Opening Your Heart

A couple of years ago, I attended a worship service at a wonderful church in Pennsylvania.  I arrived a few minutes late and found the congregation standing for the opening hymn.  I took my place in one of the pews and stood along with the rest of the congregation.  We proceeded to stand for the next several minutes while the minister made several pronouncements and we sang a second hymn.  I grew a little tired and began thinking about how good it would feel to finally sit.  I looked around the sanctuary and saw other members who I imagined were thinking the same thing.  I also reflected on those in the congregation who were physically unable to stand and how they must feel, having to sit all this time while everyone around them was on their feet.

This was one of many moments I have had in congregations across our region where I questioned our sense of hospitality toward those who have varying abilities…in mobility, functionality, and interrelatedness.

One of the keys to growth in our congregations and in our faith movement is our willingness to be more accessible and more inclusive of people with varying abilities.  According to the National Organization on Disability, people with disabilities are very likely to say their faith is important to them, but are more likely to not attend services due to accessibility issues. With the aging of the American population, they point out, the situation is becoming an increasingly significant factor in worship community vitality.

Part of the problem, certainly, is physical barriers.  Steps that people can’t climb; sound systems that people can’t hear; hymnals that people can’t read.  According to Ralph Adams Cram, architect and critic of American church design, places of worship... “were to be spiritual oases, set apart from their pedestrian environment through substantial, soaring walls and monumental stairs approaching impressive entrances well above the street. Unfortunately, our legacy is daunting stairs, heavy doors, and soaring walls. Much as our hearts may want to welcome everyone to enter our halls 'as a homecoming' the reality is that we are sometimes confronted with architectural designs that make hospitality a difficult undertaking, to say the least.“

While it may be cost prohibitive to make large structural changes, most accommodations require little or no outlay of money.  The biggest investment is not in money, but in the effort to find creative ways of enhancing the worship experience.  Make sure there are spaces in the sanctuary for wheelchairs; invest in assistive listening devices (they’re not as expensive as you may think); have several orders of service in large font available; ensure that you have enough accessible parking spots near the building; ask people during the worship service not to stand, but to “rise in body or in spirit” or introduce more “seated” hymns.

Here are some additional ideas for creating a more hospitable and inclusive environment:

·        Always use microphones (even if someone says they don’t need one)

·        Encourage speakers, worship associates, etc. to speak loudly and clearly

·        Raise the pulpit so that all can see

·        Make sure there is accessibility to the pulpit so that people with mobility limitations can speak or lead the service

·        Have a wheelchair or two donated and make it available

·        Wear name tags all the time for people with memory problems

·        Record services and make them available. Often a CD can be created instantaneously; or have them available on your website.

·        Hand out printed versions of the sermon.    

In his book, Year of Our Lord: Faith, Hope and Harmony in the Mississippi Delta, T.R. Pearson tells the story of Lucas McCarty, a young white man born with severe cerebral palsy who uses a wheelchair but also gets around by walking on his knees with the help of knee pads worn over his blue jeans.  He shouts and makes vocal sounds, but for the most part communicates through an electronic language device.  Lucas became a member of the Trinity House of Prayer, a small, poor African American congregation.  He was embraced by the congregation and was in no way considered out of place or disruptive.  Lucas even joined the choir.  Pearson writes, “Without exception, Trinity’s members treated Lucas with unstudied compassion. At no financial cost to the congregation — no special programs, no architectural alterations— they demonstrated that making people with disabilities, even severe disabilities, feel a part of them is within reach of every house of worship. Sometimes it's not about building a ramp. Sometimes it really is about opening up your heart.” 

May it be so.

Mark Bernstein

CERG Growth Consultant and UUA Liaison to Equual Access

Untangling the Measuring Tape by Rob Spirko

When I was a kid, running around with the other kids in the neighborhood, playing war games, I would sometimes have my character sustain a pretty serious injury, often losing a limb. In retrospect, it was kind of weird. It certainly didn’t interfere with the burgeoning “geek” identity I was developing. Looking back, I wondered why I did that, until one day it hit me: back then, I wanted an obvious disability. Something evident at a distance, something that people would understand immediately. If you’re missing an arm, well, you’re missing an arm. If you have to ask people to repeat themselves, if you talk funny when you do that… What do people know about that? If you have to explain why you go off to speech therapy every day after lunch time, you start developing a sense of yourself as different.

Years pass, and you can mostly forget it. People don’t mention it so much. Occasionally, a college professor, with the best of intentions, will ask you in his office if you’ve considered “doing something about your mouth,” something vaguely dental or surgical, because he seems to think that’s the cause of your odd quality of speech. Or later, your dissertation director, again with the best of intentions, will caution you not to disclose your disability in your job letter, because “you don’t want to give them any reason to doubt your ability” before they meet you. (And she’s probably right—people with disabilities are less employed than the temporarily able-bodied.) Someone, your own child perhaps, tries to whisper something to you, and all you can do after that stream of hisses and clicks is look at them helplessly and shrug. You’re made acutely aware, again, that you’re different, and that others can tell.

W.E.B. DuBois, in The Souls of Black Folk, talks about what being marked as different in a racial context does to your psychology. He says, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

That’s the condition of stigma, that double-consciousness. You know what normal is, primarily because you are not it. The “normal” have the luxury of not knowing. They don’t need to measure themselves by that tape. They know it exists on some level, because they have to reassure themselves of their own normality by holding the tape up to people who don’t fit. If you can hold the measuring tape up to someone else, you never need to hold it up to yourself.

The act of pity means setting yourself up as better than. You can’t pity an equal. That’s why people with disabilities don’t want pity. If a stigma were simply the mark of difference, it wouldn’t be a big deal. We’d all live in our UU paradise, letting our freak flags fly. But a stigma says, “You can pity this person—here’s someone you are better than.”

That’s probably why I don’t mind when little kids ask, “What’s that thing in your ear?” They’re not doing it with an agenda— they’ve just seen this weird thing in your ear, and want to know what it means. It reminds me of when I was small, and saw a man at Myrtle Beach who had one leg. I pointed it out—quite loudly-- to my parents, who felt an appropriate amount of middle-class horror and hushed me up. I was on the verge of walking over to him and saying, “My ears don’t work. What’s it like for you?” Sure it would’ve been inappropriate, but kids can get away with it. They’re still learning how to use the measuring tape. And your hushing them up and hustling them off doesn’t make that tape go away--it only shows them its power.

I try to answer the kids as directly as I can: “I have trouble hearing. You know how glasses are for your eyes? Hearing aids are like that for your ears.” I can’t undo the way we value normality, the way we stigmatize difference. But what I can do, I hope, is give them something of a different measure.

*****

Rob Spirko teaches English at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He and his wife, Jennifer Spirko, live in Maryville, TN, where they attend Foothills Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

An Induction Hearing Loop Comes to Brooklyn

Last October, an audiologist and member of the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, Margaret Weber, read an inspiring article in the October 24, 2011 Science section of the NY Times on the Induction Hearing Loop called:  “A Hearing Aid that Cuts Out all the Clatter.”  She had been doing her own research on the loop and with this great exposure in the Times, Margaret felt that she was ready to discuss the technology with other members to see if they agreed that it might be the right time to bring the Loop to Brooklyn.  Enter members, Kay Corkett, who was serving on the Board of Trustees, and Kathy Ivans a school psychologist. They both became as enthusiastic about the Loop as Margaret and determined to write a proposal to the Board suggesting a special fundraiser to install the loop in the First U Sanctuary.

The major point made by the NY times article was that the Hearing Loop sends sound from a microphone directly into hearing aids equipped with a telecoil (a device originally developed years ago to enhance the sound from a telephone).  With the sound coming directly into the hearing aid, the surrounding noise in the room is eliminated. Without the Loop, hearing aids amplify everything, both what you want to hear and what you don’t want to hear.  So the sounds of creaking floor boards and pews, shuffling of feet and bodies and the reverberation of sound on surfaces interfere with hearing.  That’s also true for those with no hearing loss, but those folks are able to tune the background noise out while hearing aids amplify it.

The Induction Hearing Loop is literally a thin cable that runs invisibly from an amplifier around a room and back to the amplifier making a loop. The technology has been around for 70 years and is in wide use in Europe and parts of the US, and now it is becoming more widely used in other parts of the country in schools, churches, and concert halls.  For example, the New York City MTA has installed the Loop in 400 of the token booths that have clerks and microphones.

So, having met numerous times to discuss their research and proposal strategies, as well as obtaining bids from audio companies, Margaret, Kathy and Kay completed a five page proposal and took it to the Board.  They asked the Board to consider fundraising for the Hearing Loop in the annual end-of-year appeal letter to the congregation. The proposal was accepted.

First Unitarian is a 169 year old land-marked building, so research has shown that it is very difficult and extremely expensive to provide access for those members and visitors with mobility challenges.  But the installation of the Hearing Loop has at least been one step taken toward garnering the support of the congregation to put energy and money behind the goal of providing access for full participation to those members and visitors with hearing loss.