In Disability and Spirituality: Recovering Wholeness William C. Gaventa distills a lifetime of work in care institutions and churches to foster better ways of meeting people with intellectual disabilities and their families. Gaventa's passion is to support people with disabilities and their families while pressing service organisations to address spirituality and to take more seriously the supporting roles faith communities might play.
His book offers a bumper crop of models and procedures to help pastoral carers and care professionals sensitively to engage with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families throughout the life-course. General points are regularly but judiciously offered to show creative and insightful examples of how care professionals might go beyond ‘care provision to customers’ to achieve more human professional services. Religious communities in which everyone's gifts are taken with full seriousness are also depicted in marvellously fine-grained detail. Gaventa's central aim is to foster trust between people with intellectual disabilities, churches and care providers. Trust emerges out of the experience of compassion and commitment, of feeling listened to personally, as well as through skilled care and treatment.
That Gaventa himself embodies this trust-building sensitivity is more than apparent, and near the end of the book he presents this spiritual sensitivities as very like those of a coach who, ‘invites people into a new, sometimes scary world, models and demonstrates new abilities and skills, and also works from where people are, listening to all questions and helping them to learn their own skills, gifts and capacity to meet the challenges in front of them’ (p. 257). As a worked performance of this sensitivity, this book very effectively evokes fresh ways of looking at a whole range of practices.
Gaventa begins the book by interrogating the ethical and theological implications of diagnosing and labelling disability. A brief survey of the history of disability rights movements shows them to have sprung from religious roots and still to be carriers of spiritual values. Attending to the origins of ideas of universal human rights in religious ideas like the image of God, for instance, can be understood as a healing work furthering the highest moral aspirations of modern believers of all types as well as nonbelievers. The term ‘spirituality’ usefully overcomes traditional boundaries between religion and science as well as between different sorts of believers and unbelievers by pointing to the universality of the need for humans to have an identity, meaning, connection and purpose. In other words, the most common usage of spirituality language is incorrect: it is not the opposite of religion. ‘Spirituality’ names the deepest features of every human's aspirations, identity and need to belong.
A second section traces spiritually dense moments in the life-course of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities: as they are born and grow, as they transition from the world of children to the adult world, and as they age and die. Here the focus is on helping faith communities move away from understandings of their life together in which cognitive knowledge and performance-driven rites of passage in effect bar people with disabilities from taking part. The treatment of why, and how, religious communities might help youth transition from childhood into the adult world is one of the most powerfully constructive in the book.
A third section deals with the journey of grief, adjustment, exhaustion and joy travelled by families of children, and then adults, with intellectual disabilities. Once again the rendering of the problems faced by families is penetrating, as are the suggestions to congregations about how they might welcome people with intellectual disabilities by offering them and their families an experience of Sabbath – known in secular terms as ‘respite’.
In a fourth section Gaventa calls caring professionals to grow beyond the assumption that good care entails eschewing personal relationship to focus on providing high-quality care. Professionals need to rediscover their role as a vocation, a call that resounds through the last sections of the book. Friendship between social workers, healthcare providers and care assistants will need regularly to cross the modern boundaries between ‘client’ and ‘professional’ if modern healthcare and social support organisations are not to become as inhumane as the old institutions in which people lived isolated and friendless lives.
A final section offers models for building true community in and around modern social support and healthcare systems. Building true community within the demanding constraints of modern care systems is absolutely essential for the flourishing of all people, and Gaventa takes religious communities to be an untapped well of potential spiritual community builders.
There are clearly some gains in addressing diverse ‘religious communities’ by way of a very loose umbrella term like ‘spiritualty’ to organise the discussion. The chief gain is the freedom it gives Gaventa to draw together concrete stories through that allow spiritual community builders in many walks of life to begin to see how they ought to view the world if they are to foster community, trust and friendship beyond the care and rights statutorily due to people with intellectual disabilities. In this Disability and Spirituality is a resounding success.
Less successful, perhaps, is the assumption that the ‘spirituality’ animating the book is not noticeably Christian. The examples of creative practice that Gaventa offers are overwhelmingly drawn from Christian churches, lightly sprinkled with success stories from Jewish communities. Examples of Muslim and other religious communities getting it right are noticeably absent. Gaventa might be right that the problems faced by different religious communities are all basically similar, and that his Christian-shaped spirituality promises to energise the practices in all of them. These are questions that can only be answered by non-Christian reviewers. In a Christian theological context, however, it is probably best to understand this book as an attempt to display what it looks like when an observant Christian melds themes and ideas from his own scriptural tradition with winsome examples from (Protestant) churches. Such works of Christian hospitality promise not only to enrich the lives of those often called disabled, but all of us.
