Conversations in theology have begun to address the role of the body and interestingly the role of the broken or disabled body. Sharon Betcher's 'Spirit and the Politics of Disembodiment', Nancy Erickson's 'The Disabled God' or Amos Yong's 'Theology and Down Syndrome' all point to a reclaiming of body as a body of knowledge and place for theological/spiritual discourse. While their work focuses on physical disability little of it touches on Learning Disabilities as theological discourse.
Broken For You
There is an unfortunate theological history of viewing the body as broken due to our sin, God's punishment or as a revelation. Such theologies, thriving in late modernity, insist on salvation or healing being a return to normality. To reencounter the Jesus of the Gospel narratives is to encounter a first century Jewish peasant in Roman occupied territory. Such a world did not have health plans, health insurance or plastic surgery - the normative body as we know it would not have existed. This is the reality the healing narratives are told in. To tell a story of Jesus performing a healing is not to tell a story of a body returned to normative status but is to tell a tail of a person returned to a state of abnormality. In this the resurrected God, who returns with holes in his hands and a tear in his side, is seen as God identifying with the goodness of human brokenness and disability.
In this then healing is not to make a person normal or perfect, but to make them abnormal. It is in this that we can begin to address disabilities as not something we are to be saved away from but something we will need to be saved into. While such models work with physical disability we can see the limitation of this discourse with the Differently Wisdomed (Learning Disabled). The Resurrected God, who returns broken and disabled, has a limited salvic theopoetic for the ADD and others with Invisible Disability.
New Pentecost
Wikipedia identifies several of the signs or symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder. Among the traits identified are impulse control, excessive fidgeting and pressured speech. Such realities often come uninvited, creating disruption to order and putting 'on slant' the expectations of the linear-normative. If the Resurrected God does not provide a salvic theopoetic for the Differently Wisdomed then it can be that Pentecost does.
The season of Pentecost is a liturgical expression of the biblical narrative in which the church identifies its origin in the way the Holy Spirit disrupts the community of disciples bringing the gift of tongues with it. As a theopoetic it allows us to look at the Differently Wisdomed as having those traits we identify as being gifts of the Holy Spirit.
In this way the Differently Wisdomed provide a model for the church and theological engagement in the way in which The Spirit and the Differently Wisdomed may disrupt our assumptions of knowledge and power. The Differently Wisdomed will erupt in our midst, creating a w/holy chaos that creates revelation in its wake and beg that we pay attention to those people and ways of being that fall through the cracks.
Like the disciples on Pentecost the Differently Wisdomed come to us with pressured speech (speaking in tongues) and impulse control problems (the disruption of the spirit in our midst/the call of the spirit to speak prophetic truth in the face of power). The Differently Wisdomed are the children of Pentecost and ask that we consider the salvation metaphor present in resurrection but also in the coming of the Holy Spirit.
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