“Sorry no Disabled parking in Hipville…”

Often I meet people for appointments all over town. Sometimes it is food courts in middle class suburbs, sometimes is cool cafes in hip parts of town. Recently I have noticed a trend. I was sitting waiting to meet someone in the food court of a tired, middle class, suburban mall, when I looked up and did a scan of the occupants of the foodcourt, there was an extremely high percentage of people who were disabled. I noticed a number of carers as well, helping and feeding their disabled relatives/friends/spouses. A few days after, I was again waiting for someone for an appointment, this time however I was in a hip, inner city yuppy/bohemian cafe zone. The main street was being used as a kind of open air catwalk by impossibly attractive and painfully cool males and females, who were out to mix haute couture with buying their everyday groceries. As I looked through the forest of legs clad in designer jeans, I struggled to see one disabled person. I guess they were picking up an unwritten message that the hip and non disabled were not – “stay away!”.

I have been on planes coming into my city where visitors are encouraged to visit Melbourne’s faux bohemain precincts, such is our culture’s worship of commerce and cool. I bet they will never encourage overseas visitors to go out and drink in the sights of the mall where the disabled people feel comfortable.

Not long after my visits to these two places I was back at the tired old mall; again I was waiting for a late appointment. Behind me was a group of people in suits, there were talking in hushed tones, so I had to listen in. The people in suits were the mall management. They were meeting with people who were considering moving their business into the mall. The mall managers were sharing their plans to redevelop the centre, to attract a younger, hipper and fresher clientele. This of course was code-language, the disabled and the elderly were not good business for their mall; they did not flash the cash in the way that the young, funky and functional citizens of the new global economy could. A cutting edge redesign with new stores, would drive the message home. With this move, the mall moguls were commiting a sin of omission.

Our culture commits this sin of ommision all the time when it comes to the disabled, of course in our politically correct culture we watch our language and terms. But every fashion mag, every music video, every piece of advertising stock photography that makes up the media wall paper of our every waking hour, shows taunt, toned, beautiful, and well functioning bodies. It is the absence of the disabled from our media world, that speaks with a horrible and deafening silence, and that betrays our true values.

The concept of disability and degenerative illness, pulls down the paper tiger that is our secular culture with its unspoken and irrational belief in the superhuman. Ours is a secular culture that worships functionality and output. We bow at the altar of the material. However the concept of disability invites questions of eternity, of realities beyond this life, and nudges us towards the Christian hope of bodily resurrection. These are questions however that our culture is not prepared to entertain. So instead it turns its head and prefers to look at the supermodels (a loaded term if there ever was one.)

Before the Nazi’s came to kill the Gypsies and the Jews, they first began to sterilze and kill the disabled, The Nazi propaganda machine simply justified this slaughter as a neccesary part of their social darwinist worldview, their commitment to productivity, and their quest for physical perfection.

For how we as a culture treat the disabled and the seriously ill is a barometer of how ready we are for Christ’s coming kingdom.

When I ask my wife when was the time that she most palpably felt the kingdom of God, she does not tell me about an altar call or a worship service. She tells me of the time that  as a student studying occupational therapy, she organized a disco for people with intellectual disablitities. At the end of the night, the last song that the DJ played was Queen’s “We are the champions”, Jesus’ words that the first shall be last and the last shall be first came to my wife’s mind. The group formed a circle holding hands, as the chorus came they raised their arms, and belted out the chorus with tears running down their faces; and for the length of a overplayed 70’s pop song, my wife sensed heaven and earth unite.