Jemma

“Finally, however, everything will be perfect again. We need to recognise that there are many forms of perfection. Perfection itself may be diverse. So we should not try to divide people into those who are perfect and those who have an impairment, because basically we are all the same.”
― John M. Hull, Disability: The Inclusive Church Resource

“It would be easy for us to think that Jesus took the distorted, abnormal people and normalised them, making them like everyone else. We should, rather, understand that the welcome Jesus extended to marginalised people, whether because of their occupation, their social status or their impairments, was an experience of healing. He healed people by helping them to escape the ritual taboos which marked them out as impure, by restoring them to the communities from which they had been banished, by eating and drinking with them when no one else would even touch them, and by restoring them to life in all its fullness. In many cases this healing process was accompanied by a cure, but it is the healing that we should emphasise, because it was being healed that saved them.”
― John M. Hull, Disability: The Inclusive Church Resource

“A rereading of these two events—death and resurrection—is timely in light of what we know about trauma. The dynamics of traumatic experience press Christian discourse beyond the site of the cross to think about what it means to live in the aftermath of death. Studies in trauma suggest that trauma has a double structure: the actual occurrence of a violent event(s) and a belated awakening to the event.8 Trauma is not solely located in the actual event but, instead, encompasses the return of that event, the ways in which the event is not concluded. This phenomenon is described in different ways, but the nature of trauma is such that an inability to fully process an event means that it returns. This return distinguishes trauma and suffering. Suffering is what, in time, can be integrated into one’s understanding of the world. Trauma is what is not integrated in time; it is the difference between a closed and an open wound. Trauma is an open wound. For those who survive trauma, the experience of trauma can be likened to a death. But the reality is that death has not ended; instead, it persists. The experience of survival is one in which life, as it once was, cannot be retrieved. However, the promise of life ahead cannot be envisioned.”
― Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining

“God does not desire our lip-service or our religion, but our hearts. Our religion sickens him without a heart that is genuinely seeking to please him. Thinking that we can be reconciled to God through a prayer while our hearts remain far from him in disobedience and sin is no less hypocrisy than going through the motions of the law.”
― S.M. Platt, Freed From Sin to Become Servants of God!