Walking with Jesus in Strange Places

John Swinton

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506484532
• eBook ISBN: 9781506484549
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology

Theology doesn't come to us neatly packaged from above. There is a sense in which all theology is autobiography. We learn it as we live it, and the place where we live it out is within our own story. It's not that there is no such thing as objective truth. It's just that we come to know what we know not only as we think our way into it with our minds but as we live into it with the whole of our lives. As theologians, our own stories inevitably matter. In this book, John Swinton uses fragments of his own story to show how that story has impacted the way he sees and practices theology. His place of formation walking alongside people living with intellectual disabilities, mental health challenges, and dementia has gifted Swinton with the opportunity to ask different questions of the tradition--questions that emerge from the lives of people who see the world differently. That learning has shaped him as a theologian. It has also raised some crucial questions around the nature of faithfulness, discipleship, and exactly what kind of community the church is and should be in both theory and in practice. As we reflect on these matters, the hope is that all of us together can begin to appreciate more deeply the goodness, kindness, and love of God for all human beings.

In the My Theology series, the world's leading Christian thinkers explain some of the principal tenets of their theological beliefs in concise, pocket-sized books.

1

Finding my vocation(s)

I NEVER PLANNED on being a theologian. What I really wanted to do was become a rock star. Indeed, I spent a good deal of the first 33 years of my life trying to achieve that goal. As I write I am preparing to release my first album, so you never know. In the end I became a theologian, and I am very happy with that as an outcome for my life. But how I got here is interesting. When I look back over the past 40 years or so of my life, it’s difficult to see the connections between what I thought I would be and do back then, and what I have ended up being and doing. I have never really had a career plan or even a life plan. I don’t mean that I never plan, I just mean that I rarely sit down and think: ‘What am I going to do with the rest of my life.’ I probably plan more now that I am a bit older and beginning to sense my mortality, but when I was younger, I tended just to go with the flow of life and see what happened. When I left school at 17, I had no clue what I wanted to do. I went to a rough school where, with one or two notable exceptions, university wasn’t considered to be a viable option. Those who did express the desire to study further tended to be ridiculed and abused psychologically and physically for having ideas above their station. Expectations were low, and we all managed to meet them. For me, university was never an option. It was much more fun to develop a healthy scepticism towards all things educational and all people who liked such things. Which probably explains my school exam results.

My first job was as a marine scientist which is hilarious when you consider my obvious challenge when it comes to anything to do with numbers and statistics. I am almost completely right brained, which is great if you are a musician, a poet (and perhaps a theologian), but less helpful for a scientist. The mismatch between the job and me was quickly exposed, and I was sacked within my first year. The question ‘What will I do?’ was on my mind and filled the horizons of my anxious parents. I took a job as a van driver. I loved that job! I just got up in the morning, did my job and went home again at night. No worries, and some lovely Northeast countryside to drive around. It was bliss. Not much money but zero work stress. But I knew I couldn’t do that forever, so I had to think about what I wanted to do on a more permanent basis. One of my best friends at the time had just become a mental health nurse so I thought: ‘Why not try that?’ I did. And I loved it! I had wandered into what turned out to be my vocation. Strangely enough, although it was never on my mind, this was the time when I began my formation as a theologian.

I trained originally in mental health and then retrained in the area of what was then called mental deficiency, and which has gone through a variety of names since – mental retardation, mental handicap, learning disabilities, intellectual disability. The current term of choice seems to be ‘intellectual disability’, although some in the UK still retain the term learning disability, a term which in the USA relates to things like dyslexia (a language processing disorder), dysgraphia (difficulty in converting thoughts into writing or drawing) and dyscalculia (problems related to mathematical calculations). It’s complicated. These kinds of name changes make me a little suspicious of the politics of naming. The phenomenon remains the same, but the name changes with the politics, assumptions, values and attitudes prevalent at particular periods of time and across cultures. Disability is much more than something that is contained within your own body. It is also determined and defined by the place in which your body is located. But more on that later.

The formation of a theologian

These years of nursing were deeply formative for me and of me. When you spend time with people who see and encounter the world differently you begin to realise that the way you thought the world was may not be the only way in which the world can be seen. I listened to people living with schizophrenia tell me their stories of hearing voices and the ways in which that experience brought them deep distress, but sometimes happiness and companionship. Listening to such experiences I began to realise how much my understanding of schizophrenia had been shaped and formed, not by listening carefully to what people were saying, but by making certain assumptions based on what I had been taught (my clinical formation) and what culture assumed (my cultural formation).

Whilst my clinical formation taught me to look for signs and symptoms and to frame people’s experiences of illness in these terms, lurking below this perspective was a cultural worldview that, via the press or TV (no social media back then!), almost exclusively framed schizophrenia in terms that were profoundly negative: ‘split personality!’, ‘violent and dangerous!’, ‘beyond understanding!’, ‘completely distant from the world’. And yet, when I spent time with people living with schizophrenia, I came to know them by their names and not their diagnoses. When that revelation occurred, the cultural veil was ruptured, and I was opened up to new realities and fresh possibilities. In coming to see people, rather than diagnoses, I began to understand schizophrenia differently. I started to recognise the difference between treating someone who has schizophrenia, and being with John, Brenda and Jean as they went through deeply troublesome experiences. Even then, key questions began to form in my mind. ‘Why do we stigmatise people in such ways?’ ‘Why are people with this condition so lonely?’ ‘Why can’t they find friends?’ ‘Is it “them” or is it “us” the problem lies with?’ ‘Where is God in the midst of such distress?’

Similarly, as I spent time with people living with depression, I began to realise just how complex and painful depression is. Like many others, I used the language of depression as if it were just some kind of derivation of sadness. I’d talk about the ‘Monday morning blues’, or how depressed I was because my car was playing up. But as I spent time with people living with depression, I saw how weak and thin such language was. I remember one woman describing her depression as a pit that she tumbled into. When she was down there, she could look up and occasionally she would see flashes of light, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Finding my vocation(s)
• 2. Formation, vocation and change
• 3. Thinking about theology
• 4. Practical Theology and qualitative research
• 5. Theology and Disability: Who gets to ask the theological questions?
• Conclusion: Walking with Jesus in ‘Strange’ places