An Uncomfortable Presence

Sarum College hosted a remarkable conference for disabled people and their allies and carers in early May 2008. During the weekend, delegates discussed some difficult questions:

Why people with disability are often experienced as an ‘uncomfortable presence’ in church and society?

How is the church challenged or inspired by the stories of the impaired and their carers?

Excerpts from a report to her Oxford Diocese colleagues, Conference delegate Ann Memmott, social responsibility voluntary adviser :

What a challenge faced the organisers of this conference: To invite and include a diverse selection of people with differing disabilities, from different denominations, and to also balance their leaders' disability-related needs.

Each of the leaders of the course is managing a significant level of disability of some form; two in wheelchairs, one with hearing impairment, two with severe back problems. Their own energy and commitment to this event is at huge cost to themselves, but despite the exhaustion, there was such kindness, caring, and love for each participant from each of them. Nothing was too much trouble.

What was there, in abundance, was caring, and love, and acceptance of people as they are. That is the key. There was acknowledgement of need, but such welcome and a sense of 'ordinariness'. Nothing was seen as scary or dangerous. Each person was valued as exactly that: A person, a friend. Someone to talk to without worry or concern, safe in the knowledge that each person had what they needed to make it possible for them to enjoy all that the weekend brought.

[People with disabilities] face pain and daily challenge of uncertainty… They maintain their integrity, their humanity, their faith, their gifts to the world (whatever form those take) in a world that so often wrongly categorises these people as broken, as meaningless, as sinful or lacking in faith, as that Uncomfortable Presence in their midst.

What a lost opportunity for us all to really engage with love.

The conference was led by the Reverend Peter Cole, the Reverend Donald Eadie, Sister Barbara Claire of the Community of St Mary the Virgin in Wantage, Susi Burdell and Helen Tyers.

For information about follow-up events, please contact Alison Ogden.