October 12 Disability Awareness Item

Friends,

Here are two Meeting-related blog entries behind my frequent observation that Hospitality Committee = Pastoral Care Plus Knives and Hot Liquids. The actual hot liquids moment is in the second blog entry.

http://rantwoman.blogspot.com/2009/03/coffee-hour-meditations.html

http://rantwomanrsof.blogspot.com/2010/08/god-are-you-out-of-your-mind.html

The first item refers rather frankly to a Friend’s hidden disability. A hidden disability is one that one would have to be told about to identify; the destription in this post is based on the Friend’s own description of her realities. She does not speak of this all the time, but she does occasionally speak fairly frankly of it.

I doubt this Friend reads blogs and I have not asked her whether she minds being assigned a rather too frank nom-de-blog. In fact, I decided that the nom-de-blog in the first entry really tells way too much of the truth. I have chosen not to edit history but do now refer to this Friend by the nom de blog used in the second entry. I also had to evaluate a whole bunch of things and realized that just probably there were a number of circumstances calling me specifically to try to work with some of the points vexing me.

The blog entries are true to my experience. If the details overwhelm you, please just hold them, hang with what I manage to appreciate, and be glad to have only your own problems. I hope it is clear that my thinking about several pieces of the story has lurched painfully into more evolved states as well.

Here is another Hospitality-related entry with a lovely observation by a child. I truly do not mind comments like the one here even though my capacity to seem well-adjusted varies a lot in general.
http://rantwomanrsof.blogspot.com/2010/04/present.html


For more language about care of community and practical matters as ministry see our Year of Discernment final report. Sorry but fishing for the exact passage I have in mind is more than I want to do right now.
http://blogofdiscernment.blogspot.com/2009/12/final-report.html


As an aside, another reason Hospitality Committee = pastoral care plus knives and hot liquids has to do with helping about memorials and dealing with grieving loved ones. Last year a couple other Friends and I went to a workshop put on by Marge Abbott about support and accountability committees and in general about pastoral care. Friends from Multonomah sent out a whole packet of information and there was a really nice write-up from I think Twin Cities Friends about handling memorials sensitively. Were I specifically telling the NPYM Discipline Committee about resources I would definitely mention this item even though I have no idea whether other UFM Friends have even looked at it.

Come to think of it, maybe there is a second hidden disability issue here : SOMEONE is doing too good a job of hiding distress. SOMEONE went home and poured out her heart in a blog and lots of people think Hospitality committee is just a challenge. SOMEONE has spoken only slightly of her personal distress. SOMEONE has been doing too good a job of seeming to cope and impeding her community’s access to opportunities to walk alongside difficult circumstance in all its messy and occasionally irksome detail.

My childhood kitchen experiences also keep showing up here when I try to write this. The main point: my brother and I both had cataract surgery pretty young and then several years later had surgery to remove scar tissue. In the interim we both learned a lot about the kitchen. My mother must have been absolutely maniacal about safety: she had two half-blind kids and a third one who always wanted to climb up and do what the big kids were doing. But there are also some subtle issues of language, dyslexia, facility about different categories of words, and capacity to articulate frustration all mixed up here. These are too much for this particular item but they still show up to be tripped over sometimes.

In the Light

(RantWoman)