The Tactile Heart

John M. Hull

Description

The Tactile Heart is a collection of theological essays on relating blindness and faith and developing a theology of blindness that makes a constructive contribution to the wider field of disability theology. John Hull looks at key texts in the Christian tradition, such as the Bible, written as a text for sighted people, and at hymns, which often use blindness as a metaphor for ignorance and explores how these can be read by blind people.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 28 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334049432
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Tactile Heart



Also by John M. Hull
Sense and Nonsense About God
Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition
School Worship – An Obituary
Studies in Religion and Education
What Prevents Christian Adults from Learning ?
The Act Unpacked: The Meaning of the 1988 Education Reform Act for Religious Education
Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness
God-Talk with Young Children
Mishmash: Religious Education in Multi-Cultural Britain, A Study in Metaphor
On Sight and Insight: A Journey into the World of Blindness
Utopian Whispers: Moral, Religious and Spiritual Values in Schools
In the Beginning There Was Darkness: A Blind Person’s Conversations with the Bible
Mission-Shaped Church: A Theological Response





The Tactile Heart
Blindness and Faith
John M. Hull






© John M. Hull 2013
Published in 2013 by SCM Press
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.
The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978 0 334 04933 3
Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon



Contents
Preface


1. The Tactile Heart
2. Milton, Paradise Lost and Blindness
3. The Material Spirituality of Blindness and Money
4. Open Letter from a Blind Disciple to a Sighted Saviour: Text and Discussion
5. Blindness and the Face of God: Toward a Theology of Disability
6. A Spirituality of Disability: The Christian Heritage as Both Problem and Potential
7. Is Blindness a World? From Theology of Impairment to Theology of Disability
8. The Broken Body in a Broken World: A Contribution to a Christian Doctrine of the Person from a Disabled Point of View
9. ‘Sight to the Inly Blind’? Attitudes to Blindness in the Hymnbooks
10. ‘Lord, I was Deaf’: Images of Disability in the Hymnbooks
11. Teaching as a Trans-world Activity


Acknowledgements of Previous Publication




For Marilyn



I hate all sighted things but for your sake I love them.
It was because of you that I embraced blindness;
You gave me strength to turn from the world of nostalgic images
And face the dark future where you are.
I hate the darkness that hides me from you
And I hate the light which hides you from me.

I love both worlds, yours and mine
And so across the worlds, I love you.




Preface
I became a registered blind person in August 1980. It did not occur to me that there was anything particularly interesting or remarkable about blindness; it was all perfectly straightforward although admittedly most inconvenient: blindness is when your eyes don’t work and you need to find other ways of doing things. Three years later my attitude changed. The last traces of light sensation had faded, and the lingering hope of some slight improvement had been crushed. I was now disorientated in the world, not only by what blindness was doing to me but by the nature of blindness itself. I did not set out to write about blindness. My first book on this subject, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness (1990), was based upon a series of tape recordings made over a number of years in order to enable me to monitor and meditate upon the changes that were taking place. These original recordings from the mid-1980s have now been retrieved by Fee Fie Foe Films, who are using them as the basis of a film about blindness which will be released in 2014 or 2015 under the title Into Darkness . An enlarged second edition of Touching the Rock was published in 1997 under the title On Sight and Insight. The original Touching the Rock was republished as an SPCK Classic in May 2013.
Although the experience of blindness changed the way I thought of God, it was not a challenge to my faith, so much as to my imagination. The imagery of light was replaced by the more intimate meanings of darkness. When I read the Bible as a blind person, however, it was a different matter. In the Beginning There was Darkness: A Blind Person’s Conversations with the Bible (2001) describes how I came to realize that the Bible was mostly written by sighted people. The disturbing fact that the Gospels portrayed Jesus as a sighted person sharing the usual first-century attitudes towards blindness came as a shock. My earlier reflections had been of a personal nature but now the foundations were laid for a more thoughtful theology of blindness. This took the shape of a number of reflections upon Christian faith including some analysis of the phenomenology of the blind condition and its significance for social and ethical living.
This present book, The Tactile Heart: Studies in Blindness and Faith , is a collection of these studies, most of which have been published as book chapters and periodical articles although a couple are appearing here for the first time. These meditations on sightlessness, now spread over 30 years, have moved from the autobiographical, in which I tried to understand myself, to the biblical, in which I tried to understand Scripture, and now to a more mature but still fragmentary series of reflections upon the deeper meaning of blindness for the religious life.
I am grateful to the RNIB who in 2012 presented me with a lifetime achievement award for contributions to the literature of blindness, and to The Allan & Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust and the Westhill Endowment Trust, whose generous support has made this work possible. I am also grateful to Natalie Watson of the SCM Press for her careful work in preparing the text.
These writings on blindness have been the subject of music, drama, poetry and works of art, which have given a wider scope to my intentions of bridging the blind and sighted worlds and of interpreting one to the other. The most profound and redemptive experience of these two worlds has been my relationship with Marilyn, to whom this book is dedicated.
John M. Hull
The Queen’s Foundation for
Ecumenical Theological Education
Birmingham




1. The Tactile Heart
The beauties of touch are, I suppose, largely hidden from many sighted people. For those who go blind in adult life, the loss of beauty must be one of the most perplexing problems. Those in the blind state who do not wish to remain as sighted people who cannot see, but to become authentic blind people, will find that discovering the beauty of touch is one of their most important tasks.
In my own experience – perhaps I am not alone in this – one passes through three stages in the learning of tactile beauty. First, there is the stage when, with our hands, we learn again to do. There is the second stage when, with our hands, we learn to know. Finally, there is that stage when, with our hands, we learn to appreciate beauty.
The first stage, the doing stage, is in itself sufficiently perplexing. So accustomed are sighted people to think of the eye and the hand as being interlocked that the separation of the eye from the hand, which is the condition of blindness, causes considerable puzzlement. It takes time for both blind and sighted to realize that you don’t have to see to do up your shoelaces, to brush your teeth or put on your tie, although I must admit that it helps a little to know what tie you are putting on. It takes time to realize that, as a blind person trying to unlock a door, you have to remember what it was like coming home late at night drunk. You need one hand to locate the keyhole and the other hand to shove the key in. This is an example of blind doing.
When one has rediscovered blind doing through the hand, the next stage is more difficult. To move on to blind knowing is so much more complex. Of course, sighted people do use their hands for knowing. One licks one’s finger and sticks it up in a breeze. One touches something to discover whether or not it is hot, and one says ‘ouch’. These experiences are relatively isolated for the sighted. In the case of the blind, we see with our fingers more regularly. For us, tactile knowing is our standard form of knowledge.
It is surprising, for those who lose sight, how difficult this is, although for those blind from birth it is, of course, their natural form of knowledge. I well remember, as a recently blinded person, learning again to play chess with my children. How difficult I found it to remember that in the case of the blind one not only moves the pieces with one’s fingers; one knows the whole structure of the board with one’s fingers. One must not try to hold in one’s imagination a picture of the board wit