Abstract
I began reading this book in the cortile of the Irish College in Rome. As I progressed, I began to notice the noises around me: the birds in the trees, the noise of the traffic, the lady cleaning in the next room and the airplane overhead. I began to wonder about only hearing these things and never seeing them and indeed, being in this city which is such a visual feast, having to reply on the reaction and comment of others to describe it. It is impossible to comprehend fully how a blind person perceives these things, but John Hull has helped considerably.
Those who work in the area of Religious Education have long been familiar with the writings of John Hull, Emeritus Professor of Religious Education at the University of Birmingham. In 1980 he became blind and has been writing on this subject ever since; in particular his autobiographical account, Touching the Rock. The Tactile Heart is a collection of previously published essays and articles, which offer his thinking and philosophy on blindness.
Early in the book he mentions that his blindness was less a challenge to his faith than it was to his imagination and throughout the essays there are signs of an author wrestling with the challenge of his blindness while keeping to the fore a God with whom he is on intimate terms. Central to the collection is an open letter to ‘a sighted saviour’ as Hull titles Jesus. He cites the mention of blindness in the New Testament; its negative connotations in the gospels (the Pharisees as ‘blind guides’); how John’s gospel is the product of a sighted community and the use of light and darkness as metaphors; the relationship between disability and sin (Bartimeaus); as a metaphor for unbelief and disobedience. He expresses himself profoundly to the saviour, ‘when I began to write to you, my mind was full of questions. Then my confusion turned into indignation; and then I wrote with tears what I realized that you not only died for me but you became blind for me’ (p. 34).
In Blindness and the Face of God, he discusses how ‘the God who is in the image of perfect human being must possess all the faculties and members of perfect humanity’ (p. 42). All these sentiments, Job-like in their expression, are pause for thought. In The Broken Body for a Broken World he finds a certain resolution in Paul’s writing on the Body and most specifically on the Broken Body of Christ.
In A Spirituality of Disability and The Broken Body in a Broken World, he distinguishes between the world as perceived by a sighted person and that perceived by a blind person. These are different worlds, ‘as the recently disabled person recovers from the shock of the fractured and now lost world, a new world gradually begins to dawn’ (p. 63). ‘The experience that a blind person has of the world is so significantly different from that of sighted people that we can speak of it as a constructed world’ (p. 94). Hull positions much of this thought in the writings of the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: how knowledge is sometimes grounded in the visual; how the body is ‘my point of view upon the world.’ ‘Blindness is not just something that happens to one’s eyes; it is something that happens to one’s world’ (p. 92). However, he doesn’t limit his research to Merleau-Ponty alone, but situates his writing in a comprehensive body of source material.
The difference between a ‘theology of impairment’ and a ‘theology of disability’ is discussed in Is Blindness a World? A theology of impairment, which he understands as a part of body theology, is seen epistemologically (‘as the bodily basis for what we know,’ p. 78) and phenomenologically (‘dealing with the nature of the subjectivity of impairment’ p. 78). Theology of disability is understood as part of Liberation Theology, as it would ‘seek for social and political change for the emancipation of an oppressed group’ (p. 78).
Continuing in his exploration of the Christian Tradition, Hull also looks at the blind Milton’s Paradise Lost and the references to blindness and other disabilities in the Christian Hymn Book. He suggests that Milton’s blindness may be the key to understanding the great poem. It describes three worlds: ‘one of majesty and power, one of desperation and utter loss, and the third a world of quiet acceptance, where the inner vision of the mind can still converse with angels’ (p. 8). In the hymns he finds much the same type of rhetoric regarding blindness that can be found in scripture.
As the book is a series of essays contributed to various journals, etc., there is some repetition across the pages, but this only acts to embed Hull’s idea into the mind of the reader. Some end with a paragraph or two on the ‘educational implications.’ Ever the teacher, Hull provides the reader with opportunities to extend the knowledge gained in the book towards a greater endeavour; thus ‘the educational significance of this is that to understand disability does not require compassion, let alone pity, but it does demand that one should be able to enter into a world very different from one’s own. One must learn to see the way the other worlds look from within the world that one has entered’ (p. 73).
The final chapter of the book he calls, Teaching as a Trans-world Activity. He sees that the rhetoric regarding blindness is not confined to the biblical world. The Prime Minister might been seen to have a ‘blind disregard’ for some group in society, blind marking is employed at universities, blind testing is done elsewhere, all the while reinforcing the notion of blindness as being equated with ignorance, etc. At the end of the chapter, he talks about impaired and disabled children. This section was sadly too short and perhaps he could be persuaded in the future to write at greater length on the subject of children and the spirituality and theology of disability.
Hull’s interest in Practical Theology situates the book in that particular sphere, either as an aid to parishes in understanding impairment and disability and the challenges of inclusion, or to those preparing for ministry and how body theology and scripture might be understood in ways (and worlds) other than the conventional.