SOPHIA NICOLLS: Just before coffee, we are following the programme and we are pleased and excited to have Reverend John Swinton today, he will be presenting to us, Knowing God Without Words. I was blessed recently, we have an allotment, just to slip this in and I was in the allotment, early in the morning, digging away and it was the morning service and John was there speaking about God in his gentleness, I'm looking forward to your presentation this morning.
JOHN SWINTON: It was cruel of him to say there was coffee and now this fella here, get lost. I forgive you! It is a pleasure to be here and to be able to hopefully help us all to think through some things together. You know the gospel can be very straight forward at its heart, Jesus loves us, and values us for who we are and he's with us and for us in all things and at all times. If you take that as a the essence of what human life is, Jesus calls it life in all of its fullness. But it should be really straight forward. No matter what the shape of our bodies, and no matter what the shape of our minds, God loves us. And asks us to live together. But of course, like all simple things it is never that simple. We live in what Stephen Post describes as a hypercognitive society. What that means is we live in a type of society that puts cognition and intellect and reason above other things like community and love and being together with one another. You know as soon as you meet somebody you ask them what they do, then you put them in a hierarchy depending on what they are. We like to think, and the problem with liking and enjoying thinking is that eventually we begin to think that the ability to think clearly, the ability to talk, to articulate yourself is the essence of what it means to be a human being, and as soon as you do that then very vulnerable groups within the society become well very vulnerable. I want us to think a little bit about what it means to know God? I want to focus on people with advanced dementia and profound intellectual disabilities. People with those disabilities are people who don't use language in the way we do. Who are not dependant on words and symbols to experience the world in quite a different way? People with advanced dementia are people who are beginning to lose words, people for whom words are different. They don't do the job that they did before. And they don't help us to engage with the world in the ways that they did before. So how do we come to know God? It is interesting the only have something like 5% of the way in which we gain knowledge in our lives comes from words. Most of the knowledge we get about the world comes from our experience from being in community. We get it into ourselves by being with other people; we know the world through our bodies. And dealing with a hypercognitive culture means we forget the importance of our bodies, but our bodies are beautiful and important and the ways in which we encounter the world. How can we live lives in a world that demands words and intellectual engagement with the world? As a good reformed Presbyterian, words are everything. The word became flesh and we managed to make it words again and we are proud of it! (Laughter) But if we look at scripture a bit more closely, we see some very interesting things. The book of James is all about the knowledge of God. And what is knowledge of God for James, looking after the poor, looking after the widows and the orphans. He says many people don't understand God in the sense of words and concepts and ideas, but many people don't know what it means to know God. There is another passage in Jeremiah 22:16. Jeremiah is talking about king Josiah, who is a good king. This is how he describes the good king, he says he defended the cause of the poor and so all went well. This is the key. Is that not what it means to know me, says the Lord. What it means by that is you don't simply know God through your words and your mind you know him through your body and your social interaction with the world. What is love? Love is an engagement with the world through our bodies. And the shape and texture of our bodies actually is fundamental for understanding how we make sense of the world. We make sense of the world not simply through words but through our bodies, through the way our bodies encounter the world, through the way they teach us things about the world. So if we can't see we can never read the scriptures. If we can't hear, we can never hear the word. If you have no arms then you can't embrace, even though you can experience the embrace of another person. So the idea of being embraced by the love of God, will have a totally different meaning for you. Not a lesser meaning, but just a different meaning. The idea of hearing the word will have a different meaning, the way that you encounter the world and God and one another, through our bodies, is fundamentally important, likewise if you can see you will never understand what it means to encounter God without seeing. If you can hear you will never know what it means to encounter God without hearing things, if you can no longer remember things, you are never going to understand what it means to encounter the world without memory, to encounter God without your memory. I think we make a big mistake sometimes in thinking that there is only one way of being a human being actually when we look around here and own lives there is there are many different ways of being a human being and encountering the world. And it is only when we take seriously the beauty of our differences and the different ways which people engage with God, engage with the world, and engage with one another through their bodies, that we can understand the broad range of what it means to be a human being. Our culture may say to be a human being is to have two arms, two legs and stand in this way, but our experience tells us that is nonsense. And it is only when I listened to your story and you listened to my story, that we can perhaps be friends and if we are friends who share the ways in which we encounter the world, then the idea of not including one another begins to make no sense whatsoever. What I'm suggesting to you is the key for inclusion and belonging is hospitality. Thing about it this way, in order for me to be hospitable towards you, I don't need to, or at least I can't try to turn you into me, I can't try to make a clone of you and I end up speaking to myself. The only way in which I can be hospitable to you is if I accept you exactly as you are, and you accept me exactly as I am, and then we, in whatever way we communicate, communicate. We become friends, and when we become friends we learn things about one another. And when we become friends, we learn things about the world. If you look at the hospitality that Jesus offers in his ministry, it wasn't like this, sometimes he's a guest, sometimes he's a host. So you have got a rhythm of guesting and hosting that runs like a golden thread through the Ministry of Jesus. He sits with the tax collectors and sinners, as a guest. Not as a host. And remember, they were tax collectors and sinners not reformed tax collectors and sinners! In other words he just sat there and looked at what it looked like and felt like to be a guest in the house of the marginalised. Think about if we take that into our disability ministry, what would it be like to be a guest in the lives of people with advanced dementia, or people with intellectual disability. Not to be a host that tried to convert their experience into language and symbols that makes sense to us, but actually to be a guest, who will sit down, look around, and we're grateful for the gifts that are given. If we get that dynamic in whatever difference we have, everything changes. We stop hosting everybody and try to include everybody and we are simply guests in one another's lives, and if we are guests in one another's lives we can become friends. If we become friends the idea of exclusion just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Think about it this way. One of the primary marks of dementia is losing your memory. That is the thing that people seem to be most afraid of. You lose your memory you lose yourself and so on and so forth, I don't think that is the case, but that is public persona. But where is your memory? If only 5% of what you know in your life is through your intellect and language, where does the other 5% come from, it comes from the body, because your body remembers things. Every time you encounter somebody your brain captures that and captures that in the neurons of your brain and begins to shift and change and shift with your experience. Every time you learn a ritual, a prayer, some worship, your body learns that. And so eventually you come to a time in your life where you can no longer remember the meaning of certain things, your body remembers it. You know what it is like when you begin to worship with people who have advanced dementia and their bodies move and they sing and they do all sorts of things that doesn't happen normally. That is because their body remembers. That is because over time this practice of shapes and forms them into bodies that remembers Jesus even when their minds struggle to hold on to Jesus. Memory doesn't simply come from the past into the present. Memory is worked out. You can look and see and feel and touch memory and people when they engage in these rituals and practices that have made them the person they are. When you are prepared to be a guest in the house of someone with that experience everything changes. And suddenly passages like psalm 139, "where can I go from your presence where can I flee, if I go up to the heavens you are there, if I make my bed in the depths you are there, if I rise on the wings of dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your hand will hold me fast". There is nowhere you can go to escape from God. Even the strangest experience of dementia, thing happen and the spirit moves with you. Surely Jesus says he is with us always until the very ends of the age. When we are prepared to be guests of the house of people with that kind of experience, suddenly the faithfulness of God can take issue and form. And we will learn what it means to know God in a different way. Likewise with people with profound intellectual disabilities where society says you can't do this or be this. There is a profound power in simply being. People change particularly in the presence of other people. You don't have to do something no change anything, when you are there things change. I was at a community in France last year; they gave me a lovely story. I was speaking to a guy who had been forced to take a person with profound intellectual disabilities to the sacrament every Sunday. He was an atheist and he hated it. But every Sunday he had to take this person to the chapel. And two years later the person whom he was taking to the chapel died, and the carer, the friend missed the sacrament. All that time he thought he had been under great duress taking this person to the chapel, now this person was no longer there and he missed it. In other words he thought he was doing good but in fact he was being transformed. There is something very beautiful about that, no words, no actions, no clever apologetics, simply a presence that opens up a space to do what God does. And the last thing I want to say to you is this. This is maybe the most important thing; people with advanced dementia, Christians with advanced dementia are disciples. They are followers of Jesus Christ who have responded to a call on their lives. They don't cease to be disciples with advanced dementia, or seems to have a calling or vocation simply because biological things are occurring at that time. Martin Luther talks about vocation, wherever you are, shopkeeper, doctor, nurse, that is the place that God has put you to do what God wants you to do. And it is no different when you encounter advanced dementia, and it is no different if you have a profound cognitive intellectual disability which prevents you from articulating yourself in the way that everybody else seems to expect you to do. People with such experiences people who live with such bodies have a falling from God. Rather than thinking how can we include people with dementia or disabilities, maybe a better way of framing the question is how can we find the vocation and calling of these individuals. Because could you imagine Jesus excluding a disciple? I think a lot of the exclusion that goes on is because people don't consider certain people to be disciples or be capable of being disciples or to have a calling. I think they are wrong. So I think alongside inclusion and belonging location and disciple ship needs to be essential. Jesus would never exclude a disciple so why have a disciple do the same. Thank you. (APPLAUSE).