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"Toward Full Social Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities"

Developmental Services Inclusion - Community Inclusion: Some Spiritual Benefits

By William R. Booth
BDS Community Inclusion Conference
November 20, 2002, Augusta Civic Center

My family is full of thanks for the great, steady and reliable help the Bureau has given us over these many years. Truth is neither professionals nor parents have the whole picture; we need each other and by learning to listen to each other we’ve seen progress that would have been impossible to imagine 40 years ago. Thank you and keep up the good work!

Several years ago the Bureau did an especially fine thing when they brought two great pioneers of community inclusion to Augusta for a day to inspire us with visions of what supported employment in the community could do: John and Connie O’Brien. How many of you remember hearing John and Connie? John had the most exciting stories about supported employment—true stories from his own experience. One in particular has stayed with me and I’ll retell it as well as I can. (But that was good few years ago and if you remember it differently please tell me afterward, not now.) It’s the wonderful one about the guy—I don’t remember his name, lets call him Charlie—who got a job, with his job coach, in a factory where the pressure was high and at times the atmosphere got tense, setting everybody a bit edgy. The other employees were anxious and some of them naturally were apprehensive about bringing a mentally retarded worker into a place where nerves were already getting frayed. But there he was. Now Charlie had a loud voice and whenever the tension got too much for him he would sing a TV commercial jingle at the top of his voice. The other workers, already tense, became angry and got to the boss to shut Charlie up or get him out of there. He’s going to cause an accident around here!

Now you’re the job coach; what are you going to do? With all that tension it’s not a great place to bring your client in the first place, but jobs are hard to find and Charlie with his loud voice is not easy to place. But there you are; what do you do?

Let me tell you what happened. While the job coach was trying to negotiate something and the workers were putting pressure on the boss, Charlie kept on singing his jingle whenever he felt the need and then getting back to work, relaxed. Eventually somebody saw the humor of it and started laughing. Next time Charlie sang somebody else joined in and sang along. Eventually the whole shop took it up; when the pressure got to be too much, different ones of them would start Charlie’s dumb song and then in no time the tension was gone. The shop then had a new tool. The tension problem was solved and the consultant who solved it for them was Charlie.

John O’Brien’s story is a fine example of what I want to talk about, some spiritual benefits of community inclusion. I picture Charlie with a good strong voice—a little raucous perhaps. He catches the spirit of the moment, responds helpfully without inhibition, and creates a spiritual change beneficial to the whole shop. And my point in using this story is that it’s not a freaky coincidence but a rather common type of occurrence not only in supported employment but in lots of different settings. Many of you know how to do it I’m sure. Within the limits of safety you give Charlie his head and watch him work out what he has in mind. You’ve seen this work; I certainly have and I’ve written up several such incidents in poetry. I’ll read you one before I’m finished.

But first we need to look at what’s really going on with Charlie. First, he catches the spirit of the moment, then he responds helpfully without inhibition and by so doing he creates a spiritual change beneficial to the community.

I say spiritual: I’m talking about spirit, not religion. Spiritual values have a wholeness to them. Change the spirit in a group of people and you change a whole lot of things. Relieve the tension in a work place and you reduce accidents and down time, increase cooperation, improve safety, productivity, longevity and health. And among the people we serve spiritual talents like Charlie’s are not in short supply. In fact mental retardation has never implied any spiritual deficit. The first thing we had to overcome in community inclusion, the thing that for so long prevented us from making real progress, was not a deficiency in our clients, it was a three-headed monster in the communities, called ignorance, prejudice and fear. For a long time the monster was hard to overcome, but now many communities have found themselves spiritually enriched by the presence of the very people whom they had held in disrespect and even contempt.. Hallelujah!

Back to Charlie:.. he catches the spirit of the moment, he responds helpfully without inhibition and he creates spiritual change beneficial to the community. Lets look at the spiritual gifts which Charlie reveals in the story

First, the sensitivity to catch the spirit of the moment. Zilpha and I have had a great deal of experience with this one. Our son Jim is amazingly sensitive to the moods of people, even to what they are thinking about. He wants to greet everyone, but if it’s a frail, elderly lady the hug is exquisitely tender or even omitted. The person who would not welcome any greeting he simply ignores. And along with this sensitivity we’ve seen a constant, ingrained desire to relieve distress anywhere and a lot of intuitive understanding how to do it. I’ll bet most of you know people who have some physical or mental impairment but have these talents in good measure: the sensitivity to the spirit, the desire to relieve distress and the understanding how to do it.

Charlie’s second spiritual talent is the ability to respond helpfully without inhibition. Of course uninhibited responses give us a lot of surprises not all of them pleasant and you have to think quickly sometimes. But how many of us wouldn’t have tried to suppress Charlie’s singing, which turned out to be his unique and creative contribution? So the spiritual gift is not just uninhibited action but knowing when to suppress your first impulse and when to let it fly. To come up with a spontaneous action that’s just right for the moment—I call that a spiritual gift. And so, by exercising his spiritual gifts of sensitivity and creative response, Charlie created a change of atmosphere beneficial to the community. Good for him! Good for anybody who can do that!

You’d probably have to say Charlie is unusually gifted, but look. Spiritual gifts like his are unusual in any community, and I’d want to ask, in a community of what you’d call ‘normally functioning’ people do you think gifts like Charlie’s, especially the ‘uninhibited’ part,
would be valued and encouraged or discouraged and put down? Or if one of the normally functioning workers in Charlie’s plant were to burst out in song as Charlie did and for the same purpose, do you think they would get away with it and accomplish as much as he did?

Our clients living and working in our communities are already busy exercising many spiritual gifts. “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control.” We’ve all seen it. And equally important, there are many people in the work places and communities of the land who are ready to acknowledge and accept a spiritual gift when they see one. We do need to be tactful and not flout our spiritual concerns, especially not flout the term ‘spiritual’ because of those who might misunderstand or misrepresent the intention. But among ourselves we will recognize and celebrate the beautiful spiritual gifts and their fruits growing in our communities, and let others do the boasting. (Isn’t it great to hear other people telling those wonderful stories?)—while when we hear it we’ll exchange with each other a wink and a slow nod..

Inclusion is good for everybody. Here’s a poem about it, a story true to the facts in every respect except that I created a fictional traveler to tell the story. In other words the “I” that tells the story is the fictional traveler but he tells a true story.

LUNCH STOP AT A SMALL DINER

Seated alone
in a stuffy little diner beside a busy highway,
I rest my eyes with a slow cup of coffee.
It is Good Friday.
At another table the waitress sits,
weary and hot from the huge weight she carries
every step she takes.

Two prospective customers arrive,
an older man bent with some
prolonged anxiety or care,
and a youth, alert and tall,
his peculiar gait a little jerky;
lifting from the shoulders
and rising on the ball of the foot
he hesitates an instant, savoring every step.
He looks around the room
as though expecting to recognize a friend.

Waitress rises heavily to move behind the counter.
The young man orders an Italian, but
We don't do Italians, she replies,
and refers them to another place farther down the road.
But they choose something else instead,
arrange themselves on stools before the counter,
and she takes their orders to another room.

Dad?
Yes, Jim?
What kind of lady is she?
The question sets the older man to wondering,
as it does me. He thinks a moment,
then evades the question with a waitress.

Soon the dolorous waitress brings their lunch
and, with a sigh and a weary countenance,
sits down again for respite while they eat.
I continue musing with my coffee,
for the young man's question has ignited
questions of my own:
When will someone else appear,
competent to write the check and make the change?

The two men finish eating.
Dolores labors to her place behind the counter,
writes out their check and deftly makes the change.
They move toward the door, my eyes unable
to relinquish that young man
whom I have scarcely seen yet feel I want to know,
and I smile as I watch his final move unfold.

Suddenly from the door he turns again,
steps into the crowded space behind the counter,
and, with a smile
drawn from some unfathomed well of recognition,
embraces the woman tenderly.
Have a happy Easter!
And he's gone.

Slowly, as one might peacefully awake
from a long refreshing sleep,
her smile arrives, first to the mouth,
then to the moistening eyes,
then flickers across her face
as she lightly moves to clear away the dishes.


The poem LUNCH STOP AT A SMALL DINER is from GREEN FIELDS AND AN OPEN GATE, POEMS BY WILLIAM R. BOOTH, published by and available from the author at 14 Mill Brook Road, Bar Harbor, Maine 04609 Copyright William R. Booth 2002.