Thank You, Alice

by Rev. Dr. Sarah Griffith Lund

In the beautiful diversity of humankind, we are invited to celebrate disability. This is the legacy of Alice Wong, disability activist and author who died last November at age 51. Alice felt like a friend to me even though I only knew her through her speaking and writing. She talked openly about the real-life impacts of discrimination against people with disabilities, starting with her own stories of growing up as a disabled child in Carmel, Indiana. That’s just a few miles north of where I live now in Indianapolis. I imagined us as friends meeting for coffee and sharing stories.

As storytellers, we can help decrease the shame and stigma associated with disabilities and mental health experiences. I appreciated Alice’s use of storytelling to open people’s hearts and minds to injustices that often feel faraway and too overwhelming to think about. In Alice’s powerful memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life, she says, “I think of storytelling as a chance to know ourselves better, to really question who we are, where we've been, and who we want to be. Each person has an entire universe of stories inside of us. So my question to you all is, what is your story and how do you want to share it with the world? If you aren't ready to share, tell your stories to yourself and let it nourish and guide you. Most importantly, your stories should please you and you alone. And when you are ready to share it, it'll be out there with other disabled narratives pushing back at that status quo.”

When I share my stories about my family’s experiences with chronic and serious brain disabilities, I often ask people to think about their “God stories” about mental health. I invite people to think about where God shows up in the midst of mental health and disabilities. And in exploring this question, we begin to craft our own theologies of mental health and disabilities. Storytelling is how we make sense of our lives and wrestle with God’s presence with us.

Disability and mental health experiences are not punishments from God. And no, God does not make us disabled and sick so that we can deepen our faith. The saying, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” is bad theology. We are wonderfully human and that’s why we get disabled and sick. God shows up in the love and care we show to one another.

Alice explored the intersectionality of mental health and disabilities in her writings. She navigated her own personal experiences with mental health and talks about this in her book Disability Invisibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, She writes, “I may not find joy every day. Some days will just be hard, and I will simply exist, and that’s okay, too. No one should have to be happy all the time—no one can be, with the ways in which life throws curveballs at us. On those days, it’s important not to mourn the lack of joy but to remember how it feels, to remember that to feel at all is one of the greatest gifts we have in life. When that doesn’t work, we can remind ourselves that the absence of joy isn’t permanent; it’s just the way life works sometimes. The reality of disability and joy means accepting that not every day is good but every day has openings for small pockets of joy.”

I love this idea of “small pockets of joy.” Maybe the joy is so small we can just stick our thumb in the pocket, other days the joy is big enough for our whole hand to rest in our pocket. Yet, claiming joy exists, in some form, is an act of courageous faith.

Thank you, Alice. Thank you for being a friend to all of us, reminding us that we are not alone. Thank you for building beloved community through storytelling, creating spaces where we all belong.

Rev. Dr. Sarah Griffith Lund is an author, advocate, and pastor. She has written several books on the intersection of mental health and faith, serves as Minister for Disabilities and Mental Health Justice on the national staff of the United Church of Christ, and is senior pastor of First Congregational Church of Indianapolis, Indiana.