For three years I am known as the person who wanders around Sacred Family Church with a notebook and a voice recorder. One spring morning a congregant calls me to her and asks me to record her skills in my research notebook. Before I begin, Lillian makes sure that I write down the date: “March 11, 2014.” She then asks me to record this list:
I can do hair.
I write poems.
I can sing.
I can fight.
I can sew.
I can paint.
I can dream dreams.
I have visions.
I can see things that aren’t there.
I see invisible people.
I can do makeup and nails.
I can have good sex.
I’m a librarian.
I can dress—fashion dress—model gowns.
I’m a good lover.
I can tell fortunes.
Lillian’s description of herself and the playfulness of the moment lead her to use her fortune-telling skills to tell me about myself. I like talking to Lillian. I am fond of her witty company. She has shared some heartbreaking stories from her life with me, but she also makes me laugh, and I share with her stories about my life. I offer her my hand. She takes it and carefully runs her finger along the lines in my palm, talking to me while she does: “You’ll have a long life. You’ll have two children: a girl and another baby.” And then as she runs her fingers along my fingers: “You are mysterious, curious, nosy, feisty; your husband likes you and you like him and there’s the band to prove it.”
“You’re feisty too,” I comment.
“Yeah, but I’m not nosy,” she replies.
As a participant observer at Sacred Family for three years, I am both observer and observed; I participate in the representation and construction of my own identity and the identity of others. Accepting Lillian’s self-identification as a fortune-teller requires me to reflect on the kind of fortune she predicts for me and the way she sees me—a future that involves both great love and my characteristic “nosiness.” Indeed, my friends and those closest to me would confirm Lillian’s description of me. If I were to make a list of skills like Lillian did, I would probably list this as one of the things I do in any place where I happen to be: I ask questions.
While Lillian is the only fortune-teller I meet during my research, her interest in my husband and future family is a common point of inquiry and fascination among the people of Sacred Family. I became engaged and then married during the time of my research, and so the most frequent questions I field are about my spouse: what he was doing that day, how did I meet him, and when was he going to come visit Sacred Family with me again. Because Sacred Family is a place that welcomes many visitors throughout the week, on occasion I brought friends and my spouse to join us in Sunday or Wednesday worship. Many Sacred Family congregants expressed their pleasure in being able to meet people close to me and especially to meet my spouse. And I experienced it as a privilege to introduce these friends and family to a place that had impacted me in profound ways.
Attraction is difficult to predict or dissect. There is a mysterious quality to the way that any particular person or place catches our attention and elicits a desire for future engagement. I could say that my relationship with the congregation about which I write in this book was love at first encounter. My nosiness was born of attraction. I visited Sacred Family my first month in Atlanta, having learned about it from another student. Almost twelve years later, I find myself returning again and again. Although my own role and relationship with the church have changed over time—intern, regular attender, researcher, occasional attender—my desire to be woven into the ever-changing community that is Sacred Family persists.
My attraction to Sacred Family was both unexpected and unsurprising. Sacred Family was not only a place where it was fun to spend time and where I had enjoyable and thought-provoking conversations with people like Lillian; it was also a place where people like Lillian claimed the beauty of their lives and cared for (and fought with) one another in experiences of pain and distress. From a young age I had lived among extended kinship networks that were practices of faith and mutual care rather than blood ties or biological bonds; I had long been interested in countercultural communities that testify to human beauty and mutual care. Sacred Family appeared to me as one of those communities.
It was also a place that made profound sense to me in light of other communities in which I had actively participated. Prior to my arrival in Atlanta, I volunteered for six years in the country of Ukraine with a Christian organization called Mennonite Central Committee. My work in Ukraine connected me with a number of Ukrainian organizations and groups that supported people with disabilities and mental illness: a group of local women who were advocating for families with disabled children; a home for the elderly that took in people of different ages who had been abandoned by friends and relatives; and a group of church women who regularly visited patients at a local psychiatric hospital. Simultaneously, my experiences with Orthodox, Baptist, and Mennonite liturgies in Ukraine prompted an interest in the power of worship and liturgy. When I arrived in Atlanta, Sacred Family was a place where the presence of disabled people in Christian worship provided me with fresh ways of thinking about what it is that Christians do when they worship God together and why people with disabilities are vital for Christian worship.
Of course, attraction was only the beginning. Over time my interest in Sacred Family evolved into a deeper set of affections for and investment in the people who gather and the kinds of play, prayer, care, and protest that this community embodies. Affection prompted a desire for a more profound understanding of both the hope and the challenge of being this peculiar kind of congregation.
My desire for understanding, what Lillian called my nosiness, was instigated not only by the hopeful gathering of Sacred Family but also by the prophetic work of the Disability Studies Initiative at Emory University. A cross-disciplinary group of faculty and students, the DSI encouraged my conviction that disability is a vital and compelling lens with which to study and investigate all human embodiment as well as the political and social environments that shape assumptions about human abilities and relationships. Both Sacred Family and the DSI at Emory expanded my theological and liturgical imagination regarding the human person. Both Sacred Family and the DSI were places where my own body-mind was profoundly engaged in ways that were challenging, compelling, and life-giving to me. Through these interactions, I began to dream of communities in which people with and without disabilities might flourish together and to claim my own responsibility to interrogate ableist assumptions in myself and others.
While I could have taken a number of paths to deeper engagement with Sacred Family, the path that fit best with my own emerging vocation involved ethnographic and theological research. My desire to learn the arts of research coincided with the habitus of Sacred Family as a learning community. Sacred Family was a place that enthusiastically welcomed students from across Atlanta to “loiter” and learn from its intentional experiments in being a circle of friendship and support for people with mental illness as well as a church and an unconventional community. While I recognize the dangers and challenges of pursuing ethnographic research without knowing firsthand the experiences of mental illness or poverty of many Sacred Family congregants, my hope was not to study and represent the lives of people who were different from me but rather to study a community of people that I and people like me had and would continue to learn from, worship with, and join. I wanted to describe what made it possible to embrace a wide range of mental abilities and experiences, my own included, as central and irrepressible factors of Christian worship.
My hope, upon the completion of my research, was to continue spending significant time at Sacred Family and, even more, to have time with Sacred Family congregants outside of the formal time and space of church life. Consistent with some of the tensions I analyze in Chapter 3, I have found that the structure of my work time is often in tension with Sacred Family time. Still I continue to attend about once or twice a month on Wednesday evenings. I no longer carry a notebook or a recorder, and while the community at Sacred Family continues to spark my curiosity, I no longer maintain the breadth of interactions I sustained while I was researching or analyze every moment of participation in the community’s life together. I go to pray and eat with people I have come to consider friends, even as I am still learning to be worthy of that name, and I go to make the acquaintance of newer people who have come to make Sacred Family what it is now. I go to encounter God, whom I worship in a particular way in the time and space of Sacred Family.
Sacred Family, like every living and breathing community, continues to change. New people bring new rhythms and new art forms even as the heartbeat of the community continues. Of all the changes that have taken place at Sacred Family since my research, the most painful involve the significant number of people who are no longer part of the creation of community there. I came to Sacred Family with questions about how Christian liturgy is and might be transformed by the presence of disability. I left with questions about how the social violence of urban spaces and the lack of safe and affordable living spaces affect the arts of Christian worship. I continue to be haunted by the memories of a group of people who were lost to the church during the period of my research. They drive my commitment to housing justice movements that are vital for the people with whom I spent time at Sacred Family. A significant number of the people I mention in this narrative have died. Others have moved to a new location or have been moved by family members or group home owners. Some stopped coming to programs, and I lost touch with them.
The last time I spoke with Lillian was in a hospital room. Still feisty, still full of life even at the threshold of death, she was a person I was glad to have known even for a brief time. I hope that she is pleased by this record of her skills and that others like her are honored by the ways they are represented and remembered in this work. Each of the congregants I write about here has left a profound mark on me. They are a part of my memories and my dreams. The anthropologist João Biehl writes of “an ethnographic venture” that “has the potential of art: to invoke neglected human potentials and to expand the limits of understanding and imagination—a people yet to come, ourselves included.”1 I cannot tell the future, my own or the lives of others, but I imagine and seek to understand a future world where people with skills like Lillian’s and mine can expect to find a place to pray and dream with others and a life of great love in community.