REMINISCENCES AND REMARKS

by the Rev. A. Ralph Barlow, Pastor Emeritus
April 27, 2003 / Groundbreaking Service
for our Access For All addition

When Mr. Taylor invited me to speak today, he said I might have something of a perspective to offer. Well, there is an historical “view” available to us at this event today. Providing “access for the disabled” isn’t just happening at Beneficent in the year 2003. It is an achievement that has a long history. And, indeed, it moves us beyond where our fore-mothers and fathers were.

When Evone and I, and our family, came here in the summer of 1964, the “elders” of this very historic church were a generation to a generation-and-a-half older than us. They were a strong, resilient group -- many of them having made heroic come-backs from rather serious crises in their lives, all of them having “survived” in one way or another an economic depression and a major, severely tumultuous world war.

They really did not have -- let me say it this way -- a consciousness of “disabilities” foremost in their minds. They were focused on “ability,” on overcoming hardship, on moving on -- regardless of what might have been their disabilities. In fact -- and I say this with enormous appreciation, not with negative judgment -- they tended to deny their disabilities, their shortcomings. They wanted to be, in their own minds at least, and hopefully in their “public” image as well, invincible. And in many ways they were!

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a hero to most of that generation, regardless of political persuasion. Most of us knew that he had polio. But at the time of his presidency he didn’t want anyone to know that he was crippled. His son James stood beside him when he was speaking in an upright position -- to steady him, hold him up, as it were. He wanted his personal, physical disability to be a secret. For how could a people be inspired to believe that “the only thing to fear is fear itself” if they knew he was a victim of a crippling disease? How could they believe that they had “a rendezvous with destiny” if they knew that he suffered from an illness that could not be conquered? He wanted his “disability” to be a secret.

But time marches on. So, not surprisingly, when it came time to build his memorial in Washington -- some 50 years later -- there had to be a compromise between those who wanted to respect his secret and those who wanted to make his disability an inspiration. The statue of Roosevelt that finally was cast for the memorial in West Potomac Park shows him sitting in a wheelchair, but his cape surrounds the chair -- hiding the chair for the most part. Yet, as an acknowledgment of his real condition, one of his crippled legs shows through the cape, for the discerning tourist.

We have moved beyond “secret-mindedness,” no longer wanting to hide our human condition. Beginning with the Vietnam era, and more than dramatically confirmed on September 11, 2001 -- 9/11 we call that day -- we know that we are all vulnerable. Not all of us can climb stairs, or come back down again. Not all of us can address public gatherings in an upright standing position. Indeed we now realize that our greatest strength is in our willingness to own up to everything that makes us human.

We share a long-enduring humanity that means for many persons crippling illness, physical disabilities of several sorts. As a nation, too, since the Vietnam War we have finally come to acknowledge that we are not superhuman. Moreover, since February 20 of this year, when a disastrous fire claimed the lives of 99 people, and injured many more, at the Station nightclub in West Warwick we all realize we do not live beyond the possibility of loss of life because of the hazards of fire.

And, in this congregation we know we are not exempt from the eventual decay of gold leaf on our dome and the gradual erosion of the structural beams which support our grand old meeting house on Weybosset Street. For several years we new the balcony was unsafe and, finally, we realized the roof right over where the choir sits and listens to all those sermons might cave in. A danger to life indeed! (And a remarkably brave choir at that!) So we did something about it in the mid-1980’s, convinced that our building was not immortal. Our building, like us, is subject to all kinds of varying conditions, all kinds of very mortal abilities and disabilities.

Beneficent is embarking on a building program today that celebrates a keen yet painful consciousness that has been emerging in this church for 70 years. It is the awareness, slow in reaching maturity, that we are a diverse people when it comes to our physical abilities and disabilities. We are a church whose diversity has been defined in terms of race and class and ethnicity, of gender and sexual orientation, of the God-given blessings of age, of religious and non-religious backgrounds. To all these insignia of status in our household -- physical disability today joins the ranks, unashamedly, indeed proudly.

Of course the question that must inspire us is simply this: For the disabled, access to what? This is basically a question that has beset the Christian church for centuries. It’s the question of integration. Once gathered, how are the church’s peoples really meshed together in one whole?

I remember a professor at Yale telling the story of when he came to New Haven in 1936 as the pastor of Humphrey Street Congregational Church. A deacon was showing him around his first Sunday. The deacon said, “Mr. Pope, you will be glad to know that there are Negroes who attend our church.” “Oh, that sounds good,” replied Mr. Pope. “Yes,” the deacon went on, “And, in fact, they all sit together back there in the last three pews in the northwest corner of the Sanctuary.” Integration is the question, not simply access.

Once in Beneficent Church, will the disabled find true acceptance? Will there be room enough for everyone: for every mind and feeling, for every sort of understanding of the dilemmas of war and peace, for every interpretation and tradition of art and music, both classical and contemporary?

Beneficent has had in its finest moments an uncanny ability to take a very diverse group of people and shape it into an outpost for mission. That has taken some doing, but it is a continuing challenge as this church tackles the problems and scary outlooks of the early 21st century.

So, Pastor Rick and my friends at Beneficent Church, that’s the perspective that I would offer on this very significant day.