Season 2 Episode 11: Dr. Naomi Lawson-Jacobs On Queer and Crip Sexuality and the Disabled Christ

On this episode of the podcast we talk with Dr. Naomi Lawson-Jacobs about their creative piece "A Story Like Mine" from the Fall issue of the Canadian Journal of Theology, Mental Health and Disability which focuses on Mad and Crip Sexuality. Naomi shares their experience of growing up in churches where they heard no stories of queer, disabled people and how disabled people’s sexuality is silenced, especially queer disabled sexuality. They also talk about the disabled Christ himself, who queers and crips the Resurrection.

Read their piece here: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cjtmhd/article/view/39551 

Watch on YouTube with captions here: 

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Transcript

Okay.

Welcome to another episode of the Mad and Crip Theology Podcast we're so glad that you're here with us today. And today our guest is Naomi Lawson Jacobs, who is been so kind to, uh, join us all the way from the UK. So thank you so much Naomi for being here. We're just going to start off with a couple of announcements, um, about, uh, the journal, so, we just want everybody to know-- oh, sorry, about the book that we're looking for from the, um, Mad and Crip Theology Press, Miriam's doing the journal, so, I'll leave that for her, but, um, I just wanted to let everybody know that we are still looking for submissions for the, uh, edited volume that the Mad and Crip Theology Press is going to be publishing hopefully in the in the new year, and it's called, um, Joyful Hard Work, and it's about caregiving, so if you are a person who gives care to someone with mental health, lived experience of mental distress, or also disabilities, we would love to hear from you. So you can submit your, um-- or you can read more about what we're looking for at madandcriptheologypress.ca, and you'll be able to find the call for content right there on the main page. And if you want to email us you can also email us-- email us at madandcriptheology@gmail.com if you have any questions about submissions, or what we're looking for. 

And the next general issue is also looking for submissions, also on care giving and care receiving, so if you give care or receive care or both, you're free to submit research articles, creative work, and if you have any of, uh, commentary, reach out to us at the same email address.

And this-- these next podcast episodes will feature authors and contributors from the Mad and Crip Sexuality Journal, so if you haven't, check out that issue, it's still on our Facebook page and on the post part, and you can find a link there too. So, without further ado, we are delighted again to have Naomi here, and Naomi, would you mind introducing yourself? 

Yeah sure, thanks Miriam! And thank you both for inviting me onto the podcast. Um, so I'm Dr Naomi Lawson Jacobs, I'm an independent social researcher, my PhD-- which finished in 2019, was a study of disabled people's experiences of churches, and I've gone on to co-write a book with Emily Richardson sharing those disabled Christian stories more widely, and--and that's called At the Gates: Disability, Justice and the Churches and I've written a piece for this special issue of the journal on Mad and Crip Sexuality, uh, it's called A Story Like Mine, and it's about my experience of looking for the stories of disabled queer Christians like me in the Bible and among the people of God.

Awesome, well we are so happy that you're here with us today, and, um, when you first reach out-- reached out to us and were-- we were chatting with you about the piece that you ended up contributing to the journal, we were very excited, um, to have you, uh, become a part of the journal family, so. Um, we wanted to start with one question today, Naomi-- oh actually, we're gonna get you to read a little bit, aren't we? Sorry for the discombobulation listeners. We are gonna get Naomi to start off, uh, with reading, um, a portion of their piece, so, it's going to be the first couple sections, just to get us oriented and help our listeners to understand a little bit more about the contribution. So, thanks Naomi. 

Thank you. A Story Like Mine. This wedding will be the story of us, as my partner, standing at the kitchen window framed in sunlight and hope. There are no stories like ours. This is not even a wedding. It's 2011, and all we're allowed is a civil partnership. We get to sign a piece of paper in a dusty administrative building. It's so far from equal marriage we can't even mention God. We're the open family secret, marrying outside the church gates. Then we'll write our own stories. We'll have a blessing, and God will be in every word. We plan a bilingual Hebrew English service, honouring my partner's Jewish background and my where-else-would-I-go Christian faith. We take every line of the cis heteronormative Church of England wedding ceremony, and we pull it to pieces and we put it back together again until it's about us. Queering. Why exchange rings? Do we want hymns? What do we really want to promise to each other? Amidst all the doubt, I find I still want God to do a new thing. I want a symbol, a Biblical couple like us, I want to tell their story when my partner and I promise it ourselves to each other. I want holy queer crypts at the centre of my wedding ceremony. I don't know where to start looking. 

A Story About Church. I grew up in a church that never told stories of people like me. Back then, I had no words for everything that was different about me. Disabled, ehlers-danlos syndrome, autistic, bisexual, non-binary. My tongue hadn't yet twisted itself around the strange and beautiful language my communities have reclaimed. Queer. Crip. The only thing I could say, was that there was something profoundly wrong with me, deep in the core of my created being. I wanted to believe that God had knit together every fragile sinew and distinctive gene of my body and mind, but I had to wade through years of lies before I ever heard that truth. Here's what I knew: I had to dress in floaty flowery clothes, and marry a man, and have babies, and embody the empty promise of a vague social construct called woman. Here's what I knew: I didn't fit. I stretched myself around inaccessible worship spaces, hurt myself limping to a banquet table to which I was not invited, but my divinely knit body mind refused to twist into other people's shapes. And there were no stories like mine. The closest thing I had were stories of the bent over woman, the man born blind. But Jesus healed them, and their story diverges from mine. From where I was sitting, I could see no disabled people in the gospels who didn't disappear. No wonder I was a problem with my wonky body and my weird mind that wouldn't fade conveniently from view. I was a stubborn reminder that God's creation is divinely unpredictable, gloriously out of our control, and that seemed to cause an awful lot of anxiety for everyone else. "You'll be able to walk in heaven," well meaning meeting people reassured themselves, trying to disappear me. "You'll be healed of your autism," they said. So confident that I would become a story like them in the hereafter. How could God want anything else for me? For them? Heaven became a threat, not a promise. There are no stories like mine. I didn't fit as a queer person either. I found my way to churches that tolerated me, but few that wanted me. Debated as an issue more than I was loved as a person. Just about good enough to take communion, but never holy enough to preside over it. Falling short of the ideal. In faith communities built the straight married couples with children, I kept hearing the same story: marriage is between one woman and one man. And my spouse and I are neither, we weren't even imagined in church. And I wondered what terrible things they thought might happen if all the lgbtqia+ people clambered over the clustered walls and burst through the closed gates. We might change everything. I began to wonder if everything about me had to be fixed before I could be holy. If I would have to become someone else before I could be loved. There are no stories like mine.

Thank you so much. You're such a gorgeous writer, so, I'm honoured to hear you read your words.  

Thank you so much. 

We wondered how it felt to have your story out out there, and in the world? How did it feel to write it, how does it-- how does it feel now?

Um, writing it was scary. Um, so, I-- I heard the the call for papers, and I'd been, um, doing a couple of talks that seemed relevant to put together into a piece like this, but I also didn't want to, and, um, this might sound strange, because I consider myself a storyteller, but I'm really bad at telling my own story, and part of why I went into research was because I wanted to tell everybody's stories that weren't my own, and then, I thought hopefully people would stop asking me about my experience, and my messy faith, and my story of disability, which can be really difficult to tell, um, and, I've just co-written a book, as I said in the introduction, based on research, and I thought that all the questions I'd get about it would be about the research, but, um, in interviews I've had so many questions about myself, and my disability, and my faith, and, um, it makes me really uncomfortable to talk about myself, and I feel like I should be talking about my participants, um, and I think that's not just because I want to talk about my research, I think partly it's because I don't think I measure up to the image of what a Christian writer should be. Um, and my research has occasionally been judged on who I am, rather than its content, um, especially when it's been noticed that for a while I wasn't calling myself a Christian. Um, I do now, most of the time, um, but, um, that's difficult when your work is-- is judged on your personal experience, and it can make you quite intimidated to say anything about yourself. Um, but, that's part of what the article is about, what the story is about. Um, I-- I wanted to talk about reclaiming my story, as who I am, and not listening to-- to judgments of others, and, um, and about how difficult it was to find stories like mine, really didn't happen until I started doing a PhD, um, which I think is-- is, um, it's really worrying, um, for the people who-- who never will kind of dive into disability theology that deeply, where will they hear the stories that are like theirs. Um, so I-- I really wanted to tell my story, so that other people might maybe see it reflected-- their story, reflected back, um, and I think this special issue is-- is telling so many important stories from that perspective, so, thank you.

Yeah, Miriam and I talk so much about, um, how academia-- there's-- there's certain, like, I don't know, codes in academia? I'm not sure if that's the right word, but we just find, um-- at least I find, I've been discouraged a few times from telling my own story, and talking about myself, so, I think we understand, uh, what what you're saying Naomi. 

And of course that positionality is really important, so, it is important that we tell our stories, and position ourselves in our research, but-- but yeah, it's-- it's difficult. 

Yeah, for sure, and I think, um, I've observed that, um, sometimes our professional roles seem to, like, overshadow our person, or maybe we had to over identify with our professional roles too much, and like our-- our real, sort of, like, raw stories can become buried a bit so, um, we're so glad that-- that you told your story here, and, um, that you're, like I said, a part of the journal family, so thank you so much. So, we wanted to talk a little bit-- we have a couple of questions for you about, um, the piece. And, uh, if listeners want to follow along with where we are, you can check out the the latest journal issue where Naomi's piece is, and the first question we're going to be asking is about is on-- is, um, located on page 140. So, the question is, on page 140 you talk about crip, queer, holy bodies. So what do you mean by this?

Um, so, I thought I'd try to put this into the context of the the rest of the piece, because it kind of-- it comes a bit later, where I-- where I define that, and, um, it kind of, um, is meant to follow after a, kind of, more experiential understanding of queer and crip bodies, um, so I-- I write in the piece that I grew up in church feeling broken, and-- but I didn't know I was disabled or neurodivergent or queer yet, but I did know that the stories I were hearing were not my story, and, um, and holiness was talked about as a very disembodied thing in churches, um, and I felt that, as somebody who's constantly reminded of my embodiment as a disabled queer person, that, um, I couldn't be holy until I became somebody removed from my body, and so, I've been through a whole process of kind of a lot of dissociation from my embodiment, and now trying to learn that I think that God inhabits our bodies, and-- and God gives us these bodies in order to understand God. Um, but-- um, uh, yeah, I didn't know as a young person, that I could be affirmed as a child of God who's been created disabled, queer, and autistic, and-- and, um, this lifetime spent trying to disembody myself has-- has been the opposite of holiness, and has taken me further away from God, and-- and so, the reclaiming of my queer crip body, um, has made me want to be more like God, and-- and to believe that that's possible without changing who I am, but that's been difficult without stories to model that to me. Um, and in the piece I talk about this intersection of being disabled, and neurodivergent, and queer, and how it's a really uncomfortable place, I think, both for churches, and for society, um, it often feels like there's no room for our queer crip bodies in society, and, um, I talk a bit about how society is very uncomfortable with the idea that disabled people can be sexual beings, um, and I think we see that reflected in theology, um, of disability as much as-- as we see in society, and because queer people constantly remind people that we're sexual beings, even though that's not the only aspect of our-- of our queerness, um, it does come with that-- that reminder more than, I think, heterosexual people do, because, um, heterosexuality is so normalized and removed from sexuality. Um, so, um, I think queer disabled people complicate things, because we are often reminding society that we're sexual disabled people, and that's really difficult for society. Um, so, um, part of the messaging around this, is that disabled people receive messages that we're not desirable, so, when I first became chronically ill, my partner on a number of occasions was asked whether they were going to leave me, as though that was the the natural and right thing to do, um, and as though I was some kind of terrible burden, and I really felt this sense of not being desirable as a disabled person, and that kind of coalesced with not feeling holy as a queer, disabled, embodied person. Um, and-- and yeah, like I say, that all starts with not hearing stories that are like mine. Um, and when I started looking at disability theology more closely, I started finding ways to understand, um, the characters in The Bible as disabled and queer in ways that I could relate to, um, so the way that I think stories of disabled people are often told from the gospels, is that, um, there's a disabled person, Jesus heals them, and that disabled person disappears from the story. Um, and when we look more closely at the narratives of Jesus's healings, I think there's a lot more going on than that. Um, you look at the bleeding woman, or Bartimaeus, disability theologians theologians are showing us how they challenge society's understandings of their bodies, and their place in society, and they even challenge Jesus in his attitudes to-- to them. Um, and I think that's what you might call cripping. To crip something is to shake up our ideas about everything that is normal about body, minds, and societies, and all the ways we think about body minds, and it involves, um, showing that there's no natural body, there's only a socially constructed body in our ideas of the body, um, and in that sense, cripping's got a lot in common with queering, and-- and I've read some great writing that queers and crips the Bible, so one of my favourites which I talk about in the piece, um, disability Theologian Sharon V Becher talks about circumcision for God's Hebrew people as an act of cripping, and she says circumcision was done to God's people as a mark of slavery, and they've reclaimed it, and they said this bodily difference makes us holy, and it reflects the image of God. And that to me is cripping, that's a radical statement about how our disabled, diverse, bodies reflect God's image, and can be experienced as part of holiness. Um, so I slowly came, as I say in the piece, to find more stories like this in the Bible, that I interpret the stories of queer, crip, holy people of God, so people who live differently challenge the norms of their society, and what I think is really powerful about those stories is that we can use them to challenge the ableist,  hetero patriarchy we live in. And, through some of those holy queer crip stories, I've found sort of new ways to sit with my body, and to to heal the wounds of ableism, as one of my participants once called it, and to, um, to work towards believing that I can be wanted, and that I can be holy, just as I was created to be, and I think this is prophetic work that disabled people often do, um, it's part of the work of showing the world, and the church, that their normative ideas about bodies can be oppressive and sinful, um, and that we have a gift to bring to people from our readings of the Bible that are positional, um, and to challenge the idea that there's only one natural body. Um, and then there's the idea of Jesus's resurrection as queering and cripping creation, but maybe I'll come back to that in a minute.

Thank you, Naomi. A lot there to unpack, and for us to delve into, so, thank you. I know related around your piece, you also talk, you also connect, queer crip bodies to Holy Saturday, and we wondered, we both have a professor who-- who loves Holy Saturday, and so we both, by virtue of that relationship, also have come to the Holy Saturday, at least I have. So, we've wondered about, yeah, how you connect queer crip bodies to that? 

Yeah, I mean, that suggests that you probably know a lot more about the theology than I do, I've, um, not delved into it very deeply, but, I've done a lot of thinking about Holy Saturday, especially from a practitioner standpoint in the disabled Christian Community, that I am part of, we quite often talk about being Holy Saturday people, um, because of a minister we were in touch with, whose name I have forgotten, um, who spoke about disabled people that way, I'll try and find it after the interview and share it with you, um, but yeah, so later in the piece, I go on to say that a big problem with Christianity for me is that we've disembodied Christ, and, you know, feminist and queer theologians have told us a lot about that, um, and-- and I write in the piece: "We doze off in the garden, sleeping through the blood and the sweat of the sword, running ahead to the triumphant resurrection of Easter Saturday. If we tell stories of Christ's body we remember a fantasy an unblemished risen body, but I live in the not yet of Holy Saturday with all of us who don't have the privilege of forgetting our bodies." Um, and here I was drawing on, um, the ideas of Theologian Shelley Rambo, who writes about the experiences of the disciples on Holy Saturday as traumatic, and she says that the resurrection doesn't erase that trauma, the disciples don't just jump to forgetting it happened, and and Jesus hasn't forgotten his trauma either, and so I write about the disciples waiting in the upper room, and imagine them not having a clue what's going to happen next, and I think our reading of this story is often a bit spoiled by the fact that we know the ending, so we're keen to jump to the resurrection, but if we sit with the disciples in this space of three days where they did not know what was happening, and how traumatic and terrifying that must have been, it's a very different experience. And as disabled and queer people, I think we're often forced to wait in liminal spaces, in between spaces, where things don't happen when we want them to happen, um, and that often happens, in my experience, in-- in a church that wants to pretend that suffering and oppression don't happen, that Holy Saturday didn't happen, because "There was the resurrection, and we're all going to a better place, and we'll all be healed, and that's what matters!" And, um, you know, whatever your your understanding of miraculous healing and cure, um, if you're a disabled person, you probably don't live in that space. And, um, so, I could give a few examples of-- of that not yet Holy Saturday space for queer and disabled people, if that's useful.

So, um, one thing that came to mind was that the Church of England, which I'm a member of, is currently going through a really long process of dialogue on queer issues called living in love and faith, and, um, in it, at least from my, sort of, biased perspective, since all our perspectives are biased, um, it seems to me like my church is debating my right to exist as a queer Christian, and the debate is going on, and on, and on, with no kind of obvious resolution, as to whether there'll be ordination of queer priests and those kinds of more-- more useful decisions, there's just debates, and so, that feels like a Holy Saturday space, where I have to sit in a lot of trauma, um, and, um, another experience that came to mind is my experience of having to research outside of academia, and never being able to keep up with my peers who publish their work widely, because I spend a lot of my time lying in bed in pain, and often not just cursing my body, but cursing the world that expects my body to be endlessly productive, and that is an embodied Holy Saturday experience of waiting, and uncertainty, and crip time, as disabled people have called it. Um, and life in the church as a disabled person can be a Holy Saturday experience, when the church piles exclusion on top of my impairments, and-- and wants me to move on, and tries to tell me that I'll be different in heaven. And wants to jump to the end of my story, but I actually want to tell that story. Um, so in the piece, I then go on to talk about Thomas's encounter with the Risen Lord after the trauma of Holy Saturday, and I don't think of Thomas as doubting, I think of Thomas as faithfully seeking an embodied experience of Jesus's risen human body, um, he doesn't want to move on quickly from the-- the crucifixion and waiting experience that's caused him so much trauma, he wants to touch Jesus's wounds and to feel that Jesus went through hell, and to know that Jesus can identify with him, and I think that's where Thomas finds healing in His Holy Saturday experience without Jesus telling him to just move on to it. Move on from it, Jesus shows him a great deal of compassion in that experience, and what's interesting about this Holy Saturday space for me, is that that's where I start to realize that Jesus is here too, um, and that after the resurrection Jesus doesn't just forget his experience of suffering, and oppression, and death, um, we've learned from Nancy Iceland that Jesus was resurrected in a disabled body, and I think that's a body that remembers in his start-- in his scars, Jesus has a reminder of His Holy Saturday experience forever. So, the church might have disembodied Christ, but Christ doesn't disembody himself, and-- and that's where there's healing in that Holy Saturday space, because Jesus is there with us, and his story is like ours. Um, so for me, Holy Saturday is part of how Jesus queers and crips creation through the resurrection, he takes everything we believe about the divine body and turns it upside down, he becomes like his creation, and then he retains the body that he's incarnated into, and one of the things that body is, is disabled, and I find that so beautifully counter-cultural, in an ableist Society and church that want to make disabled people more like everyone else, when actually we are like God and God became like us. Um, so that's expanding on Holy Saturday a bit more deeply than I did in the piece, I think it's such an interesting concept for disability theology. 

Yeah, we totally agree. I just kept wanting to scream "preach!" as you were just talking, so, I'll just say it now! Preach! So, yeah. Um, all right, well thank you so much for that, and I hope that, um, we'll be able to return to some Holy Saturday, um, maybe we could do a whole issue on Holy Saturday at some point for the journal, that's just so interesting. 

Um, so moving-- moving forward with some of our questions here, um, in our Journal, we always have all of our contributors create an author's note at the end of their piece, so that will-- that sort of like, allows them some space to tell the their-- the readers or the viewers something about the piece that they want them to know, um, it's like, you know, an aside, um, to give them a little bit more insight into what they've created, and so, in your in-- in your author's note, you talk about fear. So, what were you afraid of? And why do you think that society fears intersecting identities?

Um, that's a really interesting question, I-- I might start with why society fears intersecting identities, um, I could answer that in lots of ways, and I'm sure there's been research done on intersection, and reactions to intersectional identities that I have not read, um, but the first thing that comes to mind, is that privilege is really difficult to confront in ourselves, and when we meet people with different identities and experiences from ours, I think we probably want those people to stay as simple as we can make them, and not too different for us-- from us, or we might have to work on addressing all the-- the dimensions of our own privilege, which can be quite difficult, um, but it's really important work to do, so as a white person, I might be willing to challenge my thinking about racialized minorities on a surface level, but I'm still tempted to do so much stereotyping because that's less work for me than trying to understand someone else's whole intersectional experience. So I think that's part of what's going on when people don't want to see me as a queer person then a disabled person, which is what I talked about in my author's note but I also don't think that's all of it, um, and-- and I think this gets us into what I was afraid of, um, in my PhD research, I wrote about how some Theology of disability is is not as critical as it might be, and although that is my view, it wasn't just my view, um, I had research participants who talked about this as well, so, um, I had one wonderful participant called Mims, who experience mental distress, and she said that a lot of the Theology of mental health she'd read was very nice, but she didn't mean that very positively. Um, she thought that there was a lot of talk about friendship, for example, but less willingness to wade into the waters of social oppression, or to look at what really happens to people who experience distress, either in society, or in our churches. And I think that niceness, and fluffiness, in some theology of disability, I think there can be a tendency there to see disabled people as holy innocence, which is all part, I think, of this reaction of society against us as sexual beings, um, and there's sometimes a reluctance there to see us as people with whole lives who might-- might be sexual beings, might be queer, might be polyamorous, might be kinky, might have tattoos, and drink, and smoke, and when I look at how we're depicted in some of the theology there's so little talk about our sexual lives, and-- and I think your special issue of the journal is is really important there, for showing more of a range of disabled people's lives, and I love rev anonymous's brilliant piece on kinky and mad spirituality, um, but yeah, I think more diversity of stories about disabled people is-- is what's needed to, um-- but at the same time, it's-- it's-- it's a-- it can be a cause of, um, of fear, um, as I said at the beginning, when, um, when you've been portrayed a certain way, and you want your work to be read a certain way, um, it-- you might get quite nervous about saying who you are, and I'm still reeling from the church I grew up in, which I-- I mentioned but I was reading the the piece, where I learned it wasn't safe to tell my story of a different sexuality, and gender, and be disabled. Um, and I've still got those negative societal message internalized about my sexuality as a disabled person, um, and also there's the fact that Christians are deeply divided on queer sexuality, um, as I know from my own church, Church of England, and, so, I often have an Impulse to keep my theology and research fluffy and nice, so I can appeal to everyone and not talk about the the messy, divisive, topics like disabled people sexuality. But, that's a dangerous impulse, because it's the opposite of queering and cripping, and it's the opposite of holiness. Um, I say in the piece that God has called me to live as the disabled queer person I was created to be, and I think that's an experience of holiness, um, and I have to live out that truth, so it may be that I don't get as many invitations to write and speak if I speak my whole truth about being bisexual, and demisexual, and non-binary, and queer, and disabled, and neurodivergent, this may just be too much for some people, but, if I don't tell that story, I think I risk replicating these myths about disabled people as a homogenous group of non-sexual beings, and fewer disabled people will have the chance to hear stories from other queer disabled people.

Thanks Naomi, I know as another queer disabled person who also wrote in the journal, I appreciate about your accompaniment, yeah. So, it's really important, and-- and following on that, we have so much to gain, you're right, when we listen to stories of a Christ like us, and we wondered what-- what might we gain from a Christ like us? A disabled, crip, Chirst, an indigenous Christ, and so on and so forth. 

Yeah, I am-- I kind of cautiously had those two questions at the end about what we would-- what we might learn from a Christ like us, and what we might learn from a Christ like others, because I think it's really important that they go hand in hand. Um, because we're all on intersections of privilege and oppression, and sometimes I read theology that, um, that addresses me as, say, a white person, and forget how many people it's oppressing that are not represented by white theology, um, and sometimes I read non-disabled theology, and feel that it's not speaking to me as a disabled person, so, yeah, I live on the intersections of those, and it can be easy to disappear into one or the other, um, I think ,um, what-- what we've gained from, and are gaining from, um, the theologies of marginalized people, um, it's-- it's so important, because we've had centuries of, um, straight, white, male theology that, um, presents itself as, um, as universal theology, um, to the extent that when marginalized people then speak about our own experiences, um, we're-- we're talked about as doing political theology, or theology for the group that we're in, rather than saying anything that might be relevant to everyone. But, just speaking about disability theology, which is, um, the theology there that I'm most familiar with, I mean, um, it gets so siloed as something that's that's about care, and-- and about, um, disabled people only, but there is so much wisdom in disability theology for non-disabled people. Sometimes who need to be confronted with their privileges, non-disabled people, um, and I write in the journal about being confronted with my privilege, um, by reading James Cohn, and his image of black Christ on the cross, and how that that wasn't theology for me, but it also was, um, because it wasn't for me, it was theology, um, that was was there to change my mind, um, and to-- to see things differently, um, and to think about whether, um, I am treating black people, um, as those who put Christ on the cross, um, and so, I think there's a-- there's-- there's some important lessons for-- for those-- for-- for people to learn from stories of Christ who's different from them, um, about, um, who Christ is like, of who Christ is not like, and who we see as Christ, and who we don't, uh, who we see as the other, and who we see as the stranger, and who we see as part of our own group, but there's also so much in the-- in the theology of um, of a Christ who is different from us, or-- or like us, in this sense, um-- that, um, that can speak to the whole human experience, um, and I think disability theology needs to be taught in every seven area, and every theology course, and I wish it was, and I'm really irritated that it's often ignored, because, um, insights like the disabled God change, um, all our experiences of our bodies in a capitalist world that demands such productivity from us, and that treats our-- encourages us to treat our bodies not as a gift that God gave us, but as something disposable, which can lead to some thinking like, "well we're going to heaven, we'll get new bodies, it's like upgrading a mobile phone," um, and that's not how we'll learn-- that's how we're learning not to treat God's creation in the earth, and it should be how we're learning not to treat God's creation in ourselves. So, stories of a God who's like us, and not like us, can give us insights into our own experience, and the experience of others that together, I think, can can challenge us, um, from both sides, um, and I think we all-- we all need to-- almost all of us need to hear more stories, um, of a God like us in theology. And yeah, I'm tired of the old stories, and would like to hear more intersectional, diverse, marginalized images of Christ.

Yeah, thanks so much for that, I think, um, Miriam and I completely agree that we need to get rid of this-- the fluffy theology, and get some real-- I like the word fluffy it made me very happy, I think I will adopt that-- that's that word as well, get rid of the fluff! We need some real theology, some raw theology. Um, so, as we're coming towards the end of the episode, we just wanted to ask you, Naomi, if there's anything else you'd like to share with our listeners today, um, about your piece, or about your work more broadly?

Um, I-- I-- kind of want to do in with one note about stories, because that's the-- the theme of my piece, um, I-- um, I'm on a bit of a mission to get more of the church to listen to more disabled people's stories, um, and, um, I think the-- the mutual listening is so important there in in our processes of reconciliation, and-- and repentance. Um, and I think it's so important that there are many perspectives, and, um, what you're doing with the the journal, um, and-- and the different, um, perspectives on disability theology there is really important, um, but, um, in-- in my book At The Gates, um, co-written with Emily Richardson, um, we talk a lot about listening, and we share many disabled voices speaking about their faith, and their theology, and their experiences of churches, um, but there are also many stories we haven't told, and so much diversity among disabled Christians still waiting to be explored, and we need to hear more diverse stories of disabled people, and our images of God, um, so, I'm constantly encouraging people to go out and listen to other people's stories of a Christ like them, especially marginalized people's stories, and, um, and to see our stories as prophetic wisdom, um, and if you've never heard stories of a God like you, then-- then I'd encourage you to seek out those stories, and I hope it doesn't take having to do a PhD to find them, um, I hope the stories are filtering out, and-- and at least beginning to, um, because I think these are transformative stories, um, and I think we-- we find God in people who are like us, and who are different. And, I think it's really important to remember that we're all part of God's story, and that God's story is our story.

Thank you, I loved that God's story is our story and that's mainly the perfect place to end for the day, so thank you so much, Naomi, for sharing your story, and for-- for queering and cripping in our imaginations and our theology. And we hope others-- listeners and viewers will read and share your story so people-- people can see themselves too. So, until next time, we-- we wish you well. 

Thank you very much, and thank you for, um, both publishing the piece, and for inviting me to speak about it, it's been really interesting to talk to you.