Slow Down, with John Swinton

“Just let time take time, and you’ll begin to feel the world is different.”

— John Swinton

About the Guest

John Swinton is a Scottish theologian and Chair in Divinity and Religious Studies at the School of Divinity, History, and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen. He is also founder of the university's Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability.

Best Books

Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefulness, and Gentle Discipleship, by John Swinton.

John recommended:
The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Christ, by Fleming Rutledge.

Transcript 

JOHN SWINTON: Just let time take time, and you'll begin to feel the world is different.

BLAIR HODGES: As a boy growing up in Scotland, John Swinton decided he wasn't very interested in becoming a Christian minister like his father was. When he grew up he became a nurse instead, working closely with people with intellectual disabilities. And the experience began to change him in profound ways.

JOHN SWINTON: If you've ever spent any time with somebody with a profound intellectual disability, or somebody with advanced dementia, then you know that you need to slow down, and you need to take time and find that space to be with somebody. And when you do that, interesting things happen.

BLAIR HODGES: Interesting things like coming to experience time itself in completely new ways.

JOHN SWINTON: Across cultures, people understand time differently. So people walk faster in Manhattan than they do in Guatemala, because it's a different culture. And so the space that you inhabit in the world actually determines the way that you use time.

BLAIR HODGES: John decided to go back to the university to earn an advanced degree in theology. He brought his experience with disability and curiosity about time with him. And now he's spreading a message about it far and wide. A minister after all.

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome back to Fireside with Blair Hodges. In this episode John Swinton joins us to talk about his path-breaking book, Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefulness, and Gentle Discipleship. He takes us through a brief history of time, how western culture has changed its experience of time in big ways, and how those changes have impacted people with intellectual disabilities, brain trauma, and people with conditions like Dementia. And he tells this story through the lens of a Christian theologian.

JOHN SWINTON: Jesus, who is God, who is love, walks at three miles per hour. So love has its speed. And it's a slow speed. There's something very powerful about that. Love has its speed. And it's slow.

BLAIR HODGES: This is episode eight. Slow Down.

Doing theology and disability - 01:55

BLAIR HODGES: John Swinton. Thanks for joining us at Fireside today.

JOHN SWINTON: It's a pleasure, Blair. Nice to see you.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefulness, and Gentle Discipleship. And there aren't a lot of books about theology and disability. Yours is one of the few. It feels like they're picking up. We're starting to see more and more of that. But how did you get interested in writing about theology and disability together?

JOHN SWINTON: Well, my background is in nursing, Blair. So I spent most of my early years working with people who have mental health challenges and also people with intellectual disabilities. So I spent about sixteen years working in these fields. Then when I came into theology, it was a natural place for me to reflect upon. There’s a lot of really interesting work going on there. So I'm encouraged for the future.

BLAIR HODGES: And your work in theology, is that rooted in your own background, your own religion? Do you find that to be a very religious pursuit?

JOHN SWINTON: Yeah well, I'm a theologian. So therefore, it's inevitably based in Christian theology. And I'm very comfortable with that, because that's the spiritual route that I've taken over the years.

You know, it's interesting thinking back because my father was a minister, he was a parish minister who moved to take up a chaplaincy position. And so all my life I've been kind of around churches, and I really find them really boring.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs]

JOHN SWINTON: Because if your father's a minister and you're forced to go to church and then you get into trouble when you come back home again, it’s not a good place to begin. So it was a slow start when it came to religion.

But when I came into my mid-20s, I began to think about it. I began to take my own tradition a lot more seriously. And so that's how I came into that.

And then when I left nursing, I just felt that moving into theology was the right thing for me to do. I think it's turned out to be the right thing for me to do.

Making time visible - 03:41

BLAIR HODGES: All right. Well, this book talks a lot about time. And I wondered, as I was reading this, I kind of got a little time obsessed.

JOHN SWINTON: [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: You walk us through the history of time, and how people thought about time, and I felt like the clock started ticking louder. I was noticing time more. Did you feel that way as you were researching time?

JOHN SWINTON: I did! Because well, time is invisible, you know? It’s like it rules our lives, but you don't really see it, you know?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

JOHN SWINTON: I mean, I open up the book by saying how many clocks I'd seen that day. And I was writing that chapter at probably half past nine in the morning. And I'd already seen about ten or twelve clocks, guiding from my bed to my car to my office at work. And so it kind of hums along under the hood.

But then when you notice it, you begin to see how unusual it is, that we are so tied to time and so tied to time’s structures and so tied to being at particular places at particular times and allowing this little clicking thing on your watch on your digital clock or whatever it is to determine pretty much every inch of your day. So when I noticed that, then that's when I became interested in time. It stopped being invisible.

BLAIR HODGES: And same as a reader, I had the same experience. Even setting up this interview, I mean, we’re in different time zones so we had to go back and forth, and I feel like I'm kind of “time zone blind” like I have difficulties reckoning with time. [laughter]

JOHN SWINTON: Exactly! And I've been useless in setting up these meetings, because although I wrote a book on time I'm chronologically challenged, [laughs] I'm constantly forgetting about things in my diary or putting them in at the wrong time, or if you if you add the added layer of complexity, putting them in at the wrong time zone!

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, even on a micro scale, because we're so far away, there's a little bit of a delay in the discussion that I'm not used to.

JOHN SWINTON: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: And so even just like in the moment—listeners won't pick up on it because the audio will be synced differently—but even in the moment for us time can make a big difference in how communication works in general.

JOHN SWINTON: It certainly makes a difference to how jokes work. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

JOHN SWINTON: If I say something clever, you don't laugh, and then you do laugh!

The mystery of time - 05:39

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah. I feel that, I feel that!

So another word that you use in your introduction for time is “mysterious.” What do you think about that: time as a mystery?

JOHN SWINTON: I think its mysterious in the sense that most of us don't really know what it is. It comes and it goes and we move in it, and we move towards whatever it is we move towards. But when you try to analyze it and break it down it becomes more complicated for the average person. I imagine if you're a clever physicist, or a really clever philosopher it is much easier to conceptualize and break it down, but for most of us, we just live there. It's just the air that we breathe.

And for most of us, we don't want to break it down. No. One of the things for modern people is the temptation that you're always trying to break down mysteries or turn them into puzzles and then solve them. But there's something quite nice about just dwelling in time and just, you know, making the best of the time that you have without trying to work out what it actually is. Because it exists in all our minds in the sense that we all know it’s happened.

You know, the older you get, the more aware you are of time, and interestingly the older you get, the faster time seems to move. I don't know whether that's just because you notice it more because you look at your face, particularly in an age of Zoom when you look at your face every day, all day—[laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! That's right.

JOHN SWINTON: —whether you're more aware of it a bit when you get older.

BLAIR HODGES: And COVID, obviously has changed time too, just the way that we experience it.

JOHN SWINTON: Oh, exactly! COVID has had an impact on time because it’s slowed us all down, but not in a positive way.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

JOHN SWINTON: You know, because if you think of it culturally—I'm saying “us” but I mean Western culture—we're very fast. We're moving towards the next thing. And you know you hardly have time to concentrate on what you're doing, because you're always thinking about the future.

But lockdown stops that, and it stops you dead. And suddenly you don't have deadlines. You don't have work to go to sometimes. And you know, within a capitalist society like our own, work is a form of spirituality, you know? If you think spirituality is these big questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going to? and why? then work fulfills all these things. So you stop that work—and that's a problem for people that are retiring as well or unemployed—you stop that, and these big questions don't have an answer. So you have an existential, spiritual crisis.

And I think a lot of people have found that with lockdown, when you're stopped and trapped, then you have these big questions. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going to and why? just rattling around in your head. Because it's not sure what that is. Other people loved it. But for some people, it's clearly a problem.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, this is a strength of theology. And this is kind of what Fireside is about, is looking at how these religious ideas actually intersect with every aspect of our lives, even people that don't necessarily consider themselves religious. And so when you talk about mystery, I think that's a strength that theology and theological thinking can bring to everyday life.

Because there's a sense of humility there, there's a sense of living in a “faithful way.” So in other words, like not seeing everything, not knowing everything, but living according to certain ideas and beliefs. And so to think about the mystery of time, I think it's a real strength of your book to bring theology into conversation with it.

A time when time was different - 08:01

BLAIR HODGES: So yeah, let's dig into it here. In chapter one, "Thinking About Time," your book, as we said, is a theological investigation. So you're looking at how beliefs about God come together with beliefs about time. We'll start by going really far back in time, even before the invention of the clock as we know it today, before what we might call “clock time.” Just give us a little description about how people lived in time, because your book shows it's pretty different than what we're used to today.

JOHN SWINTON: If you can imagine for a second a world without clocks, or global timekeeping machines. How would you work it out, how would you work out the way your day runs?

Well, you'd work it out because your day would revolve around the sun rising, it would revolve around the sun going down, and it would revolve around the seasons and the way that the days extend, or the days shrink, depending on the way that it impacts upon your farming or your hunting or whatever it is.

So you would be much more embedded in time, because time wouldn't be something that you can fragment in the way that a watch or a clock fragments it and breaks it up into minutes and hours, it would simply be there. Something that you live into.

I don't mean that necessarily in a romantic way because it'd probably be a very hard way of living, but you’d live into time in a quite different way. And you'd be much more attuned to creation and your relationship with creation. And as the seasons move, so the passage of your life moves with the seasons. But it'd be much more stable because there would be, perhaps, no long-term plans, because you wouldn't necessarily know anything beyond the hedge that marks out the end of your property or your life.

So you live in a relatively small, small world, you don't have the kind of long-term career ambitions because you're quite happy doing the things that you do and moving with the seasons. So it'd be very different way of living. It’s the kind of thing that many people would like to retire into.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! It doesn't sound too bad sometimes. But then you point out, there are some religious roots of timekeeping more formally. So like, hours and minutes, you talk about how these have religious roots with religious people starting to try to block out time.

JOHN SWINTON: Right, yeah, this is really interesting. The mechanical clock came into existence through the Benedictine monasteries. In the monasteries the day is split up into different spiritual segments. At particular moments and each day you do a particular spiritual practice, that you have to work out how to do that. You can do it with a sun dial, or you can do it with somebody who has a good memory and can kind of work out roughly how their day runs.

But the way in which they began to deal with that issue is, they developed a mechanical clock. But the original mechanical clock didn't have any hands. So it would simply chime bells at the precise moment when this particular spiritual practice had to go. So it was a handless clock that has purely spiritual intention, which was to mark out the day as a spiritual thing. And then as time moves on—[laughs] it's funny when you start speaking about time you see you’re always using language of time, you see it all over the place.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughter] I know! All the time.

JOHN SWINTON: So as time goes on the first handed clock, if you'd like, only had one hand, which just moved round and again, marking that spirituality of the day. So the key thing there is that these clocks had spiritual intention. They weren't there to make money in the way that we do, it was purely devotion to God.

But when that mechanical clock leaked out into society, as it inevitably would do, and then came into contact with the emerging economic system, the beginnings of capitalism, that that way of doing commerce, some clever people in Europe created the second hand. And so now you have time beginning to be divided up into smaller segments. And then ultimately, the third time if you like, equipped for seconds, so your minute hand and then the second hand.

And so time begins to be fragmented in that way. Now the difference between that fragmented two-handed to three-handed clock is that, it was to make money, so that the day was different, now you could be punctual for something, because you had to be at a certain place at a certain point, not for spiritual purposes, but because you needed to make money, you needed to go make this appointment. So the emergence of that clock time, that industrial time, moves out of the monastery, and then reveals itself in a different way. And what we would call nowadays, European average or average European time, or whatever it would be called—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, “Standard Average European Time,” you talk about in the book—

JOHN SWINTON: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: —and you name the characteristics there, that it's linear, you can lay it out, it’s dynamic, it's always moving, its forward-facing—time marches on, we can measure it and block it out. And that makes it sellable, that makes it marketable—

JOHN SWINTON: That's right.

BLAIR HODGES: —that makes it so we can block out our lives in particular ways. And that makes it feel—you say it makes it feel like it's also controllable, in a sense. Obviously, we can't control it in the sense of stopping it. But we can control it in the sense of how we choose to apportion it out on a smaller scale than maybe what people in the past did.

JOHN SWINTON: Yeah, I think that's right. And we do have control over time in the sense that if you're a manager, you have control over the time of your particular unit, you have control over the time of everybody that works in that unit. And so time becomes, first of all, the commodity, something that's bought and sold in the marketplace, the same as you buy and sell Corn Flakes, or Snickers bars, or whatever it is. I don't know what American people eat, but we eat Corn Flakes [laughs].

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, Snickers is good! [laughs] Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!

JOHN SWINTON: Well that's new!

BLAIR HODGES: Okay! [laughter]

JOHN SWINTON: And so its commodified now in that way, but it’s also—I mean you can't control time, but you can control time within the space that you are. But interestingly, in terms of your spiritual day, you see that the same thing moving into people's spiritualities where now you have to mark out time for spiritual practices or quiet time with God, as if these fragmented pieces of time are the only times when you can actually find space for God. And maybe they are. But that's a big difference between the way that Benedictines thought about it and the way that we think about time today.

The connection between time and disabilities - 14:51

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking with John Swinton today, he's a Scottish theologian. We're talking about his book Becoming Friends of Time: Disability Timefulness, and Gentle Discipleship. And I should mention as well, John is chair in Divinity and Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen, we're really glad to be talking about this book.

So that kind of gives us a sense of chapter one. And people can check that out. There's a lot more information there than we were able to cover here. But Chapter Two connects up with the disability questions. It begins with this line that I'll read. It says, "The connection between time and disability isn't obvious. But when we come to see it, it becomes disturbing and yet deeply enlightening."

How did you first start to even think of that connection? You mentioned you had worked with people with disabilities. Is that where?

JOHN SWINTON: It is. That's when I began to think about it. When I began working with people with intellectual disabilities the term that was used then was “mental defective.” Then a few years later it was “mental handicap.” Then a few years later, it was “learning disability,” and now it’s “intellectual disability.” All of these things shift and change, not because anything medical shifted and changed, but because our attitudes and values shift and change. So that's what made me think about it.

And then when you trace back the history of a term like handicap, you know, it comes originally from horse racing, where you would handicap, you know, put extra weights on a horse that was a bit faster than the rest of the horses just to even up the odds. But then it leaks out into society, and people try to use it, or do use it in different ways. So you’re handicapped, you’re bearing too much weight, you're slowed down, you're held back in that way, and you're defective.

Of course, this doesn't take too much imagination to work out what that means. Why are you defective? Well, you're defective because you don't have the intellect and ability to move quickly, to think quickly, to engage in the kind of industrial time that we value, historically and contemporarily.

And so the way that you named something describes what you think you're looking at. And what you think you're looking at influences how you respond to what you think you're looking at. So these names are really, really important. And it's just that tie-in with time that seemed to me, particularly important because people were speaking people disabilities into existence in a quite particular way. And that was deeply tied into time.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. So I studied at Georgetown a little bit of disability studies. And this is what scholars would call the “social construction theory of disability,” the idea that, yes, there are physiological things with disabilities, but the way that societies and people understand those disabilities is a construction, it's a creation, it's something that's imagined and formed.

And so it's interesting that you trace that language that, you know, it used to be called an affliction or thought of as an affliction. And then it started getting tied into these time concepts. And nobody, I don't think, did this deliberately, they didn't sit down and say, Alright, we need to tie this with the concept of time. It just made sense, the kind of ways they were dealing and knowing people with disabilities.

So another word that I didn't hear you mention, and I'm curious, maybe this is an American term, but retardation is another word. And...

JOHN SWINTON: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: Obviously, like to retard time is to slow it, like it's explicitly a time term that was used.

JOHN SWINTON: That is, that’s right, and it’s certainly one that’s been used in the United Kingdom and Europe. So yes. And they all have to do with pulling back, holding back, not being able to go fast enough for the way that society wants you to do.

And it's just fascinating when you when you begin to analyze that kind of language, which is the essence of what stigma is; stigma is all about placing negative language on people, and the negativity comes from culture.

And so yes, the idea of the social construction of disability is important. Think about it this way: so somebody who lives with Down Syndrome, okay? They're considered to be, or were considered to be, to have a mental handicap or a mental deficiency, or whatever it is. But what's the problem with having Down Syndrome? The answer is nothing. Unless you live in a society that values intellect, and reason, and speed, and quick thinking over relationships, community, friendship, and love.

So the problem for people with Down Syndrome is not diagnosing them. It's the context within which they’re experiencing that, and that's why if we're thinking about overcoming stigma and thinking about inclusive communities, we need to think beyond looking at the individual, look at the culture, look at the community. That's where the change needs to happen.

BLAIR HODGES: As I studied intellectual disabilities in particular, I also thought about how I like who I am and I like how I think, and so I would see someone with Down Syndrome, and you know, they're maybe not going and getting PhDs or not doing the same kinds of things I like. And so there's also kind of a comparative impulse I feel like I have where—and this is difficult to ask—basically to say, I wouldn't want to have those types of limitations or those type of—you know. What are your thoughts about that, that kind of personal discomfort that people have?

JOHN SWINTON: Well, the problem is projection. And this is why people say that people with—let’s stick with Down Syndrome—some people say that people with Down Syndrome suffer. And you think well, why do they suffer? And what happens and what you're pushing into there is, people look at somebody who's different, and say, ooh, I wouldn't like to be like that. And so therefore, you must be suffering.

But that's your problem, that’s not their problem! [laughs] Okay, you wouldn't like to be like that, because you're looking at the individual through a narrative of loss. Whereas they're looking at themselves, through their narrative of being. And so you're imagining, “if that was me, I feel like”—and you've no idea whether you would or you wouldn't like it. So that's two different stories that are clashing in there. And I think if you hold on to the narrative of being and stop pushing yourself onto other people's, then you begin to see things differently.

Humanism and the dangers of eugenics - 20:29

BLAIR HODGES: You get into some difficult conversations here in this chapter, you bring up humanism, or a really strong regard for life, valuing human life, compassion, and health and so on. And on the surface, humanism sounds like a really good thing and has many good things about it. But you also show that it can have an underside. It can actually turn into a deadly ideology as well.

You bring up, for example, eugenics and euthanasia type things.

JOHN SWINTON: Yeah, human rights and rights in general are really important. So there's no question about that. But we need that—in the kind of world that we live in we need to have strong legal structures to enable justice and fairness and peace.

However, rights can be turned on individuals. You may have the right to be protected by the law under certain circumstances, not to be discriminated against. But you may also have the right to live in a society where your condition is so stigmatized, that in principle, you have the right to approach the authorities to have your life taken away.

So take, for example, the issue of dementia in certain parts of Europe. When you have a diagnosis of dementia, you can go to your general practitioner, your family practitioner, and ask to be euthanized. And if that doctor says no, you can find another one that does it. And so eventually, you will be able to have that experience. Now why is it that people may be so terrified when they get that diagnosis? Not because of the way they're feeling, but because they project into the future, a possible future that they consider to be awful.

And so therefore, that right to do that becomes something that's profoundly important for them, but difficult for family and friends. Because this person may be just not in a situation where it's obvious that that should happen.

And so, there's some really interesting research just now on it, sticking with that issue, on the impact of euthanasia on doctors. There seems to be some evidence that doctors are encountering post-traumatic stress disorder, or probably moral injury I suspect, because that's not what doctors do, that's not what they’re trained to do, and yet they have to do this in a clinical context. And there's a price to be paid for that.

So the clash of rights is something that we always need to keep an eye on, without in any sense saying rights are not important. They are important. But you also have to be careful and hold them in tension with responsibilities.

BLAIR HODGES: You quote a number of thinkers and scientists here who have actually advocated perhaps for basically killing people with disabilities, or rooting disabilities out of human existence.

For example, I've got a quote here from Mary Warnock. This is some of the most highly controversial stuff. I don't think this is representative of a lot of people. But this is something that we need to grapple with when we're thinking of things like euthanasia and other things.

She said, "If you're demented", or you know, disabled mentally, or whatever, she says, "you're wasting people's lives, you're wasting your family's lives, you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service." And she suggested that people with dementia, for example, should perhaps be encouraged to take their own lives.

She's not alone in that, we have Richard Dawkins, who is another scientist who would say, you know, if someone became pregnant with a baby who had Down Syndrome, he, he said, "Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice."

I want to hear your thoughts about these thinkers. When you hear those quotes, what happens?

JOHN SWINTON: Well, it's actually not as uncommon a sentiment as you might think. And the underlying problem for both of these people—although with Richard Dawkins it's difficult to have a moral argument if life is meaningless and we're just simply the product of our genes. So I'm not quite sure what we would mean by morality in the midst of that. But for both of them, they have an understanding of personhood in a quite particular way. And it's that you can separate personhood from humanness.

And so for Mary Warnock—and at the end of that interview, she says, well, if I ever get dementia, I want somebody to take my life, because I won't be the person that I was. Now, there's a couple of things in there.

First of all, they work with the concept of personhood as separate from humanness, which means that personhood is defined by a series of moral qualities and capacities that mean that you are valid as a person. So that may be rationality, it may be choice, it may be creativity. There's all sorts of ways in which people frame it. If you don't have these, or cease to have these qualities, you're no longer a person. If you're no longer person, you no longer fall under the moral protection of personhood. So therefore, all of these things can happen to you, without anybody being particularly morally upset.

And you're right, it sounds extreme. But if you think about just sticking with the issue of dementia, the kind of language people use around dementia—he or she is not the person she used to be. Or, I'd rather remember them as a person they were. But who are they, if they're not the person they used to be then who are they and why would you love them?

Whilst it's not as extreme as these people, it's the same sentiments, because implicitly we have a similar model of personhood that runs through society.

Most people wouldn't take that to the extreme of, “therefore, we will kill somebody.” But that general sense that you have to do something and remember things, or to be something in order to be a person is something that we unconsciously just very often buy into. And so I think it's important to watch the way you speak, and be aware of the language that you use around these kinds of issues.

BLAIR HODGES: And this is why people with disabilities, disability communities, are often very opposed to things like euthanasia, because they worry about the risks where other people would be making decisions to end life of people who are assumed to either be worthless or too big of a burden, or that their existence is—would be miserable, or whatever these things are.

And I used to feel...It's confession time, right? [laughs] Here's a confession.

JOHN SWINTON: [laughs] Bless you, my son.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, thank you! I used to feel pretty confident that I value human life and I was uncomfortable with the idea of euthanasia because it would disproportionately affect people with disabilities. It could be used to basically do our own eugenics thing of trying to perfect the human race and so on and so forth.

But then I had a personal experience with my mother-in-law who had Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS, and watching her body deteriorate over the course of two years, was excruciating. And we knew, I mean, it was terminal, there was no way she would survive, we knew that. And we also knew the end could be quite grim. That she would effectively suffocate to death eventually. And it got to the point where she couldn't move anything. She couldn't move her body, she couldn't do anything. She was fully paralyzed and to her, she had lived a life where she hadn't been like that, so she wasn't used to it. And she felt trapped. It was really difficult to watch.

And I have to admit that at that time, I wondered, why not, in certain instances, allow people to have that choice of saying, “I'm in so much pain and I'm ready”? I'd like to hear your thoughts about that. Your candid thoughts.

JOHN SWINTON: I think it's a really difficult situation. But one of the challenges is that medicine can keep people alive in a way they never have done in the past, so that you've got an ongoing ethical conversation about what that means.

And so I think, you know, I don't have an opinion on your mother-in-law's situation, because I don't know that situation. But I do know that severe and horrible as that situation is—like, clearly, obviously, is—it's not necessarily people who are at that end of suffering that a lot of the arguments end up falling upon.

So there's a broad range of conditions that come under the conversation about euthanasia. And I always think there's a danger in having the moral conversation, I think of it, simply looking at one extreme—and I don't mean extreme in the sense that it's not important, or atypical because it is typical for many people—but I think it's important to keep the discussion as a whole, looking across the board, at the way in which people encounter suffering, the way in which people deal with suffering, and what our responses should be.

So my heart goes out to you in relation to that situation and other people. And I think it's an ongoing conversation in relation to what the boundaries of medicine are in the context of that kind of extreme suffering.

BLAIR HODGES: What I realized was just how rapidly personal it can all become. Because I had been studying disabilities for a while and had really felt, you know, really strong feelings about opposing things like euthanasia for the sake of protecting people with disabilities, and then seeing my mother-in-law go through that, having a personal direct experience with her, really challenged what I felt about it. And you bring up a similar thing in the book with Charles Darwin.

JOHN SWINTON: Well, there's two people that I raised in relation to that, both Charles Darwin and Peter Singer. Charles Darwin, if you read any of his early work, is pretty scathing when it comes to the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. He calls them subhuman, he calls them all sorts of things. And clearly, he sees them as further down the evolutionary chain. And indeed, there's points when he seems to point to other races that are reminding him of these other races that are supposedly further down the evolutionary chain, along with people with intellectual disabilities.

But then it turns out, it seems, that he had a child—Giddums as he used to call him—who had Down Syndrome or some kind of intellectual disability. And he loved that kid. And he played with him, and he called him, like I said, Giddums, he had this beautiful relationship with him.

So at one level when he's writing in this professional capacity, he needs to use—he actually has to use people with intellectual disabilities to try and make the points in relation to his theories. But in his own life, he loves this guy. And so that tension is there.

You see the same tension in the life of Peter Singer. So Peter Singer is notorious for his opinions on ending the lives of people with disabilities. His book Practical Ethics lays it all out very clearly. For example, parents should have twenty days after the birth of the disabled child to make a decision whether they want to keep it alive or not. And if they decide not, then the doctor should take the child's life. He says the same thing about people living with Alzheimer's disease. So it's a very hardline utilitarian argument. And yet when his mother had Alzheimer's disease, he put her in a really expensive care home.

And so the tension there is when it hits home for you it's not the same. And he said this himself, he says it's different when it’s you. And it is all of these—an ethical argument is an ethical argument until it becomes part of your life and then it becomes something completely different.

Practical everyday theology - 31:16

BLAIR HODGES: That's John Swinton. He's a Scottish theologian and Chair in Divinity and Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen. We're talking about his book Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefulness, and Gentle Discipleship.

So John, in the next parts of the book, you build a practical theology of time. And just to take a second to define that, practical theology to me just seems to be theology that applies to everyday life. It's not these high intellectual concepts. It's not parsing out little bits of intellectual doctrine or whatever, but it's a theology that has to be practical and applied to everyday life. Is that a fair description? How would you describe practical theology?

JOHN SWINTON: Yeah, that's not a bad description at all. The way I look at it is that practical theology looks at the interface between what we believe and what we live. So it lives in that cultural space between belief and experience. And to some extent, ask the question, so what?

So you have this wonderful theological structure here, which tells you lots of intellectual things about God. And then what does that mean for the people of God today? Because God's working today, because God's doing things today. How do we understand that doctrinal structure in relation to what's going on today?

So “so what?” doesn't mean I discount theoretical concepts—in fact quite the opposite! I'm very keen on them. But I always think if you're going to talk about the revelation of God, it's not just a historical thing. It is a historical thing. But it’s also a contemporary thing. And practical theology moves between that historical theology and contemporary experience with a view to try to discover what God's about at this moment in time.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, so I guess even what I was sort of calling that high-falutin’ theology could be practical theology, when you ask that additional question of “so what.” So you might have some particular view of say, how God created humans or something, and it could be very intellectual and very high concept, but if it has practical implications for like, how you live every day, or what you do, I guess, then yeah, then even that high up there stuff could be pretty practical theology then.

JOHN SWINTON: It can be. And I think one of the problems with the academy is it tends to split us all up, you know, so you have systematic theologians, historical theologians, biblical scholars—and I actually think the only way we can do things well, it's by dialoguing together, by being theologians together, rather than split.

And so there's, I think, there's lots of good things happening in the academy, but that split within theology isn't healthy.

The tree-mile-an-hour God - 33:35

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so with that in mind, then, you're going to talk about a theology of time that includes people with disabilities. And you introduce us to a book by a theologian named Kosuke Koyama, who wrote about the three-mile-an-hour god.

JOHN SWINTON: There's a very interesting book by Levine called The Geography of Time. And he points out that, across cultures, people understand time differently. So people walk faster in Manhattan than they do in Guatemala, because it's a different culture, like people are functioning differently going to different places for different reasons. And so the space that you inhabit in the world actually determines the way that you use time. So geography is important for understanding time.

Well Koyama, long before that book was written, he wrote this back in the Sixties, wrote a book called Three Mile an Hour God. And then there's an essay called “The Three Mile an Hour God”. So he says, Jesus walked at three miles an hour. So Jesus, who is God, walks at three miles per hour. Jesus, who is God, who is love, walks at three miles per hour. So love has its speed. And it's a slow speed. There's something very powerful about that. Love has its speed. And it's slow. And so he urges us to take up the time of Jesus, really, and walk in rhythm with Jesus, and see what that looks like.

BLAIR HODGES: And how do you tie that in then to people with disabilities?

JOHN SWINTON: Well, because if you've ever spent any time with somebody with a profound intellectual disability, or somebody with advanced dementia, then you know that you can't go quickly, you need to slow down, and you need to take time for those things that the time of the world just can't even see. You need to slow down and find that space to be with somebody. And so you don't have any choice. In a world that passes people by, somebody needs to slow down and spend time with those who God adores in that sense.

And when you do that, interesting things happen. If you've ever spent time with somebody living with advanced dementia, sometimes there are just moments when you come together and recognize one another in a way that you hadn't done at any other point of view.

Within the Christian tradition is a spirituality called the sacrament of the present moment, that idea that you slow down and just begin to follow your breath and recognize that every breath is a gift, and you begin to live a life of gratitude. When you do that there, you see these things. If you're moving too quickly, you miss them. But if you're moving slowly, then you begin to see things you can't see a faster speed.

BLAIR HODGES: And this is where the title of the book Becoming Friends of Time is from. To think of time as something relational like that is really interesting. You introduce us to a British practical theologian named John Hull. And in his fifties, he lost his sight because of a progressive disease. And you talk about how his actual perception of time changed with this new disability. He felt like time just expanded. He felt like time sort of—He could be more present to it.

I have a quote here from him. He says, "Most forms of disability mean that many things in life must be done slower. Things take more time. But it's not the things that take the time. It's our bodies that take the time, and the time that takes our bodies. Thus, time for the disabled person is neither long nor short. Doing this particular job takes me longer than it takes you. However, if I do not compare myself with you, but just concentrate on the task, then I'm not impatient because I know that this is just how long the task takes."

So this is a person—and you describe several people, you introduce us to a lot of people in this book who experienced a change in ability in their lives. And it seems like so many of them have that realization of how time itself changed for them. Becoming friends with time meant to become patient with it, and to become acquainted with it in the same way that an eternal God would do that in becoming embodied and walking on a dusty Palestinian road.

JOHN SWINTON: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I mean, so one of the interesting things for John Hull is when he lost his sight, he began to realize just how much sighted people colonized the world. And what he means is that you always assume that the only way you can see the world is by looking at it. And so as soon as somebody has a visual impairment, the natural thing to do is try to fix it in that way. That was how he felt that he first became blind.

But then he says, once I began to see things differently, I began to see that this world of blindness is different. And so my hands are different. I used to just use them to pick up things, I've never used them to feel the face of my children, to be able to work out what they look like when I can't see them. Sounds are different. Everything's different. And within that context, time is different. Because you're not looking at your watch. It's not a visual thing. It may be a tactile thing if you have a Braille watch. But even the tactile movement of time is different because, you know, to touch something's not the same as to look. To look at it, you don't really have to do anything. To touch it, you have to intentionally reach out and engage with that watch or that clock, or whatever it is in a way that is different. And so your whole body comes into play for the simplest things of the world.

And I think he's saying that, just let time take time, and you'll begin to feel the world is different.

Resisting making object lessons out of people - 38:55

BLAIR HODGES: And as you have worked with people with disabilities and communities of people with disabilities, including some profound intellectual disabilities, in the book you talk about things you have become more acquainted with in those relationships, aspects of your discipleship like gentleness and rest and resistance to rushing, resistance to the kind of capitalist sort of utilitarian views of people. Like, is this person useful, or not? And are they useful to me or not? Or you know, these types of things, you spend a lot of time with that.

I also just wanted to hear your thoughts about how it's important not to turn people with disabilities into just simple object lessons, or to sort of pedestalize or romanticize what they experience.

JOHN SWINTON: I think crucially important, because it's not like I hang around with people with disabilities so that I can learn things and I can be transformed. That does happen. But then, that happens with everybody, any relationship’s the same. I mean, I'm having a conversation with you, and I'm being transformed by the things that you're saying.

The way I try to think about it is, the thing that marks the body of Christ is diversity, not uniformity. And so the idea of normalization, or even the idea of what is normal seems to me to be completely transformed by thinking about what Paul means about the body of Christ. Because there is no norm apart from Jesus. Jesus is the only norm that we aspire to, in that sense.

And so with the diversity of experiences that go on within the body of Christ, we're supposed to be listening to each of them. And if we don't listen to each of them, then we don't learn.

You know, we sometimes ask the question, “what does it mean to be human?” as if there's just one picture over there that you could look at and say, that's what it is. But actually, being human is a wide range of possibilities.

One of the things that we learn when we're together, in all of our diversity, is how to be human. And to be human is to be together. It's not just simply a concept or a set of capacities. It's a community in that way. That's why I think the idea of instrumentalizing people so that you can get your fix of, you know, humility, or gentleness, or whatever it is, is wrong. What we're saying is, that that's part of who we are, but we just have to learn that from one another.

Tonya’s acquired brain injury and the funeral - 41:08

BLAIR HODGES: I love hearing you talk about that vision, the body of Christ and all the diverse members. I share it, I share that with you. But your book doesn't just—again—it doesn't fall back into cheap romanticization, it's not just like a beautiful vision. You also engage with what you call in one of the chapters, “the horror of time,” some of the real, real difficulties that don't seem to be resolved in this life; that don't seem to be—you know, people can feel estranged from God through some of these things, seeing or witnessing suffering or experiencing suffering.

And your book spends some time on acquired brain damage, for example. So people that have had traumatic brain injuries or something that actually changes their personalities. And you introduced us to one woman who held her own funeral as a result of something like this.

JOHN SWINTON: She did.

BLAIR HODGES: Most people don't get a hold their own funerals. Maybe describe what happened there.

JOHN SWINTON: No [laughs], most people don't. Well, that's Tonya Whaley, a colleague who wrote that chapter with me on acquired brain damage. And she had a car accident a few years ago and got some quite significant permanent brain damage. Which meant, for example, that certain colors, or smells, or tastes or things, she no longer had. So, you know, sometimes you think of brain damage as simply making a different person. And in some ways, that's true. But it's sometimes it’s just small things as well as big things.

Through this accident she changed quite significantly in her own eyes and the eyes of her friends. And the way that she dealt with this was, well, she went through quite a lot of therapy to deal with some of the psychological aspects of the change. And that's absolutely as it should be.

But at one point in her journey, she and her congregation, her church community, got together beside a river. And each person had a handful of rose petals. And they all stood there. And they began to tell stories about Tonya. And so Tonya would tell stories about herself in the now and in the past. Her friends would tell stories about her in the now and in the past, this beautiful narrative picture of how she was, how she is, and hopefully how she will be.

And so once that had finished and that kind of ritual had past, everybody dropped their petals into the water, and the stream washed them away. And that symbolized a new life, which was different from the old life, but not necessarily worse from the old life. And so that ritual, much like a funeral ritual, it's a rite of passage to move you from one way of being in the world to another way of being in the world. Or one way when you were in the world to a time when you're no longer in the world. It's like that movement there they've captured.

And I thought that was nice. Just a nice way of recognizing things change. But we're with you.

BLAIR HODGES: And they can build a relationship with this person as they are, and also mourn the loss of a person that they were. It doesn't have to be either or.

JOHN SWINTON:  Yeah.

Adjusting religious perspectives  - 44:08

BLAIR HODGES: I wonder, as a religious person, in this book, you don't shy away from critiquing your own tradition here. Has engaging with these ideas challenged your faith at all?

JOHN SWINTON: No, it's deepened my faith, it hasn't challenged my faith in the sense—

Well, you know, sometimes we think that faith is an intellectual feat, you know, something you've got to learn lots of things and think lots of things and be able to recite certain of things, and these are all helpful things. But the Letter to the Hebrews says, the faith is being sure of what you hope for certain of what you cannot see.

And when you are with people who have acquired brain damage, or people that have profound intellectual disabilities, people with dementia, or people with dementia, you've got to be sure of what you hope for and certain of what you cannot see. You've got to give people that faith in that sense.

And so by realizing that within myself, that my concept of faith was limited—not necessarily wrong, but definitely limited. And to see it embodied in my work, in my writing, in my thinking, and in my experiences with my friends, it shifted my faith to, I guess, probably, it's more embodied, it's more real, it's more open to intellectual humility whereby I recognize there's some things I just don't know. And that comes to my relationships, it comes to what I know about God, it comes to what I know about faith. And I'm comfortable with that. Because to be humble with your intellect is to avoid the tree of knowledge.

BLAIR HODGES: I can certainly relate to that. And as you critique Christianity in this book, what's an example of a common Christian understanding of disability that you'd like to challenge and perhaps see change in people's minds?

JOHN SWINTON: Well I don't so much critique Christianity, I just critique particular ways of thinking about how we come to know Jesus. And the problem is, if we are completely focused in on, you have to know certain things, and you have to be able to articulate certain things about the faith before you can be part of the faith, then you automatically exclude not only a lot of people with brain damage and intellectual disabilities, but also anybody who forgets things.

So you, Blair, could be a disciple at the top of the stairs, you tumble down and by the time you get to the bottom and you're brain damaged and you can't remember anything and you can't say the things that your tradition wants you to say, you are no longer a said disciple. So that seems to me to make very little sense. I hope that God doesn't function that way. I don't have any indication that that would be the case.

And so beginning to think about the importance of tradition, the importance of beliefs, the importance of intellect, but also recognizing that, actually, faith is more embodied in that sense. Bonhoeffer says this quite nicely. Bonhoeffer says that when Matthew is called by Jesus, he didn't know who Jesus was. He says, you could imagine that he'd heard the stories, or he actually did know because his friends had told him. But before you can say that, you have to go beyond the text. The text doesn't say that. So Bonhoeffer says, Jesus called, Matthew followed.

And the interesting thing about Matthew and all disciples is that all the way through their ministry, they didn't really know who Jesus was, but they were still called disciples. And so the idea that you're gonna have problems cognating certain things doesn't necessarily prevent you from being a disciple. No, love is an embodied emotion. It's a feeling, it's part of a community. It's quite possible to communicate love without having to actually articulate it.

So that expands my imagination a bit in a way that helps me to understand God more fully, but also to understand how I should be with my brother and sister who live with disabilities.

Becoming more timefull - 47:51

BLAIR HODGES: I hope that people as they listen to this discussion, or as they read the book, can come to feel a little more aware of that pressure of time, and how time affects how we think about people with disabilities and how we think about disabilities itself.

I think this is an invaluable aspect of the work that you're doing, is to call our attention to how time, and our expectations of time, lead us to value things in certain ways. I mentioned my mother-in-law, one of the things that was difficult for her as she was dying was that she felt she had lost all of her usefulness. Like, being able to do stuff was so important to her that losing those abilities was excruciating. Where I regretted so much this sense of her feeling like she was a burden on us or that it was such a problem. I wish she never had to go through those things to begin with, obviously. But I also wish she didn't have to worry about that sense of uselessness.

And your work on time, I think, can take us a long way toward seeing time a different way. You're inviting us to engage in timefullness, time-fullness, do you have any practical advice for people about how to be a little more timefull?

JOHN SWINTON: Many of us work in a kind of highly pressured work environment, for example. And the question is, how do we do it. I mean, it's very interesting, because in some of the research we do on health and social care, you'll go along to an institution or a care home and we'll talk about spirituality a little bit and everybody will say so yeah, it’s fantastic. It's a really important thing. And some people will say it's the essence of what a human being is. And then you talk about the practicality and they say we haven't got time to do it. And so if you haven't got time to do something that's the essence of human beings, then you have a problem, a structural problem with the way things are.

Now, how do you deal with that? Well, I always think, you know, when the people of Israel were being oppressed and definitely being put under time poverty, when they're going through all that suffering, one of the things that God gave to them was Sabbath. Which is a bit of an unusual thing, because you expect him to send in angels or send them warriors, but he gives them Sabbath. He says, take this space, and think about me. And there's something really profound about that as well. Take that space and think about me.

So I want to think that one way to become timeful people in a busy environment is by thinking about creating Sabbath moments in the midst of the busyness of our day, where we just take the space and think about me. Which means stepping out for a few seconds, thinking about what you're doing, and then stepping back in with fresh eyes. It doesn't take a lot of time, and there's some interesting research done on what's called “micro breaks,” which indicates that if people are working in a pressured environment, just get two or three minutes from time to time to step out then step back in, they're actually more productive. And but they definitely see things better.

Getting into that habit of finding Sabbath moments—just times when you can step back, breathe, step back in. Now, you can do that in a highly pressurized environment, but it's probably a good practice for all of us to do, just when we get so immersed in things, whenever we’re just humming along under the hood, we can't see things properly. Step back out, step back in.

BLAIR HODGES: That's John Swinton, a Scottish theologian and author of the book Becoming Friends of Time, Disability Timefulness, and Gentle Discipleship, and he's Chair of Divinity and Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

Alright, John, we're going to take a brief break and come back for our final question. It's going to be our best book segment. I hope you brought something good for people so we will be right back after this.

[BREAK - 51:25]

Best Books - 55:42

BLAIR HODGES: We're back with John Swinton, author of the book Becoming Friends of Time: Disability Timefulness, and Gentle Discipleship.

Okay, John, we're gonna turn the time over to you. It is best books time, what did you bring for us?

JOHN SWINTON: Well, one of my favorite books recently has been a book called The Crucifixion, by Fleming Rutledge. It's just a fascinating exposition and exploration into the meaning of the crucifixion, both in terms of its historicity, but also in terms of what it means for us today.

She's a preacher, and so she spent all of her life preaching and teaching, and it's a huge book, it's a big book, it must be about six hundred pages or something. And it's just the fruits of a lifetime lived preaching the gospel. But it's not like a big, thick academic book that, you know, you get into four pages and you think, oh, I can't be bothered! [laughter] It's actually it's actually quite riveting. It'll take you a little while to get through it, but it's great. And it's one of these books I like as it's thick with knowledge, but also thick with contemplation, and you feel you're a better person for reading it. So that's, that's my book of the moment.

BLAIR HODGES: Cool. Well, John, is there anything that you're working on now? We're a few years removed, I should—I want people to know, too, we actually met once and I don't—I'm sure you don't remember this either, but we were at a conference on disability and religion—

JOHN SWINTON: I do remember.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you do? You signed it! And I told you back then, I was like, I'm gonna interview you someday. And it's been like five years or something.

JOHN SWINTON: [laughs] There you go! It takes time. Good things take time.

BLAIR HODGES: Time takes time. Yeah.

JOHN SWINTON: [laughs] Time takes time.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, what are you working on now? What are you up to?

JOHN SWINTON: Well, I just had a book out last year, called Finding Jesus in The Storm, which is focusing on the spiritual experience of people with mental health challenges. That was very interesting. It’s based on a series of sixty-odd interviews I did with people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. So that that's been out, and it seems to be helping people.

I just finished a book roughly titled, A Little Book on Evil and How to Avoid It. Years ago I wrote a book on evil, and I felt I still had some things to say. And now I wish I hadn't because evil's really depressing [laughs]. Never write a book on evil! I don't know why I'm surprised. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I mean, like you wrote a book on time and time started closing in on you. Then you wrote a book on evil and... [laughter]

JOHN SWINTON: Surprise, surprise.

BLAIR HODGES: Cool.

JOHN SWINTON: So I'm just finishing that off just now and we'll see how that goes.

BLAIR HODGES: Good. Well, I look forward to it. John, I want to thank you for coming on Fireside. This has been a really great conversation.

JOHN SWINTON: Well it's a pleasure. It's been really nice to see you again.

Outro - 58:13

BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.

I hope you enjoyed this discussion today, thanks for being here at Fireside. This is a bring your own refreshments situation, but you're welcome to continue the conversation online. You can join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. And I’m on Facebook too. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. If you don’t know where to review the show, Apple Podcasts is the main place, but you can always just click on an episode on the website and scroll down past the transcript—a full written transcript of each episode, by the way—and you’ll see the comment section there. And as I mentioned earlier Spotify listeners can rate shows too, so you can do that there! You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions to blair@firesidepod.org. That is the address.

If you've recommended this show to a friend, I want to say thanks, sincerely, because that's how we grow this audience together. Tell your mom, tell your dad that this show is super rad.

Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistant, Kate Davis who created the transcript. And also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, Caroline Kline, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges as usual.

Our theme music is by Faded Paper Figures. Thanks for joining me at Fireside with Blair Hodges. It's a place to fan the flames of our curiosity about life, faith, and culture together. See you next time.

[End]

NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.