Useless

on sanctity and vocation to ministry

Christ is Risen!

You don’t have to be useful to be holy. 

As a disability theologian, I see the obsession with roles and usefulness and “value” of humans placed on their commodifiable services to be a major factor in building stigma against people with disabilities. If you think the goal of humans is to be useful or used, you will shortly have no use for those who cannot fully use the range of human faculties and abilities. You will wind up ignoring disabled people or thinking their lives are less important or their input and ideas and relationships not important. You will devalue them because you have made the mistake of placing value on humans, who are meant to be loved, not valued as usable objects.

The good news is that humans are not made to be used. They are made to be loved and to love God and one another so that they become like God. As Bulgakov said, theosis is the only theodicy. In other words, the answer to our differences and the suffering in the world and any unfairnesses we encounter is Theosis. Everything is for our salvation. To put it another way, Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing can stop grace from entering the soul. There is no human condition which deprives us of the happiness that is knowing God. We can all freely choose to love one another and so to bear one another’s burdens and lift burdens that are too great for us.

Did you notice how that story about the pyramids recently resurfaced? It was confirmed again in another study that the way the huge blocks of stone were transported was that the Nile used to have another branch that went past the valleys where the pyramids were built. No one person could have lifted a stone, and no group of a hundred could have moved them the distance they traveled. Rather, the water lifted the burden, and the people worked together with pulleys and rolling logs and wheels to set the stones into place. We are like that, too. We need the water of baptism, the grace of the Holy Spirit, to do the bulk of the lifting and carrying of our burdens. And then we need each other, working together to move and build.

Think of that when you are lonely and isolated by a disability in your family. You were not supposed to do this alone. The church should send people to visit you. They should continue to come around when someone has a chronic or terminal illness. They should accommodate the growth spurts and burnouts and shutdowns and meltdowns of neurodivergent people and the complex medical needs of people who have food allergies or feeding tubes or equipment that helps them move or sleep or breathe or eat or bathe. They should send someone to your house to listen to you and love you and help you hear the good news in your life, to see your life reflected in the life of God, to see the sacred story as your own story, the company of saints as your neighbors. They don’t, though.

Most people receive no visits, and some as many as one. Usually a diagnosis is also an entry into loneliness and isolation. The current dearth of diaconal ministers means that loving and kind priests can’t make it around to everyone, and untrained lay volunteers rarely have the skills or sacramental support to carry out complex pastoral care visits. If you have a communication challenge that requires specialized tools and skills, or an “embarrassing” symptom of your illness or disability, there’s a further gap in care. Few people have the gifts and training to safely and attentively minister to someone in hospice or someone who cannot hold their bladder or someone who talks with a speech output device or someone who suffers frequent nausea or who has an ostomy or a chamber pot. These things do not deprive people of their dignity! But if you don’t have training, you might go once but not return. Besides all this, volunteers are not expected to stay or to last in their ministries. They are frequently discouraged from staying in a service position for a long time.

Then there’s the more insidious problem, of those who would deny that complicated pastoral care needs exist. I have not even mentioned situations of the 30-40% of people who have survived domestic violence, sexual abuse or assault, child abuse, or clergy abuse. Those people need special care, too, especially from someone ordained.

You might think that I have drawn you in so I can make a point about the need for deaconesses, and in some ways you are correct. I do think that the restoration of the diaconate including the female diaconate would greatly help in meeting these pastoral care needs for the sick, disabled, suffering, and surviving. But this has nothing to do with trying to grab power, as some have falsely speculated. It’s everything to do with treating people as holy even when they are not useful to the church. That’s what the diaconate is meant to do. If you are a nobody to the world that uses people due to your circumstances, you are a sacred somebody to God and His Holy Church. Someone has to go and tell you this, to do this work. People like to say online, distanced from reality, “Well, couldn’t anyone do that?” Obviously not. Specialized skills are rare and take training and long term commitment and sacramental support and a connection to the “Liturgy beyond the Liturgy,” the ongoing work with God in thankful service that we all partake in. But also, let’s say there is a small part of this need that could be met by an average layperson. Could they visit someone whose arthritis makes their needs and schedule unpredictable? Yes, but they don’t. Could they visit the family with the autistic boy who can’t stop spinning and won’t bathe? Yes, but they don’t. Could they go to the mental hospital to talk to the girl who can only communicate with symbols? (Probably not because only clergy are allowed in most hospital settings.) If yes, they don’t.

There’s no competition between lay ministry and the need for the diaconate to be restored. The imagination that ignores the pastoral care needs of women is likely plagued with a misconception that women who are still useful are not in need of care. But we are not people who use people. We are people who love, people who heal, children of God, daughters and sons who have received the Holy Spirit and who bring good news and care to each other.

There are those who will not only say that women don’t have particular pastoral care needs, but that it’s not women’s “role” to care pastorally as deaconesses. This is nonsensical on the face of it. If we say that the work of the diaconate is ongoing under another name, as we must since the gifts and callings of God are without repentance and God established deaconesses in the beginning of the Church, then we must also see the obvious truth that women are the ones most fully and appropriately trained to minister to people with disabilities and to other women. Women are most nurses, most speech language pathologists, most primary parents trained in the care of disabled children, most counsellors to people who survive sexual assault and child abuse and domestic violence. They are doing work in exile, alongside the church but without the explicit support and permanence and acknowledgement and connection to the prayers and sacraments that would bring the ministries into fullness and strengthen greatly the whole Church.

The obsession with “roles” is problematic for a lot of reasons, largely because the people who talk about “the role” of women generally don’t  have a corollary with men, as though women’s existence as not-men needs some utilitarian justification (which is the pagan view) or because they think that only men are fully human (also a pagan take, but this one gets spun in religious language as complementarianism). If only men could minister pastorally or teach or preach, we would not have a church, because women have always done these things. If there is a “role” for women in the prophets, it is in fact as preacher and good news bearer, as foretold in the great Paschal Psalm 68 (67LXX), which begins, “Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered,” and continues, “The Lord sent the word, great was the company of women who bare the good tidings” (who evangelized). And that is exactly what we see in the New Testament, as Jesus’ women disciples are always teaching and preaching and spreading the good news like St. Photini (the woman at the well) and the Myrrhbearing women. It’s what we see in the early church in Sts. Mary and Martha of Bethany who with their brother evangelized France, and in St. Mary Magdalene the Apostle to the Apostles who was the first to see the risen Lord and boldly told the Emperor of the Resurrection, and in St. Thekla who accompanied and preached with St. Paul, and in St. Lydia who hosted the church in her home and St. Phoebe the Deaconess who taught and explained St. Paul’s letter to the Romans and was known as the Light of Cenchrea. And in St. Priscilla the Apostle who taught St. Apollos and in St. Junia the Apostle and in St. Mariamne the Deaconess who with her brother St. Philip preached boldly and St. Nino and St. Irene and so many, many others. The Lord God of Hosts is a God whose “hosts” are written in the feminine plural, the company of women who spread good news. This is how it has always been.

This is what it looks like when women love Christ crucified and risen, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God, not a grab for the decrepit and twisted, vain “power” of the world that uses people. We are not using people when we say we want to share the gifts of God in ministering to our fellow Christians. We are loving them. The only power in that is the power that was from the beginning given to all humans equally, for us in the image of God to grow into His likeness by loving God and one another in Christ.

There are particularly strong pastoral needs for women to minister to other women in many places right now. There are regions of the world where fistulas are a common predicament, communities where domestic violence is more prevalent (particularly where complementarian biblical interpretations have emboldened men and silenced women so that abusers can get away with it), needs like grief and aging and pregnancy and pregnancy losses where a theologically trained minister who can carry the prayers to the priest directly and perhaps in some circumstances bring the Presanctified Gifts to someone isolated who is suffering and in need. You might be under the false impression that American women are not abused and assaulted or trapped or manipulated, or that our children are not neglected or harmed. Thank God that you have been sheltered from such things, but at least one in five and more likely 2 in 5 women and children have survived some form of these horrors. Do not imagine that the usefulness of women means that they are being cared for adequately. And those people you do not see, the people with chronic or terminal illnesses or disabilities, the ones who are wandering in despair and unable to help themselves, those people who aren’t making themselves useful at church, those also are loved by God. Those also need care.

When each of my parents died, ten years apart, I served as their lay chaplain at their bedsides. As a well-trained seminary graduate and theologian, I had a practical and prayerful skillset to set them at ease, to help their passing be at peace with God. It was with a good conscience that after I chanted Psalms while my mother died, I handed her care over to her Catholic priest. Even then, for the parts of the services where a layperson could speak, to give a eulogy before her funeral Mass and a talk before her Rosary, I gave the talks. It was God’s grace that I was carrying. It was the long practice of chanting Psalms that helped me see her breath slowing as I chanted her prayers on her last night. It was the mercy of God that He took her just as my son and I chanted, “For He shall give His angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways. They shall bear you in their hands…” and that was when God in His great love sent His angels to bear her away. I gave the care, and God gave the mercy to us all. God gave the cure.

With my dad who had been abusive and violent a lot of his life, there was more theologizing, more declaration of the goodness and mercy of God. He slept in peace after I told him the good news in Christ: that when his soul was weighed, there would be a thumb on the scale, because I had forgiven him and that meant that Christ had done, too. That I loved him, and that was only a little drop in the ocean of God’s love. That at the end he finally had a solidly good option, to accept the mercy of the God Who Loves Humankind and to eat the bread of heaven. I was the first person who let my dad know he was dying, the first to turn off his TV, to make him laugh, to tell him honestly that his work was done and that his mistakes could still be healed. Do you know what that’s like, to walk into a room where demons want to pick a dying man apart and to say, “Absolutely not. This one is God’s. I forgive him,” and then to pray for him in songs and psalms and spiritual songs until the room settles into the company of angels? That’s the priesthood of all believers. Yes. It is. And it is also a specialized skill set that the church needs.

There have been other bedsides, other prayers and songs for the dying, because I am not afraid. I bring these up because they were moments with people who needed the Church but only had me at the time.

What would it be like if the people who needed the Church had someone recognized, someone whose authority to have mercy were connected to the Divine Liturgy? What if the people whose daughter wasn’t a bold, God-loving disciple-prophetess-teacher could have a word in season at their most vulnerable, sacred moments?

I have never been intimidated by the deaconess question because I grew up hearing about  my twice great-grandmothers who cared for their community with so much faith and practical mercy that they were called “Deaconesses” even though the official vocation had been out of practice for several hundred years. I grew up with a grandmother who told me how to approach the living and the dead in love and fear of God and to give with dignity and to feed the hungry and give freely. I learned not to be embarrassed pretty early on. My Nana was called a deaconess, too, even though as a Roman Catholic she was not ordained as such. She cared for her retirement community members and was a liaison for them with the church. They called her a deaconess because of her service and love. These are the women I think about first, and then the saints. The legacy of deaconesses is one of service borne of love, not utility. They were not powerful in this world that uses people. They served instead the God Who Loves Humanity.