This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine . . .
Everywhere I go, I’m gonna let it shine . . .
Jesus gave it to me, I’m gonna let it shine . . .
—A favorite spiritual of Sacred Family congregants
One Sunday in early February, a bishop comes to visit Sacred Family. It is a morning of celebration: Andie’s baptism, Jack’s confirmation, and Belinda’s reception into the church. The community first gathers for a festive breakfast and conversation with the bishop and then reassembles in the sanctuary for the formal service.
Before the rituals of baptism and confirmation, there is a homily. The bishop begins this sermon with a question: “So why are you here this morning? Why did you come to church?”
“Praise the Lord. Praise Jesus!” a chorus of voices responds.
The bishop offers another possible answer: “To be together. To not be alone, right? To be in a place where you have value and worth, where you are important to someone, where somebody loves you. Jesus loves you.”
“Jesus loves you,” Forest affirms.
Jesus loves you, but isn’t it important that others love you? That’s what it means to be a family. So today, we celebrate the sacrament of baptism. We’re going to publicly say that this person is now a member of our family. We will love them, give them value and worth, and think that they’re important. And we’ll miss them when they are not here for whatever reason. We will help them when they need help. We will gather together and give strength to one another.
The bishop goes on to describe the church as a place where people gather not only to be loved and to belong but also to be sent, to be light and salt for the world. He connects this to the ritual actions of the community that morning.
We’re going to confirm somebody and that reminds us of our job as followers of Jesus. Confirmation is not about being together; it’s about being sent. It’s entering into apostolic ministry. The word apostle from the Greek has a very simple meaning. It means one who is sent. To be a Christian isn’t just to come together to get good things for us. Coming to church isn’t just about what you get. Coming to church is about what you get so you can give it away. And so if you listen to the words, our deacon will send us into the world. We come together to gather the light that is in this building, but our job is to take that light out into the world of darkness. And to be light to other people. Our job is take the light into the world where the darkness lives, so that some others can see that light. . . . If you find something that is good for you in coming to this church, ask yourself who you are going to give it to. Because what happens if you hold on to the light? And you hold it so tight you don’t want to let it get away?
“You extinguish it,” Jack, the one to be confirmed, responds.
You extinguish it. Exactly! It’s like putting a bushel over it so that no one can see the light, but if we do that, the light in us goes out. So that when we’re trying our best to hold on to something, we’re losing it. The truth of the gospel is that the light only grows if you are willing to take the risk to give it away. And it is a risk isn’t it? It’s scary. . . . You put out your hands again, empty, and Jesus fills them with the light of his presence. You get the light again and again and again. This is why we come back every week. To get more light so that we can give it away. You, you, you, and I are the light of the world. If the world is dark, it’s not because there is not enough light; it’s because we’re hiding it in places like this and not sending the light into the places where it is needed. You and I, you and I, normal, ordinary people, or maybe we’re not so normal, none of us is, but God has chosen us to be a light to the world.
Yes! There is a chorus of affirmation to this word. At the end of the sermon, the bishop encourages us to look to the Spirit’s work among us:
Look at the rays of light. The Spirit is among you today. You are living light. That’s you. Those rays of light. Take them out of this place. Make a difference. Change the world. Jesus did that with twelve disciples. Think what we could do if we all did that together.
This bishop’s sermon has a rousing effect on the congregation. Although this occasion affords him a unique opportunity to speak about the power of liturgical sending, his invocation also echoes an already familiar pattern repeated within the weekly prayers and gestures of the sending of the congregation after communion. Embedded in these words and gestures is an assumption: To know and love God, a Christian community not only gathers together in a physical location but is also sent out to take whatever is found, revealed, and shared there out beyond the boundaries of a building and space to those who are not present.
The sermon on this celebratory Sunday punctuates the weekly petitions of the post-communion prayers that congregants say together at the end of every service before the dismissal. The prayers imagine a similar trajectory to the one offered in the bishop’s sermon: the community gathers to be nourished and claimed by God and other Christians before being sent to love and to serve others as “faithful witnesses” and as those capable of “gladness and singleness of heart.” Such prayers echo a favorite song of Sacred Family congregants: “This little light of mine I’m gonna let it shine, everywhere I go, I’m gonna let it shine.”
At Sacred Family the sending involves the ritual action of turning away from the focal point of the altar and toward the back doors of the sanctuary. The priest, the acolytes, and the deacon process to those doors and stand in front of them during the final hymn. As the community turns, following the procession, the doors are opened wide to reveal the world beyond. When the final hymn has ended, the deacon commands the community: “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord!” The congregation responds, “Thanks be to God!” The doors open onto the Sacred Family gardens and the walkway that leads to communal meals. Just out of sight, beyond the beautiful flowers and trees, are the vans that will soon take some congregants out of this neighborhood to other parts of the city.
If gathering requires a faith that a community of difference can come together without violence or coercion, then sending involves a faith that a love and protection of these differences can be carried back out into a segregated city. As the bishop imagines it, there is a world in need of this church as it is sent in the lives of those who gather. Mapping the sending of Sacred Family congregants, we might ask: what is this world into which the love and service of the faithful witnesses brings light?
Liturgical theologians often posit necessary relationships between the church and the world. Alexander Schmemann, for example, argues that the church is given “for the life of the world.” The sacraments reveal the meaning of the world as gift through adoration and joy: “the Eucharist is the entrance of the Church into the joy of its Lord. And to enter into that joy, so as to be a witness to it in the world, is indeed the very calling of the Church, its essential leitourgia, the sacrament by which it ‘becomes what it is.’ ”1 The church is a sacrament given for the life of the world to reveal the sacramental nature of all creation through the church’s praise and adoration: the world is not an object to be used but a gift through which human life is given ultimate meaning. Thus to worship God as the church is the most profound public, political, or social action that one could take. The Eucharist—as joy and remembrance of the reality of the world—transforms human relationships. While Schmemann resists dualities of sacred and profane in terms of elevating the church over the world, he nonetheless believes a clear distinction is possible: “The liturgy begins then as a real separation from the world.”2 Such separation is important so that the church may be sent back into the world “as witnesses of this Light, as witnesses of this Spirit,” testifying to the possibilities of salvation and redemption which previously seemed impossible.3
Theologians like Andrea Bieler, Luise Schottroff, and Mary McClintock Fulkerson trouble such clear distinctions or relations between church and world by speaking of what Fulkerson calls a “worldly church,” one whose sacramental nature is embedded and shaped within the often invisible and complicated histories of place.4 In their meditation on the sacredness of holy and ordinary meals, Bieler and Schottroff emphasize both the reality and imperative of “sacramental permeability.” The task of liturgical imagination is to see one thing as another or in relationship to another: “Sacramental worship embraces a permeability in which the bread we consume at our kitchen tables, the bread we steal from the poor, and the bread that is consecrated and consumed during Holy Communion are related.” Thus, the “celebration of the sacraments is a place full of conflict; [the Eucharistic life] creates presence and absence, love and alienation, hunger and abundant life.”5
Fulkerson also warns about too broadly sketched maps that fail to account for the complicated relationships between congregations and the places that shape them over time: “The very conviction of God’s redemptive presence tempts the theologian to map sense and order onto the worldly. The zeal to find good news can slip easily into the desire to smooth out the tangle called ‘community,’ rendering it amenable to the correct theological categories.”6 In her mind a “theology for a worldly church” attends carefully to ambiguity, banality, and opacity in light of ordinary existence.7
Part of the tangledness of Sacred Family as a community and congregation is its permeable relationship to an ever-changing neighborhood. At one time, congregants from personal care homes came to the church because they lived in the same neighborhood and were welcomed into its worship. But now, these same congregants with psychiatric disabilities are often strangers, persons out of place in a gentrified neighborhood. They are no longer part of the neighborhood except for their participation at Sacred Family. The current neighbors, who walk by the church with their dogs or as part of daily exercise routines, often appear friendly and only occasionally display anxiety in the presence of those whose dress and behavior mark them as other. Some come to plant sales or other Sacred Family community events. A few go so far as to associate Sacred Family congregants with crimes or identify them as a threat to the very neighborhood where some members once lived.
In the midst of this complicated relationship with those who live closest to the church, clergy often encourage Sacred Family members to consider the ways they might love and serve their neighbors—with particular emphasis on those who live closest to the church, the neighborhood. The thrust of sermons like the bishop’s is to empower each one who gathers; for each one holds the light and has something we must give. Each person can minister to another, no matter their income or social status. As one priest put it, “There are people who do not know that they are called to love their neighbor as themselves. People who need to be saved from their lack of compassion. We need to invite them to Sacred Family where they can experience a laboratory for the development of compassion and empathy.” Many of these invocations implicitly or explicitly assume the God-given ability of each individual to transform their neighbors and neighborhood. They allude to a pattern in which God—through the church—infuses neighborhoods with love. In this particular neighborhood, people from Sacred Family, as light and salt for the world, have something to teach their wealthier, abled neighbors.
Alongside the goals of theological transformation, the parish desires that neighbors with incomes might come and share the financial responsibilities of sustaining this community in ways that unemployed congregants cannot. Such desires are not stated explicitly in church services but often surface in meetings. Sacred Family staff members desire the support of the neighborhood—or those with incomes like those in the neighborhood—in order to have the resources it needs for Circle programs. A relationship of potential mutuality exists with people whose homes surround the church: the parish’s neighbors need the good news of Sacred Family’s vision of community, and Sacred Family desires more financial resources and support to enable this vision to flourish.
One afternoon, I discuss these complicated relationships between parish, neighbors, and neighborhood with a retired priest, who frequently attends Sacred Family. Abe and his spouse, Esther, choose Sacred Family for its liveliness. Finding themselves bored or restless in other parishes, there is life within Sacred Family’s gathering that draws them in and keeps them coming back. Over lunch one Sunday afternoon, we talk about the history of the parish. Abe describes how it was a failing church until group home congregants living nearby came to fill the pews at Sacred Family and helped to keep its doors open. Poor, disabled congregants in the neighborhood came to share meals with members of the church. Gradually these congregants transformed the community into a parish that welcomes people with mental disabilities.
Abe points to a pattern of similar developments in other congregations that are compelled to change in response to demographic shifts in neighborhoods. It is not that a congregation desires to change, but when the demographics of a neighborhood change, the congregation is forced to change as well or close its doors. Esther wonders out loud what will happen to Sacred Family as the neighborhood around the church transitions again, this time to a wealthier neighborhood. Will Sacred Family change again?
Her comment reflects current demographic shifts spurred by the desire of middle- and upper-income people to live in denser, urban neighborhoods, as well as municipal efforts to encourage this kind of development. One result of these shifts is that those marginalized by poverty are further displaced from their homes and neighborhoods and, increasingly, pushed further and further from the center of the city. In the past ten years, group homes have moved further away from the parish’s immediate neighborhood due to rising property values. During my time at Sacred Family, the costs of housing in the surrounding neighborhoods—both rental rates and purchase prices—steadily rise. Echoing Esther’s fears, I can imagine a time when Sacred Family as a church with and for poor people with mental illness ceases to exist.
The parish might then transition again to reflect the wealthier neighborhood or close its doors for good, as it almost did before group home residents helped bring it back to life. According to one Sacred Family vicar, many of the neighbors are friendly but not interested in attending church on a regular basis. When those who love and need this community live too far from it to be gathered to it, will there still be Sacred Family congregants for this parish to send? Such trends suggest complex dynamics between parish and neighborhood. Those who live nearby might reconfigure the neighborhood so as to deprive the parish of those who are currently at the heart of its congregational identity.
Rituals of sending such as those named in the bishop’s sermon thus require sustained reflection on the particular persons sent and the kinds of relationships into which they are sent. Rather than assuming that the church is able to transform the neighborhood, one must ask what kinds of communal and economic arrangements might allow the church to sustain and foster its particular theological understanding: the significance of persons with mental illness to its mission and its vision of community. Asking these kinds of questions reveals the violence of the city within which faithful witnesses carry the good news they find within the parish.
While configurations of sending emerge from shifting patterns between Sacred Family and its immediate neighborhood, congregants are most literally sent to many different neighborhoods across the city of Atlanta. While they do not live near one another, many face similar conditions in the homes to which they return. During the initial months of my research, one of the Sacred Family interns collects stories about personal care homes from Circle regulars. He then assembles a list of common characteristics to help educate church leadership and others who come to the church without an understanding of the places from which people come and to which they return. While congregants rarely complain to me about the places where they live, the list helps to illustrate the challenging circumstances in which many of them abide.
The quality and structure of life vary a great deal between personal care homes. That being said, the following is true of all personal care homes in which our participants live:
Living in a PC costs $625 a month . . . at the most inexpensive. Generally, but not always, this is paid for with Social Security Disability.
Everyone has a roommate. Some share a small single bedroom. And some folks have two or more roommates. But no one has his or her own room.
Three meals a day are provided. They are never highly nutritious. In some cases the meals are decently nutritious, but in many cases white bread, bologna, and potato chips are staple foods.
Almost always, residents rise early and go to bed early. I think it is mandatory to get up by 7 am or so, and often residents go to bed at 8 or 9 pm. In at least one instance, a man had extreme difficulty sleeping because his roommate slept with the lights on and the TV on at full volume, but this situation seems rare.
Residents rarely come and go as they please. In many cases, the residents are forbidden to leave without permission, which is rarely given. In other cases, inability to pay for MARTA [the public transportation operator for metropolitan Atlanta], lack of anything within walking distance and lack of anywhere to go, keep residents in the house or yard all the time.
Fighting, bickering, and interpersonal drama arise frequently at most homes.
Some homes limit the number of showers residents can take.
Some homes will punish residents by not allowing them to leave, if a resident mentions looking for an alternative housing situation.
Most personal care homes (that we deal with) do not provide regular rides to the doctor, dentist, or psychiatrist. Some PC homes charge $15–$25 for rides to a medical facility. Some other homes do provide rides free of charge.
Some residents become great friends with their housemates, and most develop at least some positive sense of community.
The most difficult questions and anguished conversations I witness and participate in at Sacred Family are about the parish’s relationship with group homes. This complex relationship often entails the kinds of power that group home owners and managers wield over the people who live there. While a few of the homes are known to be supportive places to live, the majority are tolerable at best. Parish members often express the urgent need to advocate for better conditions for congregants. Yet they also fear that their advocacy only further isolates members from spaces where they might find help or have access to basic resources. If the church raises questions about conditions in group homes, the owners or managers of these homes may ask Sacred Family no longer to gather congregants from their homes.
In one of the most tragic events during my time at Sacred Family, a group of congregants is sent home from the church because the individuals are covered with bedbugs. For months the management at their group home attempts to rid the home of the bedbug infestation, but to no avail. Eventually, the home is sold, and the congregants are sent to new homes. Neil, a staff person at the Circle, works to find places in new homes where living conditions will be better for congregants and where congregants will still be able to come to the church. In this process of attempting to locate good new homes for congregants, he is incensed when he realizes that these parishioners have already been sold, as he describes it, to other homes for a small referral fee. A staff member at the closed home reports that the owner accepted around $100 for each client to be referred or sent to another home. It is difficult to know what role (if any) the residents themselves played in these decisions about where they would move and with whom they would live; however, typical patterns of decision-making within group homes would suggest that residents were not given options. While most of these congregants eventually return to the church and express relative contentment with their new living situations, such practices reveal the frameworks through which poor people with mental illness can become commodities.
In an even more tragic occurrence, the Sacred Family van arrives at a personal care home one day to pick up a group of long-term congregants, including Wallace, Joshua, and Victoria, only to find that they no longer live there. The story, as various congregants and staff recount it to me, begins with an act of hope. Two women from this home have found a better living situation. When they leave their personal care home, they are accused of stealing items from the home; the two women subsequently contact Adult Protective Services to report neglect at their previous home. Fearing closure by state authorities, management evacuates the premises and moves all remaining residents to a different city outside of metro Atlanta. The priest and other staff attempt to find the congregants. They talk to the manager who gives a general location. However, the manager refuses to provide a specific address and instead promises that the congregants will return at some point. Eventually, the owner of the home is tracked down and arrested on twelve counts of abuse and neglect. She is accused of moving the residents from place to place and of leaving residents outside for a time without food or medication.
Weeks after the arrest, the staff and others at the church have no way to contact congregants who have been moved to new homes but do not have cell phones or other means of communication. They receive news that a number of congregants were malnourished, dehydrated, unable to speak coherently, and hospitalized before they were moved to other licensed homes. The priest contacts over fifteen different authorities involved in the case to try to find the congregants and visit them, but she is told that their location cannot be revealed to her unless congregants themselves contact the church. They can be given her information, but she cannot be given theirs. Over the months and years that follow, the priest along with other church members try again and again to locate the church members. Last time I spoke with the priest, she told me she had spoken with dozens of people in an attempt to locate the members and had even hired a private detective to search for them, all to no avail.
In each of these situations, it is possible to locate the evil of such forms of abuse and coercions with those who run these homes, referring to the managers and owners as malevolent human beings who take advantage of vulnerable congregants. Sacred Family staff frequently speak with anger about individuals who wield power in the group homes; they are justifiably outraged at the ways congregants are abused and mistreated. Yet, to locate evil on the level of personal care home owners and managers is to make invisible the larger structures and patterns through which people with psychiatric disabilities, many of whom are also poor and black, are deprived of basic rights of protection, treated like property, and segregated from social networks that might offer recourse for abuse of rights.
In May of 2012, over a year before my research at Sacred Family begins, journalists Craig Schneider and Andria Simmons of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) publish a series of articles outlining the scope of the abuse and injustice affecting people with disabilities in the metro Atlanta area (both physically and mentally disabled people in both licensed and unlicensed personal care homes). They report that in the five years prior to the publication of these articles, the state of Georgia had found 35,000 violations in personal care homes yet had only leveled 544 fines; the average fine was $600. Of the eighteen homes that had more than one hundred violations each, fourteen remained in operation.8 Within licensed homes, violations included insufficient training and background checks on employees, as well as inadequate living conditions such as dirty floors, bathtubs and walls, soiled toilets, and live cockroaches in the kitchen. Violations also entailed more serious neglect and abuse, including the failure to give necessary medicines for diabetes and heart disease—resulting in the death of a resident—and patterns of physical abuse.9 In unlicensed homes, the violations included such offenses as residents beaten with belts and burnt with curling irons, confined to a basement with a bucket for a toilet, robbed of their money, and moved from home to home as owners and managers sought to evade the law.10
One of the articles suggests reasons for such rampant abuse and neglect. First, state resources required to oversee and implement regulation—or to track and close down unlicensed homes—are lacking. The authors relate this lack of resources to a significant increase in the number of homes in metro Atlanta, which grew from less than fifty in the mid-1990s to more than 900 homes in 2012. Such growth is attributed not only to an increase in the aging population (the number of people 65 and older increased more than 44 percent in the same timeframe) but also to the federal government’s push to move mentally ill and developmentally disabled persons out of mental hospitals and into community settings. The authors suggest three factors contributing to the rampant problems they uncovered: the increase in people looking for homes, insufficient government resources to provide oversight, and the impact of the 2007/2008 recession on household income. There are not enough good homes for everyone who needs them. Furthermore, some who provide the housing are ostensibly looking for ways to make a living, but they do so without the commitments or institutional capacities to provide adequate care. The result is that many elderly and disabled people are valued as commodities to be exploited for their Social Security and other entitlement checks.11
Sacred Family congregants who participate in Circle programs are not powerless in these situations; many of them tell stories of how they deliberately moved from one group home to the next in search of a better life. I am amazed at the complex maps that many of them narrate for me as they trace their movements around the city both as their group homes move and as they seek other arrangements. The challenge then is not that congregants do not desire or actively pursue something better for themselves, but that when they seek a better life, there are few, if any, good and affordable choices, and there are no choices that provide the kinds of support that congregants desire without impinging on their rights to make basic decisions about their lives. Even in the best situations, poor congregants with mental illness often live with numerous other housemates with psychiatric disabilities, people whom they did not choose and with whom they may find it difficult to live. As I visit congregants in their homes, it is difficult for me to imagine surviving in the circumstances that these congregants are asked to tolerate. One local disability advocate summarizes: “They [the homes] are crazy making!”
The AJC articles about personal care homes reveal the horror of living in poverty with mental illness in a particular place and time. But disability scholars argue that such forms of incarceration follow an all too common and pervasive logic by which many people with disabilities are deprived of basic rights: “Disability, situated alongside other key lines of stratification such as race, class, nationality, and gender, is central to understanding the complex, varied, and interlocking ways in which incarceration occurs and is made out to be normal, natural, politically necessary, and beneficial.”12 They question the “neoliberal policies that [have] led simultaneously to growth of the prison system, the reduction in affordable housing, and the lack of financial support for disabled people to live viably in the community.”13
Of the many complex and varied factors that result in such devaluing of disabled lives, four are particularly salient to the home lives of Sacred Family congregants: institutional logics of control that continue to prevail in the wake of “deinstitutionalization”; perceptions of disability as an individual and medical problem rather than a social and political issue; the commodification of disabled lives within for-profit models of “care” and “custodialism” in a capitalist economy; and the continued segregation of persons with disabilities from social networks in many “community-based” institutions.
Disability scholars question a common narrative about the “failure of deinstitutionalization” that might emerge from stories such as the one told by the AJC. This narrative suggests that the problem lies with inadequate resources to provide sufficient oversight for group homes or independent living. Such understandings fail to recognize the patterns through which institutions like the personal care homes perpetuate rather than challenge the logics of institutional care and, thereby, people with disabilities. Steven J. Taylor analyzes deinstitutionalization in his work on the continuum of care for people with developmental disabilities. The continuum of care framework advocates for progressively less restrictive communities, with public institutions at one end of the continuum, groups homes somewhere in the middle, and independent living on the other end. Taylor argues that the continuum of care framework’s emphasis on finding the “least restrictive environment” perpetuates an assumption that restriction is necessary. The continuum conflates higher levels of care and services with the necessity of segregated living and in so doing sanctions the violation of basic human rights, such as the rights to movement, privacy, and choice.14
Considering the re-institutionalizing logic of deinstitutionalization, advocacy for more resources to enhance government regulation of group homes is an inadequate response to the problem. Certainly, better regulation and more resources for such forms of protection are important, but equally if not more important are resources required for transforming logics of institutional care that pervade many group homes, fostering power asymmetries between owners, managers, staff, and those who live there. Thus, Taylor and others advocate for innovative community-based models of integration that do not assume an exchange of rights for the relationships and supports needed to navigate daily life.
The continuation of an institutional logic for persons with disabilities is perpetuated by the second factor, a persistent pattern of interpreting disability as an individual or medical problem that is solved by “correcting, normalizing or eliminating the pathological individual.”15 Rather than transforming the social imaginations that pathologize disability, this emphasis on the individual’s responsibility for the pathology means that the individual is in some way responsible for the needs they have and their own inabilities to meet those needs. Thus, those who reside in care homes can be expected to give up basic rights in order to receive care to ameliorate or correct their pathology. As Carey, Ben-Moshe, and Chapman point out, this desire “to individualize and psychiatrize what is properly a political, ethical, and socioeconomic issue,” also directs attention away from the state and its policies for provision of care to a “human service sector who are charged with ameliorating the problem with individualistic mental health interventions and haphazardly available free meals or sleeping bags.”16 In this regard, persons with disabilities are denied the right to stable availability of basic services and, in order to secure basic services, can be expected to forfeit basic rights.
Third, in the context of personal care homes, disabled people are not only problems to be solved but sources of income to be exploited. Sacred Family congregants have enough money to make them valuable commodities as they are pursued by various group homes in need of constituents, but not enough money to give them other viable options about where they live and with whom. Many are regarded as a source of revenue within a capitalist and human service economy in which practices of care are profit driven, so that the meals and other services provided are minimal or insufficient in order that caregivers can maximize their profits. Furthermore, such caregivers may advise group home members to make choices that are economically advantageous for the caregivers or the group home rather than for the individual.
Fourth, while the personal care home might be understood as a community-based model of care, it is clear from the experiences of Sacred Family that the group homes remain highly segregated from the communities and people who surround them and thus deprive group home members of broader social networks of people that might advocate for them and bear witness when violations to rights do occur. While Sacred Family provides a social network and place of belonging for those who come to the church, the relationships are often limited to a particular “social geography”—the space and time of church gatherings.17 Thus, when an entire group of people disappears from a neighborhood and community, it takes some time before the church, family members, or anyone else knows about it. Without reliable access to phones, credit cards, online accounts, or even online networks that might provide clues to their locations, it proves impossible to find those who have moved or been moved against their will even when church leaders put significant time and resources into locating them.
In light of such persistent devaluing of congregants’ lives, how then does the church claim a truth about communal belonging through baptism and confirmation such as the bishop did in our opening story: that the lives of those marked through its rituals and sacraments are inestimably valuable both to God and to God’s people? How can anyone declare that through the power of the Spirit at work within the church congregants are prepared to be sent back out into the difficult, even dangerous conditions they regularly face? The situations into which congregants are sent often contest the gestures and words that Sacred Family places upon them through sacramental blessing. In view of the desecration of life that many persons face outside the church, the flexibility and freedom of the space at Sacred Family also becomes a limitation, a source of lament and despair over the community’s inability to protect clients from the degradation they encounter.
One morning Neil and I discuss the perils of the loose weave of community that is Sacred Family: where people come and go as they are able, engaging as full participants for a time and then disappearing for a time to return later. While such flexibility facilitates forms of belonging that invite non-coercive participation, it also characterizes a community where many who gather are lost to others over time.
Neil reflects on the challenge of maintaining close relationships for those who come to the Circle. He describes two close friends who attended Circle programs for a time and then disappeared.
They were gone for a few months and she came back. And they were like best buds, both homeless but in a very supporting relationship to one another. And I said, “Where is your friend?” . . . And she said, “Well, I heard he drank himself to death.” And that was—I got the impression that that was his closest relationship in the world was his relationship with this woman, and his death was just through the grapevine to her.
Neil goes on to describe how such loss affects funeral and burial practices, the sacredness of human bodies after death, particularly as it affected a longtime Sacred Family congregant:
When Marlys died, and the state, to do their due diligence, before they will do a pauper’s burial, does a search for next of kin. And they hunt down basically anybody who they hope will claim the body and claim financial responsibility. I just feel a kind of spiritual unrest with the body of my friend being in a cooler in the city morgue for a month. I mean there is just something about that that just really bothers me. . . . And people here have fluid loss in their lives, where they just lose so much of family and supporting relationships that they die, and because there is nobody who can claim financial responsibility, their body just stays frozen for a month until they get a pauper’s burial in an unmarked grave. I mean the pauper’s field is a beautiful field, but I don’t know, it’s just something about it (his voice trails off).
I respond, reflecting on Sacred Family as a place that works to cultivate a community without the coercive rules and regulations that mark group homes: “It strikes me: one of the things I think is beautiful about Sacred Family is the flow, the fluidity, people can come and go, and they don’t have to show up and sign something, or do whatever, but I do think it makes, I can see that it would be hard because then . . . ”
“People get lost!” Neil interjects with vehemence.
Neil offers another example of a year in which there were not enough church staff, in the form of interns, to do home visits. The following year, he sent interns to follow up at nursing homes with a number of people who could no longer make the journey to Sacred Family. He discovered that Sacred Family no longer had correct addresses for four people who had once been regulars in the community. He was particularly concerned about a former congregant who had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t engage in conventional conversation; in her situation, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for her to contact the church. He concludes this story with how terrible it can feel to know that people who were claimed by the church community might be lost and unable to be found by the congregation: “I have lost so many members of our community to the wind. I don’t know if they are alive or dead, and that’s the painful side of having such fluidity in this community, and that’s also the fluidity of poverty.”
In this community, congregants are often displaced when a neighborhood becomes too expensive for a group home to exist there, or because home managers are attempting to evade closure, or because congregants move from home to home in a search of better conditions. Any one of these congregants might be sent from the parish on any given day without assurance of their safe return. Thus, congregants’ abilities to be light for their neighbors and advocates for themselves are limited by the violence of social spaces within which they might love and serve the world around them. It is not that congregants are unable to let the light of their lives shine in the world and to build community among those with whom they share home. In fact, such forms of support (or lack of support) are palpable at Sacred Family when group home mates seek out and advocate for one another, or have disagreements and become frustrated with one another. Nor is it that they are unaccompanied by divine love; the church claims that they are marked as beloved in life and death, whether or not the church knows where they are. Yet relationships outside the bounds of the church often appear threatened by coercive living spaces in which only fragile forms of community can be sustained. These relationships are affected by spaces that anthropologist João Biehl identifies as “zones of social abandonment,”18 where what it means to be human is contested. In these zones, societies come to relegate certain persons as “ex-human” through repetitive practices of neglect, abuse, or indifference.19 Those whose lives do not make “common sense” to others are excluded from what counts as reality.20 Those considered “good for nothing” are sent to spaces where their deaths become inevitable yet appear “self-generated.”21
When I map the sending of Sacred Family, it seems to me that relationships formed within the congregation do little to disturb forms of segregation or zones of abandonment in the broader city or to create new patterns of living together outside the space of the church. If ostensibly distinct spaces are always overlapping and intersecting through the memories, histories, and bodies of those who gather and create a place together,22 then the place of Sacred Family is continually informed by the ways in which those who are sent, myself included, do not share space and time outside the church gathering. A liturgy decentered and inspirited out to the boundaries of the congregation is often circumscribed by the physical boundaries of the church property, outside of which forms of belonging to one another are more difficult to imagine.
One of the priests often emphasizes the mission of the church made explicit in the church’s prayer book as being “to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” Such images of unity resonate with refrains in the eucharistic prayers that talk about gathering those who are scattered from the nations as one people. Yet when I imagine the promises of sending each one, the hope is that those who are gathered might then be scattered not alone but together across the dividing lines of wealth and mental ability. The hope is that the differences gathered might also be mirrored in new patterns of intimacy, solidarity, and creativity in the particular places in which people live around the city. Such scattering might perform the theological work that theologian M. Shawn Copeland describes as “eucharistic solidarity” where the “dynamics of domination” are countered by the “dynamics of love”23 and through which those who are sent by the church recognize the truth of the fact that they are created for communion with one another and belong to one another.
The sending prayers at Sacred Family claim that all who are sent are “faithful witnesses to Christ our Lord” through the love and service rendered. As I ride the vans and occasionally visit personal care homes, I come to understand the struggle to witness to the difficult realties of group homes, both for those who live there and for those who might visit from the church. Here, the possibilities for human flourishing and the material conditions under which poor persons might live well with mental illness are not yet imagined or felt. One volunteer describes the group homes as “too depressing,” especially in light of difficult circumstances she has in her own family. Yet she also dreams of a day when every person in the congregation has an advocate in the form of another person who would actively and intentionally intercede on their behalf for the resources they require.
Even when church members share a common vision, histories of oppression mean that well-intentioned support fails. For example, a young, white, abled woman tells me the story of how she struggled to advocate for needed medical resources for an older, disabled, black man. He came to resent the assistance she was trying to give him, and he thus resisted depending on her to fill out the necessary medical paperwork. He felt belittled rather than empowered by her desire to remain by his side in the hospital, even though he required help to navigate a system that would not recognize his needs and that he could not navigate on his own. To remain together and to advocate from within such spaces reflects the deep challenges of solidarity across histories of oppression and condescension and the well-founded suspicions that some have of others’ motives and commitments.
As Neil and I reflect on patterns of dwelling and belonging together across the spaces of the city, we imagine the practices and conditions that disability scholar and community organizer Mia Mingus describes as moving from “forced intimacy” to “access intimacy.” Forced intimacy operates on a transactional model of access: people with disabilities must accept terms of intimacy and forms of vulnerability they may not choose in order to gain access to the spaces and relationships they need or desire. Forced intimacy assumes that because some are dependent on others, they must consent to a proximity with others they would not otherwise choose.24 In contrast, Mingus describes access intimacy as consensual practices of interdependence among those who create access together, forms of access that may be imperfect but that are also not conditional: “when access intimacy is present, the most powerful part is having someone to navigate access and ableism with. It is knowing that someone else is with me in this mess.” Such interdependence involves a transformation in social imagination and power dynamics: “The power of access intimacy is that it reorients our approach from one where disabled people are expected to squeeze into able bodied people’s world, and instead calls upon able bodied people to inhabit our world.” Disabled people aren’t expected to “shrink” themselves into able-bodied and able-minded worlds but non-disabled people are invited to transform their own habits and practices to cultivate interdependence. Such intimacy is sometimes intuitive and often hard to build and sustain, particularly as those who are abled have less to lose when access to intimacy is not sustained or cultivated and as white supremacy and ableism function so as to isolate disabled people of color.25
Sending then might be the promise to cultivate access intimacy among those who are sent together so that all those who sent are accompanied in these liturgical acts of sending. Those who are subject to the marks of social death cannot be held solely responsible to shine a light on the injustice of their own home situations and of the body practices of incarceration they experience. In this case, rituals of sending might proclaim a form of ecclesial solidarity and name a practice of attention to the conditions and relationships necessary for art forms of interpersonal relationships to continue outside the church grounds. As a practice of interdependence, sending has both ecclesial and political dimensions and calls attention to the interrelationship between the two.
Such a connection is evident in Lloyd’s reflection on life at this parish, a place where he is certain that God has called him to be. He wonders whether the church could play another role outside the boundaries of the church. Perhaps, he suggests, “we could do more . . . like when they do things at the Capitol, try to sign people up, there’s one in January . . . a mental health day, not raise hell, but silently raise hell. I read a lot about these silent protests, they don’t cause trouble, they’re there.” He reflects on how his anxiety around crowds prevents him from taking part in such protests. Like Sacred Family, Lloyd struggles to imagine a way to transform public regard of himself, and other congregants, whose beauty might remain hidden within the parish grounds. Both he and I have to try to imagine what public and communal forms this act of sending might take in light of the already fragile community struggling to sustain the space and time of its own identity.
Political action—and its relationship to ecclesial belonging as Eiesland defines it—begins with the fragile yet ordinary interdependence of human bodies. To be embodied is to be held together and to act out in love of one’s own life and the lives of others. “Acting out” is the refusal to accept the roles and places assigned people with disabilities. “Holding our bodies together” evokes those practices that enable solidarity with one’s own body and with others who are marginalized.26 For many people at Sacred Family, the struggle for life in group homes and in the broader space of the city shapes how they hold together body-minds or how they act out against injustice.
On the one hand, disabled congregants are remarkably resourceful in claiming their own beloved lives and in manifesting a strong resistance to whatever would mark them as “ex-human.” On the other hand, those who live in group homes often cannot afford to act or speak out against those on whom they depend for survival. Yet without social protest of such zones of abandonment, or without moral imagination to envision an alternative, congregants’ lives and relationships remain at risk of real abuse and literal death. Some congregants are sent out again and again without the hope of conditions in which the light of their lives is not under threat of being extinguished by forces beyond their control.
The liturgical act of sending at Sacred Family requires forms of sending that resonate with both the beauty and the fragility of a disabled church. Sending as belonging to one another must, then, take clues from patterns familiar in the gathering of the congregation: from the practices of consent that help to hold its communal life together. How, for example, might the pleasures of eating together shape the protest of the community against the degradation of some congregants? Such a question emerges from another sermon, which links the acts of sending with the work of theological imagination.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a visiting preacher reads this landmark piece of legislation through the lens of a gospel text. The disabled preacher invokes the feeding of the five thousand as a parable about eschatological imagination. Describing the ADA as a work in progress, he notes the disciples’ inability to grasp the provision for the crowd that Jesus intended. “It’s really important to begin to believe in a world that God dreams, and that world is a world where everyone has access to the means to live,” he urges the small group gathered in the sanctuary. As I listen to him, I have difficulty imagining the real possibility of a world in which these congregants are regarded with both dignity and desire and, therefore, have access to the resources they need. I find it almost impossible to believe in a soon-to-be world where they would have adequate protection.
Claiming the good news of the text, the preacher reminds us not to give up hope:
Our role as a people of faith is to claim God’s vision and to claim that the history of God is to claim a history of bread. It’s a history of feeding people and taking seriously that people have what it takes to make it through the night, and using that vision of the world to ask good questions of lawmakers, and to push forward when we don’t quite have what we need, and to be persistent about this idea that people should not have to live on less than is livable. People should not have to make it on just a portion of what they need! And so it becomes important to ask ourselves and to ask the church: what is it we’re going to do to continue to push for a future where everyone has what it takes to make it through the night?
After the sermon, the community celebrates a sacred history of bread, of feeding, as we do every Sunday: an enthusiastic passing of the peace, prayers of the people, a gathering of offerings both monetary and vegetable, and a eucharistic prayer that recalls salvation history. As we eat together, I am left with the preacher’s questions. How do we come to believe in a world that God dreams? What kinds of belonging to and intimacy with other people both within and outside the physical boundaries of the parish does this require? What do I need to know of another to dream a city and world where she has what she needs or where they can claim from me what they need?
Liturgical theologians often emphasize the communion table as a site of such theological imagination. Bieler and Schottroff, for example, trace eschatological motifs woven through the history of eucharistic prayers and texts: a gathering of those who have been scattered, a feast for the nations who have gathered, an end to violence in the remembrance of the death and resurrection of Christ, and a reminder of the covenant God has made with God’s people.27
With similar hope, theologian M. Shawn Copeland argues for the possibility of eucharistic witness to transform community. Identifying her theological task as one of “re-membering and remembrance,”28 she remembers the body of Jesus—“marked by race, gender, culture and religion,” “by refugee status, occupation and colonization”29—as one who regularly ate with other people, in intimate practices that were interpreted by some, according to the gospel accounts, as strange and scandalous. Copeland interprets the sharing of an open, common table as an imitation of Jesus and a faithful witness to the community of desire and resistance of which he was a part.30 In Copeland’s argument, we must mark the flesh of Christ through a communion table where all are welcome. Gathering human differences, marked, despised bodies, around a communion table, Christians resist the devaluation of human flesh.31 Interpreting Eucharist as a resistance to the “anti-Logos” and “antiliturgies” of globalization and racism that debase human life, she envisions a “welcome table” as an embodiment of new loyalties and resistance to empire.32
At Sacred Family the congregation eats together at an open table in the ecclesial spaces of the church, a place where all are explicitly welcome to partake of the holy meal and of any church meal that precedes and follows Holy Communion. Yet such intimacies emerge in sharp contrast to the many tables that are not shared at other times in home spaces, where the closest friendships and familial bonds are manifest. The holy table stands apart from the ordinary tables of home and group home, not only because congregants that do not live together spend little time in one another’s home, but also because a mutual sharing of home spaces is difficult for many to imagine.
Even within a congregation like Sacred Family, which expressly desires mental difference to be at the heart of its eucharistic celebrations, there is a danger of segregationist charity. What might it mean for congregants, volunteers, and visitors to share not only the common tables of altar and church dining room and picnic table but also the personal spaces of homes scattered across the city? What might it mean to share Thanksgiving Dinner and Easter Feast and wedding showers and birthday parties, not only within the moderated space and time of a church gathering but in the intimate spaces of home and group home, with family and friends across a table?
Such questions are occasioned by an invitation to a home. I am welcomed to a private celebration in the church to which both church and non-church guests are invited. It is a festive sharing of food and friendship that takes place in a member’s house. The gathering is characterized by different kinds of eating (no lines, no long tables) and socializing (mingling, moving in and out of small groups in the kitchen and living room, touring the home) than is possible with such a large group in a parish hall. While I am grateful to be present and enjoy the festivities, I find it significant that although not everyone in the church could be invited, no Circle participants are present. While this absence might well result from the difficulties of transportation from a different part of the city, it appears as a clear divide within an ecclesial community, a divide made palpable in social interaction that would likely differ in its form if group home congregants were present.
I also imagine accepting invitations to celebrate holidays and important occasions in personal care homes. How might people who live in different parts of the city, with different aesthetics of interaction over food and conversation, commit to share and consent to space and time together? What arts of social interaction might be summoned forth by such occasions? While many Sacred Family congregants are supportive of my research and writing, some are far less concerned with written representation than with sustained social interaction. Will I continue to spend time with them, even when my project is over? Will I return to the church? Entertaining this question, I envision new relationships this continued commitment might entail, post-research and writing.33
If I imagine a time when everyone at Sacred Family has access to the means to live, it begins with a scattering of those who gather, a scattering out into one another’s lives across the lines of ability, wealth, race, and security, to share the desires, aesthetics, pleasures, and discomforts of many common tables. Such a sharing of pleasure and deprivation would occur outside the safe spaces and the moderated liturgical time of the church through invitation by small groups or individuals. Such a liturgy of sending would begin with relationships made possible through the gathering of Sacred Family but also extend the physical boundaries of the community. It would entail smaller configurations of relationships that might be sustained over time. It would not consist of one group (volunteers) helping another (participants), but a few people together at a time helping to rearrange the spaces of the city with and through others.
I began this chapter with a sermon about a theology of sending; yet in the bishop’s own homily, the sending presumes another act: the gathering and blessing of those who belong to one another. When Jack, Andie, and Belinda go forward to receive the marks of baptism, reception, and confirmation, they are claimed as “God’s own forever” with and through those who gather. They do not stand or sit alone near the baptismal font. There is an immediate circle of some family members and friends and those from the congregation who “sponsor” them. And there is the congregation, who strain from the pews to catch a glimpse of each one and who speak on behalf of the church to promise to love and support them. As the bishop claims, “We’re going to publicly say that this person is now a member of our family. We will love them, give them value and worth, and think that they’re important. And we’ll miss them when they are not here for whatever reason. We will help them when they need help. We will gather together and give strength to one another.”
In light of the suffering that sending might entail, these claims and these concentric rings of people around the baptismal font—touching, blessing, promising, claiming these lives—appear fragile. Yet Bieler and Schottroff remind us that sacraments have the potential to make visible to us the love that often remains hidden, as well as to reveal the experiences of God’s absence in the world and the church.
What I have hoped to show in the prior chapters are the artistries of shared space and time that are sometimes hidden when congregants are sent outside the bounds of the church. Belonging to one another, the aesthetics of consent is made visible through art forms and through the slow time and decentered space of Sacred Family, for the truth of these sacraments remains: none of the people who gather are worthy of social death, nor are they worthy of wealth or inheritance or privilege or ability that divides them from others. Rather, all who gather deserve the means to live together, to belong to one another, and to have power to renounce the forces that proclaim otherwise. In the language used for baptisms, which rings oddly in a congregation that does not often talk about evil powers or the devil: those who are baptized “renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” Those who gather vow to “do all in [their] power to support these persons in their life in Christ.” The divided spaces into which people are sent often belie this truth. And yet it is manifest in the space and time of Sacred Family, albeit in fragile ways that are difficult to sustain.
Sending cannot be an ableist imperative for each one to overcome the circumstances of their life by God’s grace. Rather, sending entails the promise that the palpable belonging experienced within the time and space of the assembly at Sacred Family is the more profound truth of these relationships than what often appears when the congregation is sent. Other patterns and practices of witnessing, belonging, and dwelling together can exist. And that possibility is experienced again and again not only in the communal acts of baptism, confirmation, and Eucharist, but also in the jokes, conversations and silences, touch and gesture, in the struggle for adequate names, and in the pleasures of eating together. When the congregation consents to such ways of being together, it mirrors the possibility for a broader consent to a life together outside of the time and space of the parish gathering.
As researcher, I return again and again to Sacred Family. It is here that my desire and ability to imagine a good future for all, especially for the most minoritized in the city, is stoked and refined. Such desires are aroused by the unconventional beauty and the persistent hope of the people who summon and demand it. When I want to imagine a more just city than the one I now live in, I spend time at Sacred Family with the people whose liveliness and lament evoke this urgency for me. Even the fragility of the relationships at Sacred Family calls forth and makes manifest hope for a different social geography. Those who are marked for social death refuse those marks in the fragile beauty and consent to life that persist. Through art forms, congregants insist that even in the liminal, provisional space and time of a congregation, something new can be created and held out as a witness to other social arrangements. Such hope insists that something impossible be understood as possible; a different way of dwelling together as both church and neighborhood can be imagined.
In Sacred Family’s case, such hope makes visible a connection between a set of tables: the communion table, the many tables in the parish hall, and all of the tables around the city where people sit down to eat together in places where others could not comfortably dwell. The arts of Sacred Family draw communal attention to the permeable nature of liturgy: “Does this life-meal proclaim the death of Christ? Does this death-meal give life to the community? Does this community meal open toward needs beyond this circle? Is this table set next to other tables in the world?”34
Sending, then, is the hope that the community might hold together and perceive together that which is often divided. When Sacred Family is sent into the world, the good thing that is sent is the we that emerges through artistries of connection. This we might be sent because it is the we that has eaten side-by-side, has shared and multiplied laughter, and has sat together in silence. Thus, the art forms of sending must contribute to other kinds of arrangements of social flesh. Different social arrangements might also call forth different political arrangements, different dreams of the common good, different felt senses about what material conditions for life are required beyond the bounds of the congregation. Such arrangements are not only desirable but also necessary for the artistries of belonging to take place within the church.
The call then is not to send each enabled individual to be a bright light in a troubled world. Rather, the goodness of these eating and belonging practices might extend the liturgy, stretching it out into the places outside of the parish walls, so that new aesthetics of belonging can be learned. The lines that divide some people from one another in the city can be troubled, revealing a failure to manifest both Christian and human belonging. Such practices of intimacy cannot cure the structures of ableism, racism, and income inequality that prevail. But such patterns of dwelling and remaining together bear witness to the forces of social death, so that desires for other kinds of political, economic, and ecclesial arrangements might be deemed necessary. They might foster a dream of a common good—one that would make possible an alternative mutuality of relationships between those who call themselves the church.
Such a common good must include Rose, a congregant with mental illness who lives on her own, in spite of the fact that some friends and family think she should not. When Rose asks me to come to her home to conduct a formal interview, I gain a new understanding of her life in that space. When I get lost finding her apartment in the affordable housing complex, I learn that hers is the balcony filled with plants. I know Rose as an artist but not as a gardener. As she shows me around her house, she talks about how much she loves to cook but also about the dangers of cooking given certain health conditions. Her frequent complaints and concerns about her caregivers become more palpable when I can visualize her reliance upon them to occupy this place on her own. She tells me stories of people in her neighborhood who watch out for her, and people who take advantage of her. There are pictures everywhere of her family, and she tells some of their stories, both happy stories and ones that trouble her. There is a large photo album filled with pictures that document her many years both at Sacred Family and at another church she attends, a history of relationships. At the end of our conversation, she walks me to my car and points to a gazebo in her housing complex. She describes a time when two women at Sacred Family, Shonda and Beatrice, came on their own time to share a celebration with her in that gazebo. It is a memory that she cherishes. Thinking about Rose’s relationship with Beatrice, I recall a time during the art program when Beatrice helped Rose navigate a problem she had encountered in maintaining her food stamps. As I perceive it, Beatrice’s ability to advocate and watch out for Rose comes from interactions that Beatrice and Rose have both within and outside of Sacred Family. Spending time with Rose in her home, I glimpse the possibility of ecclesial relationships that might respond to Rose’s needs and dreams outside the time and space of the church. Likewise, Rose’s love of planting, cooking, and singing might enliven the spaces of some with whom she might consent to share her time, transforming certain stereotypes of mental illness and poverty as constituting an uninhabitable life.
With words like beloved, friendship, and advocate, Sacred Family sends people outside the bounds of the parish. It imagines the conditions in which these names, these words, these symbols, might find an adequate form in the neighborhoods, the city, and in other parishes. When Sacred Family welcomes, in the name of God, it names those who gather as those who belong to one another. Sending then is an invitation to reveal those marks of belonging through recognizing one another in spaces where some congregants are most likely to be feared or disregarded. Such an invitation is manifest not only in the ritual words of the priest but also in the invitations and dreams of congregants whenever the we of desire for companionship and adventure appears as an invitation to one another. We should go for a hike in the woods. We should go to the movies. We should do yoga together. Can I have your number? Such proposals echo the desires for different configurations of relationships to extend beyond the physical boundaries of the parish, marking and revealing other patterns of belonging.
Such desired intimacies challenge in profound ways the dividing lines that remain in fragile communion at Sacred Family and between many congregations. They also make apparent the different material conditions of congregants’ lives and the struggle to inhabit shared spaces across experiences of wealth, poverty, mental illness, and racism. To be sent is not only a mandate to proclaim good news; it is also an invitation to seek out new patterns and more truthful arrangements for dwelling together and belonging to one another. New ecclesial choreographies are called forth by the Spirit whose fire and light frame the sanctuary doors at Sacred Family, by these symbols of unquenchable vitality and luminosity. Sending requires trust that the Spirit who amplifies sacred space within the grounds of Sacred Family also gathers God’s people in the places from and to which the church is sent, restlessly rearranging zones of security and abandonment, creating the conditions for beauty where social death might otherwise prevail.