“We don’t think our way into new ways of acting; we act our way into new ways of thinking.” – Harold Wilke (1914-2003)
Two years ago when Jo Ackerman was an E.L.M. student, the Friend church paid her way to General Synod. Recently, she said that the awards luncheon for outstanding persons with disabilities made a significant influence upon her own ministry.
“All those other people with disabilities far worse than mine who were doing it. I remembered that as I mustered the courage to go for a church position,” Jo said. “If they were doing it, certainly I could give it a try.” Jo serves our church at Clay Center and has become a mentor herself.
Mentors come in many forms. There are planned mentors, those of confirmands, older marrieds with younger marrieds, and mentors for students of reading or math. There is also the accidental wisdom of one person with a disability modeling hope for another to follow the calling. These mentors rise from the reading of a United Church News article written by a person with a disability who lives across the country.
Mentors come from this column. They come as two clergy members of our Disabilities Ministries Task Force. The persistence of the Rev. Jeanne Tyler and the quiet and understanding of the Rev. Nancy Erickson inform all around them about hope.
Mentors come as we need their wisdom, yet none is accidental. They are given. They dawn on us years after a chance meeting. Throughout my first months at the Chicago Theological Seminary, no longer able to read print and wondering if I were foolish to follow the calling of my heart, I summoned the words of the seminary staff person sent to interview me at college. By chance, he also lived with serious visual difficulties. His confident attitude intimated that I would find my way.
The following year, a minister named Harold Wilke visited the seminary dining room and sat at a nearby table. Slipping his foot out of his loafer, he began to eat. I was as fascinated with a sock that had toes in it as with his agility in managing both silverware and coffee cup. I had not noticed that he was without arms.
After that only encounter, Dr. Wilke has remained a source of wisdom in my ministry. As additional physical difficulties develop, it is he who comes to mind as encouraging presence. Many readers knew him as the minister who offered the blessing at the signing into law of the American Disabilities Act of 1990. I learned from him that wholeness has little to do with the body.
Reading the Signs is a can-do forum about accessibility for the whole church family edited by the Rev. Dee Brauninger, First Congregational UCC, Friend, Nebraska
