Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

By Julia Watts Belser. Beacon Press, 2023. 288 pages. $29.95/hardcover; $18.95/paperback; $12.99/eBook.

Full of personal stories and rich theological reflection, this entire book feels like a long conversation with a dear friend. “If you and I were talking about the sacred, if we were sitting together over coffee or by candlelight,” writes queer, feminist, and disabled theologian Julia Watts Belser, “I wouldn’t start by asking you about the Bible . . . or about God. I’d invite you to tell me about a time you felt a sense of wonder, a time you felt connected to something larger than yourself.” Belser, a rabbi and a professor of Jewish studies at Georgetown University and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program, maintains this casual tone throughout Loving Our Own Bones, never becoming overly academic.

Belser presents stories from her own life alongside select stories from the Bible and the Talmud specifically chosen because they present or relate to disability as negative, such as Jacob wrestling with the angel; the wicked city of Sodom; the disabled prophet Moses in his many appearances; and ones about healing, including by Jesus, where disabled bodies are viewed as “broken,” needing to be fixed. She wrestles with these problematic texts, especially so when they are clearly ableist or hostile to disabled people, and confronts what she finds with a different perspective, one that is accepting of disability and views it as linked to spiritual growth. As a disabled person myself, I found this unapologetic approach so refreshing.

My favorite part of the book—yet also the hardest—is chapter 7: “The Land You Cannot Enter.” Belser opens by sharing the story of Moses, whose “difficulty with speech” gives him “deep anxiety about his disability,” being denied entry by God into the promised land, after having traveled for 40 years. Moses tries to reason with God about this loss. Belser relates this to a time when she was left behind by friends who wanted to ride a Ferris wheel that was inaccessible to her wheelchair. She told them she didn’t mind, but as she admits, this was a lie. In these moments, when her “[d]isability has shut me out of certain things I’ve wanted,” she feels grief. Yet she also recognizes it’s “dangerous” to reveal this feeling:

To speak of disability loss risks amplifying the one story most non-disabled people tell about my life. To acknowledge grief means stoking ableism’s fire, feeding fuel to the assumption that my disabled life is a tale of sorrow and sadness, grief, and lament. Everywhere I turn that story gets broadcast.

Grief at having been excluded from society is a common yet almost taboo feeling among disabled people who nearly every day experience ableism and an inaccessible world that pretends they do not exist. I have discussed this chapter with a group of other disabled people, and we shared an appreciation for Belser writing about this dilemma so openly and eloquently. It allowed us to process our own grief at being disabled in a way that we hadn’t before.

Belser ends the book with the idea of a “God on Wheels,” a fully embodied God that reflects back the image of her disabled body. She writes, “It’s an affirmation that God knows and shares the pleasures of disability life and that God also knows the shape of its pain.” Whether disabled or not, the reader can begin to re-imagine an embodied God that intimately knows our joys and frustrations.

For Quakers, we believe that there is that of God in everyone, and I see this belief in Belser’s vision of a God on Wheels, which is truly radical in a culture that is constantly offering fixes and cures to “improve” our bodies. “For those of us whose bodies are persistently devalued,” she writes, “for those of us who have been told in a thousand subtle and not so subtle ways that we fail to measure up, finding God in the mirror of our flesh is a powerful reorientation.” Indeed, it rejects external judgement and allows us to tap into our bodies’ own divine wisdom.

In my experience though, I have found that Quakers do not talk enough, if at all, about disability within our meetings. I know of countless Friends who have been hurt by ableism within our community, yet our community has been largely silent about how ableism manifests among us. If we want to be truly welcoming and inclusive, we need to wrestle with this topic. Loving Our Own Bones is a great place to start.

Lastly, Belser offers three plain language pieces, available on the publisher’s website, that cover key themes in the book. Plain language documents are intentionally made for people with intellectual disabilities and others who process information better with shorter, straightforward sentences and simpler words.

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Greg Woods is a Quaker minister and disability theologian who lives in Minneapolis, Minn., with his wife, daughter, a dog, two cats, and three chickens. He serves as a program consultant with Beacon Hill Friends House, co-leading their Living Into Your Call vocational discernment program.