Not Just Another Brick In The Wall
Ecclesial Engagement With Disability Across Canada
This series started with a question of, "Do we exist as a limitless forest or a central tree?” And how it relates to ecclesial or community engagement with disability across Canada. Disability has many different forms and exists both in the forest of Canadian society and the central tree of our own person's.
When I first began thinking on this question of engagement, I had another image in my mind from a documentary series I watched several years ago on Netflix called Abstract: The Art Of Design. Since I was young, I have always found architecture and creative design intriguing. I had dreams of designing creative homes and living spaces. So when they interviewed Bjarke Ingles the Danish architect, I was fascinated by his design of a wall built with hallow bricks. The design allowed for two separately defined spaces to exist while they still engaged one another through the visualizations, light, and wind passing through the open spaces in the wall.
Similarly, engaging the two spaces of society and the individual people of Canada takes a willingness to see both as significantly unique in their own contexts and yet entwined to one another's understanding of disability, dignity, and hope. Each of us, in different stages of life, find ourselves not just as another brick in the wall, but as interpreters to our life experience with disability and how it has shaped our view of society and the world. Together, we build meaning by both the individual telling of our stories and the listening discovery of others in the community around us. Borrowing Wolf's words once again:
“Human life is a network of relationships. You can measure the quality of a life by the quality of those relationships. How should one live, then? Be the kind of person who contributes to good relationships.”
— Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, et al.
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Well Dwellers Vlog and Podcast — A YouTube Channel sharing videos of my own personal reflections and conversations with others as they share their stories and interactions with disability, dignity, & hope.