John Anthony Dunne: Dr. Patton. Thanks so much for joining us.
Kirk Patston: Oh, thanks for having me.
John Anthony Dunne: So as we are wrapping up this series on disability and theology, we're really excited to talk about your work on Job, and especially what you're doing with our place Christian communities, wondering, though, as we kind of begin this conversation here, if you could tell us a little bit about what got you interested in disability studies more broadly.
Kirk Patston: I I feel like you couldn't tell the story of my life almost in terms of
Kirk Patston: significant interactions with people living with disability. So
Kirk Patston: My father's mother had had several strokes, and so my memories of her
Kirk Patston: is that she needed help to walk, and she couldn't talk.
Kirk Patston: So there was this sort of silent grandmother in my life, and then she'd often be in and out of hospital, and with a tube in her nose for feeding her.
Kirk Patston: and that really
Kirk Patston: worried me and intrigued me as a young kid.
Kirk Patston: I went on to study speech pathology, which sort of took me into the world of people with
Kirk Patston: strokes and head injuries and hearing impairment, and so on.
Kirk Patston: which I enjoyed. I enjoy that area to work in.
Kirk Patston: and and often I would be thinking, as as I came to understand the complexities of
Kirk Patston: our brain and language, and all the ways in which that could break down, i'd often find myself a church thinking. Gosh, we've just done a very.
Kirk Patston: you know, a highly literate, highly verbal
event.
Kirk Patston: How would I access this if you know something was going on for me with a communication impairment that I was learning about in my studies.
Kirk Patston: So that was just sort of a question that would often sit with me.
Kirk Patston: Anyway. The years went by. My wife and I studied theology. We went into Presbyterian ministry in New South Wales, in Australia.
Kirk Patston: and then our first son was born.
Kirk Patston: and he wasn't quite right
Kirk Patston: and in terms of development, and he
Kirk Patston: it was very difficult for him to sleep, and he wasn't quite meeting his developmental milestones.
Kirk Patston: and it was interesting for me I so if I knew bits and pieces about child development, but I could.
Kirk Patston: I kept rationalizing all he's been sick, or he's. He's just not well today. This, that's why he's not doing this or whatever. Then at 9 months he started having strange jerking movements.
Kirk Patston: and it took us. It's a quite a complex story, but eventually we ended up in hospital, where we we can still remember a doctor saying in the casualty room, Well, at least he can still see.
Kirk Patston: And we thought.
Kirk Patston: Oh, gosh! There's something
Kirk Patston: quite serious going on here. And then then began several years of our lives of living with a young man
Kirk Patston: who regress developmentally
was having uncontrolled epilepsy.
Kirk Patston: You couldn't set up
Kirk Patston: couldn't make eye contact.
Kirk Patston: He would only sleep in 40 min patches.
Kirk Patston: So our life became highly chaotic
Kirk Patston: and difficult, and
Kirk Patston: we realized we couldn't sustain the
Kirk Patston: the demands of parish ministry very easily, with all that was going on in our lives.
Kirk Patston: and I had done a time bit of teaching at Bible College sort of prior to that, and
Kirk Patston: that seemed.
Kirk Patston: and a good pathway for us to head towards. So
they now began to
Kirk Patston: what's been about a 20 a bit over 20 years of teaching at Sydney Missionary
Kirk Patston: and Babo College.
Kirk Patston: as the I did a master's degree where I looked at Isaiah and mission working in a mission college, and
Kirk Patston: we're also thinking ourselves of where the Cross cultural mission could be a possibility. We decided in the end with Jere. It was too complicated for us, given for the medical help that he needs needed.
Kirk Patston: Anyway, I I was lecturing in wisdom, literature.
Kirk Patston: thinking about all these lived experience, my wife, Lisa. So deaconess, worked for the church. But again, with with all that's going on with Jere. She's taken on a
Kirk Patston: a sort of a simpler.
Kirk Patston: more containable job, but she is working
Kirk Patston: at the moment in education, support supporting people with learning
Kirk Patston: difficulties. So for both of us we're always aware that there are people out there in the world.
Kirk Patston: So who.
Kirk Patston: processing language and meaning and thought is not straightforward. And
Kirk Patston: so
Kirk Patston: and in it was I. I can recall. Back in 2,007 I went to society political literature meeting in San Diego.
Kirk Patston: and it was my that was the moment when, even though I read some books on disability theology, I actually got to sit in a room with disability theologians.
Kirk Patston: and heard the things that they were discussing.
Kirk Patston: and had a sense.
Kirk Patston: almost a sense of vocation, just praying with the law.
Kirk Patston: After some of those sessions
Kirk Patston: thinking Well, if a speech pathologist who's the father of a young man with intellectual impairment and autism
Kirk Patston: needs an area
Kirk Patston: to you know, do theology in.
Kirk Patston: Surely it's disability.
Kirk Patston: And so and I
Kirk Patston: a little bit selfishly. Perhaps I would be thinking about Gerald's future
Kirk Patston: and our experiences of church and community, and so on. And I think you know what we need. A generation
Kirk Patston: of church ladies and missionaries
Kirk Patston: who are switched on around the issues of disability.
Kirk Patston: How can I contribute to that project.
Kirk Patston: Well, given that I'm teaching in a seminary or theological college.
Kirk Patston: If I get
Kirk Patston: the appropriate qualifications in that area and start teaching in that
Kirk Patston: that will be a significant contribution.
Kirk Patston: And so that's what led you to doing. Your doctoral studies. That's right. Yes. So then I through the University of Sydney. I
Kirk Patston: started studying the book of Joe about reading it through the lens well through the lens of Disability studies. But then I added a slightly different lens, the lens of otherness so working within the social model
a disability.
Yeah.
Steph Judd: Something that
Steph Judd: you it
Steph Judd: Sorry i'm. I'm just trying to.
Steph Judd: I I'd love to have like a broader, broad question about like sketching out. How like that the framework that you start with in terms of
Steph Judd: how I know that in the slides you sent through. You talk about how disability is understood in the Hebrew Bible more generally so. I might just. I just might just love a general question about that.
Steph Judd: So in in your doctoral work you you looked more generally at how disability is conceived of in the Hebrew Bible, and then zoom in on the book of Joe. Can you sketch out for us what are some handholds for? How the he would Bible understands disability, particularly with reference to otherness
Kirk Patston: sure. So
Kirk Patston: I was keen to work in the Book of Job, because I just
Kirk Patston: sense that there would be something going on there that would be relevant to the experience of disability. But I
Kirk Patston: I gave myself the question, Can I
Kirk Patston: proving that
Kirk Patston: you can? Yeah, can I prove that
Kirk Patston: the man job is disabled.
Kirk Patston: and that's quite a complex question. And
Kirk Patston: I
Kirk Patston: I I really don't like studies where you take an ancient text and try to read back into it some sort of contemporary
Kirk Patston: diagnosis. I feel like that sort of admit that's a methodological
Kirk Patston: mismatch that may not lead to good results. So, not respecting the text on the same terms. And so I thought, what what is going on with Joe?
Kirk Patston: Well, yes, he's there's something going wrong with his skin, whatever exactly the language and imagery means that does seem to be emotional to stress going on. So I could argue for some sort of physical
Kirk Patston: impairment, perhaps, or for some sort of
Kirk Patston: mental health challenge.
Kirk Patston: But I thought, what's the clearest thing is the breakdown in Job's place in society that's crystal clear and the breakdown of his friendship, the the difficulties between himself and his wife, the breakdown, or at least get the the
Kirk Patston: the complexity and the attention that J. Is feeling in terms of his relationship with God.
Kirk Patston: So I thought, okay, that's that's where I've got the clear material
Kirk Patston: also. Then, as I. So that made me think, okay, I've got to stay with.
Kirk Patston: I've got a conceive of disability in social terms, and of course i'm i'm i'm aware I think you've been talking to others down the path about medical and
Kirk Patston: social and cultural and different definitions of disability. So so working within that social
Kirk Patston: framework.
Kirk Patston: also looking at other people's work on disability in the Hebrew Bible. It's just good to realize that different cultures create
Kirk Patston: different polarities of thought. So in the Hebrew Bible, for instance, it seems that
Kirk Patston: we've got this language of blemished or unblemished.
Kirk Patston: and we've got the language of clean and unclean. But it seems
Kirk Patston: you've got to say there's a completely different conceptual system going on there, and you can take these little cheat chinks in that when you try to say, okay, blemish person has an impairment and is therefore disabled, but it doesn't completely work. For instance.
Kirk Patston: it seems that you can be hearing impaired, but not blemished in the Hebrew Bible, and it seems to this, even if you get a condition on your skin that that leads to variation in skin color. That's a blemish
Kirk Patston: that should the disease take over such that your whole arm is
Kirk Patston: the one color.
Kirk Patston: then it's not a blemish. So the categories of thought are different from our
Kirk Patston: medical ones.
Kirk Patston: and of course, at coming out of.
Kirk Patston: you know, post enlightenment, scientific method, and so on.
Kirk Patston: We've got this very medical lens that we bring to our bodies and our experience of our bodies, and so we'll be talking about whether or not we're diseased or not, disease, and so on.
Kirk Patston: And then in disability we tend to use categories of independent. You know that often the
Kirk Patston: the variable against which we're assessing people is, how dependent or independent are they
Kirk Patston: which again sits within
Kirk Patston: a world view in terms of the autonomous, that the autonomous individual is our reference point, which I don't think is the reference point
Kirk Patston: of the Hebrew Bible.
Kirk Patston: So just that sort of whatever track I went down. I think
Kirk Patston: I can't simply impose the category. The modern.
Kirk Patston: you know, category of disability onto the Book of Jove. That's not going to work easily.
Kirk Patston: But is there a category?
Kirk Patston: And so I did sort of one step back
Kirk Patston: and thought: Well.
Kirk Patston: social, so social relationships break down for all kinds of people around a whole lot of variables, ability, disability in our culture.
Kirk Patston: gender.
ethnicity.
Kirk Patston: language, group, and so on.
Kirk Patston: And I realized that that sort of study is the study of uberness.
Kirk Patston: and I thought, Aha! I've got a more general category here that, I think is going to be
Kirk Patston: more fruitful.
Kirk Patston: and
Kirk Patston: also just in terms of
Kirk Patston: you know, convincing a university that what you're studying is a value. The study of otherness is very much on a whole lot of, you know, a whole lot of academic disciplines. A study of otherness is on view, I? And then it was sort of as a nice little bonus of that, too.
I realized that
Kirk Patston: you know the capital of all that
Kirk Patston: is a really valid category to ponder in theology.
Kirk Patston: and the the other in sociology is really valid. So it was actually a category that let me think about James's relationship with God as other.
Kirk Patston: and Joe's relationship with Ellie F. As Bill dad. So far his wife, his servants, his family.
Kirk Patston: and his experience of being other.
Kirk Patston: So it gave me a lovely
Kirk Patston: speak
Kirk Patston: category. And then I I think, what i'm, realizing what it's
Kirk Patston: done for me in terms of ministry.
Kirk Patston: is
Kirk Patston: made me really interested in the experience of isolation or segregation.
Kirk Patston: that disability.
Kirk Patston: my lead, to. And
Kirk Patston: what what are the social structures
Kirk Patston: and patterns that we have that either contribute to that or break that down?
Steph Judd: Yeah. And it seems that in some of your work. You you've looked at the those dynamics of exclusion and stigmatization, and and even discrimination at as as as as you you've done some work in the Book of Drove. Can you kind of hash out in some more detail what those dynamics of otherness
Steph Judd: at the on the human axis are? And then how they differ from this vertical access, which I think is such an interesting kind of fusion of ideas, this the other othering one another at the in the sociological terminology, but then also
Steph Judd: the divine out of the Holy One, and
Steph Judd: how? What? What have you found in in in the intersection of those ideas.
Kirk Patston: Yes, yes, yes, so
Kirk Patston: I think it's really. It is important to separate them out, because I think what's going on in the divine human relationship. And this is is necessarily
Kirk Patston: different.
Kirk Patston: but that, of course, in the end it it's going to be some
interaction. Of course
Kirk Patston: I did a
Kirk Patston: this. This is where you know, in terms of my Phd work. This is when I sort of went into the abyss of the endless reading.
Kirk Patston: and just realize all the different ways that we can conceptualize. So let's we do sociology all the different ways that we can conceptualize why we other one another.
Kirk Patston: saying, go psycho and a leading or psycho dynamic, and talk about the fact that we we barely even really relate to the true other, because we project so much of ourselves.
Kirk Patston: So that that goes on. I think, Steph, you just mentioned the word stigmatizing.
Kirk Patston: so the notion that you could mark a slave
Kirk Patston: with a sign to sort of indicate that they were slave, but that that idea.
Kirk Patston: broadening out that particular at at different times, in different cultures, particular
Kirk Patston: impairments, or physical appearances, get a particular social connotation, and so people get rejected in those terms. There's scapegoating
Kirk Patston: where a society
Kirk Patston: sorry about that. This
Kirk Patston: it's. I think it's unconscious. But this this amazing process where the whole culture colludes. To think that the problems of that culture are caused by a particular group
Kirk Patston: of people.
Kirk Patston: and then for the scapegoating to be successful. That group comes to believe itself that it is
Kirk Patston: the cause of harm in that particular social setting
Kirk Patston: and
Kirk Patston: in colludes with their own punishment
Kirk Patston: anyway, so Skype guarding
Kirk Patston: can go on.
Kirk Patston: Yes. Oh, then there's some.
Kirk Patston: I I went to the work of Mik, our back team.
Kirk Patston: I
Kirk Patston: Russian
Kirk Patston: literary critic, who he he did
Kirk Patston: originally. His work was in language and literature, and he was interested in the way in Dostoyevsky's novels.
Kirk Patston: characters, Aren't, so much described as constituted through dialogue
Kirk Patston: that you only get to know the characters through dialogue.
Kirk Patston: and
Kirk Patston: he.
Kirk Patston: he, his work, introduced me to this notion of UN finalizability
Kirk Patston: and
Kirk Patston: dialogic
understandings.
Kirk Patston: One thing to understand about Dostoyevsky is he's working in Stalinist, Russia.
Kirk Patston: and so in his background he's got this Hegelian account of otherness that that there's going to be
Kirk Patston: always in society, these 2 groups, and there'll be a thesis, and then this is but they'll clash, and then something sort of something will grow out of that. That's better.
Kirk Patston: But he'd sort of seen what grows out of a Hegelian, or then a Marxist paradigm.
Kirk Patston: and it didn't necessarily think it was better.
Kirk Patston: and he wondered if we should not be trying
Kirk Patston: when we have this thesis and an ant. This is that we shouldn't be trying for a synthesis that we should be just sitting back with a dialogue
Kirk Patston: that that's as good as that's that's sort of the closest we can get
Kirk Patston: to reality. So that that was a very telling
Kirk Patston: and helpful
Kirk Patston: insight for me that.
Kirk Patston: and came through my work.
Kirk Patston: I was introduced also to the work of the manual Lebanese or Lebanon, who have you to
Kirk Patston: say him a.
Kirk Patston: I have French, Jewish, or Lithuanian, but worked in France and writing French
Kirk Patston: scroll up.
Kirk Patston: who is really all about
Kirk Patston: otherness. His experience is coming out of his family being killed by the Nazis.
Kirk Patston: He was in prison. He was working in France and imprisoned
by the Nazis.
Kirk Patston: So he's.
Kirk Patston: He's incredibly complex to
Kirk Patston: Do you want me to go on about him? Or.
Kirk Patston: Yeah. Okay, okay. So
Kirk Patston: he's got this
Kirk Patston: fascinating idea
Kirk Patston: that
Kirk Patston: in the Western tradition
Kirk Patston: we've made being
Kirk Patston: the most central
Kirk Patston: concern of philosophy.
Kirk Patston: And then
Kirk Patston: theology
Kirk Patston: bye.
Kirk Patston: with a mixture of his own
Kirk Patston: sort of
Kirk Patston: post phenomenological thinking.
Kirk Patston: combined with his deep love of the Torah.
Kirk Patston: and he's
Kirk Patston: he's great respect for the command, particularly Thou shalt not kill.
Kirk Patston: He turned that into a philosophy where
Kirk Patston: he thought, whenever we encounter something that is not us
Kirk Patston: as Western philosophers.
Kirk Patston: Our questions are like, Who are you? What are you?
Kirk Patston: We ask questions of being?
Kirk Patston: But, he said, the prior question is, what do I owe you?
Kirk Patston: The prior question is ethical.
Kirk Patston: And so he said, Ethics is first philosophy.
Kirk Patston: and
Kirk Patston: he's an in. I find him incredibly hard to read, so I feel
Kirk Patston: I I always feel that I'm misrepresenting him when I speak, but
Kirk Patston: I think he would say
Kirk Patston: that there's no human being who is here, apart from the fact that there was a mother and a father.
Kirk Patston: so there is no being without another.
Kirk Patston: And then, of course you can turn that into metaphysics, of course, that there's
Kirk Patston: that there's a creator
Kirk Patston: There's something. Be a behind every human being you meet.
Kirk Patston: There's
Kirk Patston: there's something prior.
Kirk Patston: And so whenever we meet, being
Kirk Patston: that being in is in some ways derivative. And so there's always another.
Kirk Patston: And so he thought
Kirk Patston: he wrote a an exploration of otherwise than being
Kirk Patston: so.
Kirk Patston: which you can't even put into words like.
Kirk Patston: What sort of being do we have when we're not being it sort of
Kirk Patston: So it so, and the being that we have that's beyond our being
Kirk Patston: is our moral reality
Kirk Patston: that
Kirk Patston: we bring a face he calls it the face.
Kirk Patston: We bring a face to every interaction.
Kirk Patston: and that first gesture of the face is to say, thou shalt not kill.
Kirk Patston: So whenever we encounter another.
Kirk Patston: we have a moral imperative, and then he goes on to actually almost track, almost like a 3 stage thing that at first we want to.
Kirk Patston: We want to kill the other.
Kirk Patston: Then we come to respect. I guess that there is another with a moral claim on it claim on us. But then we finally reach this extreme. You
Kirk Patston: position that some people are uncomfortable with. We reach this extreme position where he he talks about that we become hostage.
Kirk Patston: We become denucleated. He says we are actually beholden to our moral responsibility for the other. And
Kirk Patston: yeah, so
Kirk Patston: yeah, hostage is kind of a.
Kirk Patston: Because shocking but interesting example.
Kirk Patston: And now that's all. It's all incredibly abstract, and it's written in French. So it's
Kirk Patston: it's. You know it's late night dinner party
Kirk Patston: material.
Kirk Patston: But I think
Kirk Patston: it's interesting when we meet a person who doesn't seem to be behaving quite
Kirk Patston: the way we would expect. We do go into being, don't we? We like? What's the diagnosis? What are you what! What's wrong with you? Do I? Are you? Are you autistic? Are you? Do you have cerebral palsy? Are you schizophrenic? We will do all these being
Kirk Patston: questions. That's the that's so deeply the philosophical.
Kirk Patston: You know the philosophical air that we breathe.
Kirk Patston: But then Levin S. Would say, okay, I'm meeting you. You're not behaving in terms of how I expect that my first question is, what do I owe you?
Basically
Kirk Patston: And that's just such a different
Kirk Patston: posture?
Kirk Patston: Yeah.
Steph Judd: yeah, it's a radically different approach to how you engage
Steph Judd: engage difference when you encounter it, and that a as you're speaking about that I do have the face. It remind me of this beautiful essay written by Frederick Bakner when he talks about when we're confronted with
Steph Judd: another human face, and everything that is bundled up with that face is
Steph Judd: something that is so confounding to us, yet that it attracts such
Steph Judd: moral weight behind it, and that that that ethical responsibility that we have to this other, even if we can't categorize it neatly. Something i'd like to follow up with you, and maybe link this into some of your work, as otherness engages with disability. Is
Steph Judd: that just to on to make sure, i'm understanding the work that back to
did
Steph Judd: so, is it that you're saying that? Well that he was saying that
Steph Judd: that rather than seeking to
Steph Judd: find the synthesis between these 2
Steph Judd: Aba
Steph Judd: competing forces, that we just let them
Kirk Patston: coexist in dialogue with one another. Is that what is that? What he's saying? That's right. Yes, and he says, when you read a dost, or yes, the ski novel.
Kirk Patston: that's that's the character of it that they very rarely resolve in any. Yeah, yeah. And when i'm teaching this in class, sometimes I say, just imagine that a group of friends went out for dinner last night, and somebody couldn't make it
Kirk Patston: if the next day you try to say what was the dinner party about
Kirk Patston: it's that's a it's sort of such a reductionistic silly question, like okay at you know, at the dinner party
the dinner party was about
Kirk Patston: the upcoming State election in New South Wales, or something. Well, that doesn't ever really get it. I mean you get that's just reducing it to a topic. But
Kirk Patston: the dinner party was the dinner party. It's not reducible to
Kirk Patston: a summary the next day.
Kirk Patston: because the reason Tom said this was because Helen said that. But if Helen
Kirk Patston: had used a different turn of voice. Then Jack wouldn't have said that, and
Kirk Patston: you know it's this. It's it, this irreducible dialogue, and that's what it is. And of course, that that was a very useful concept to me, too, because the Book of Job.
Kirk Patston: if you think about the Book of Jove, it could have just been
Kirk Patston: 3 or 4 chapters long. There was a man called Jab. He's playing this, and up right he's got to turn some evil.
Kirk Patston: The these 2 episodes with the site, and happen terrible things happen to him, you could just then right he's! 3 friends came to comfort him, but didn't do so very successfully, and then the Lord spoke out of a storm. You you could no right that.
Kirk Patston: But for some reason the author of the Book of Job thought i'll be doing truth, and my readers of better service if I now
Kirk Patston: inflict upon them.
Kirk Patston: Chapter after chapter after chapter of irreducible dialogue
that's full of
Kirk Patston: miscommunication. False starts.
Kirk Patston: you know difficulties in communication.
Kirk Patston: Some, for some reason
Kirk Patston: God's Holy Spirit decided to inspire that kind of
Kirk Patston: text, because
Kirk Patston: for the the kind of topic that Jobs dealing with. I would suggest that the that actually that
Kirk Patston: decision of phone, the dialogic phone
Kirk Patston: is a really useful one.
Kirk Patston: so that it means when you can, when you count to somebody who's other than you.
Kirk Patston: You're not looking for the day
Kirk Patston: when you finally both fully understand each other.
Kirk Patston: or you're not looking for the day when you finally both agree.
Kirk Patston: You're not looking to get to that.
Kirk Patston: because
Kirk Patston: that so that's a that's a reductionistic grasp of truth.
Kirk Patston: But Backton said that his relationship with God was a conversation with the Christ.
Kirk Patston: He was a Russian orthodox man.
Kirk Patston: Conversation with the Christ.
Kirk Patston: and I thought that's quite lovely. Now
Kirk Patston: I I I feel like I'm. Often i'm treading on the nice here, because I very much inhabit a
Kirk Patston: confessional
Kirk Patston: Christianity
Kirk Patston: where I can state
Kirk Patston: propositions of you know. I believe this. I believe this. I believe this.
Kirk Patston: and yet i'd still want to say that the lived experience of those truths both with God and with other human beings.
Kirk Patston: is better conceived. Biologically.
Kirk Patston: then it's something more reduced. Propositionally.
Steph Judd: I love that
Steph Judd: that so much. Thank you. Just to administrative question.
Steph Judd: I wondered if
Steph Judd: John, you thought we should
Steph Judd: unpack more about
Steph Judd: like what we learn about more about what we learn about otherness in in Job, or whether we cook. We want to go to
Steph Judd: in in in the slides that you sent through. You kind of set up stage up like
Steph Judd: like more about those dynamics of otherness as over and against with.
Steph Judd: And and then we'll what's a better alternative to those? What what? What do you think?
John Anthony Dunne: I was definitely thinking about otherness and job just because we got a little bit more of the buck team stuff there with the dialogical approach, and maybe more on Lebanon, or or just the how that plays out in Job.
Steph Judd: Sorry, quick.
John Anthony Dunne: So
John Anthony Dunne: So the way in which you are using Pakistan and Lebanon in your study of job is, is really fascinating, and drawing out that kind of dialogical nature of Job as being part of, You know, the form of this text, and the irreducibility as you described
John Anthony Dunne: is super interesting, and i'm wondering if you just say a bit more about the otherness dynamic, and how that plays out in the in that dialogue between Job and his 3 friends.
Kirk Patston: Sure. So I think, with Joe and his 3 friends.
Kirk Patston: I think
Kirk Patston: what's going on for the friends is
Kirk Patston: that they've turned their relationship with God into
Kirk Patston: something, perhaps what we might call a a symbiotic system.
Kirk Patston: where they say it as a sort of a you know a re reward, punishment, paradigm.
Kirk Patston: you know good things having to good people. Bad things happen to bad people.
Kirk Patston: and it's difficulty in that.
Kirk Patston: If you said in your mind that God is
Kirk Patston: like.
Kirk Patston: You know, the the the agent who delivers the rewards
Kirk Patston: for the human behavior.
Kirk Patston: It's hard to know anymore. Who's Who's really God, you know he's got beholden to my
Kirk Patston: good behavior. So
Kirk Patston: I I would say, the Book of Jive is really wanting to assert that there's a divine otherness that is wholly other.
Kirk Patston: and that God is utterly free
Kirk Patston: and not constrained by human behavior. But if you so, if you drill down into the course at first build out and zip that they don't really think that about God. They think they've worked out what God is doing, so that God is narratable
Kirk Patston: to them, not unfinalilizable, but narratable.
Kirk Patston: That's a Buttonian sort of lens on that.
Kirk Patston: And so they they're trying to narrate Job's life to him, and saying, look.
Kirk Patston: You think that your
Kirk Patston: innocent. But let me tell you the narrative truth. You've done something wrong, and it becomes almost ridiculous in the end that they have to invent.
Kirk Patston: Ellie Fasten's third speech is very distressing, because he has to invent, since
Kirk Patston: that jive has committed, in order to maintain the system. So what what they do. So
Kirk Patston: they've reduced God to less than other.
Kirk Patston: because he's now got his answerable to their behavior
Kirk Patston: and fully narratable
Kirk Patston: by themselves. They've reduced divine otherness into symbiosis
Kirk Patston: and to finalization, like so called it.
Kirk Patston: And then we they're trying to do that with.
Kirk Patston: and then so
Kirk Patston: when you go through that lens, and it's wonderful when God turns up and blows that
Kirk Patston: out of the water within that within that dialogue framework, I I think they sort of. There's a movement where jobs in the dialogue.
Kirk Patston: But then, just towards
Kirk Patston: the the dialogue breaks down.
Kirk Patston: let me get my chances here, and i'll go. I'm just having a bottle doing a quick little like. So at at Jive, Chapter 27, I think the nature of the discourse changes to Joe just talking to God and not talking to the friends anymore. And I love the very last thing that
Kirk Patston: Jive says to his friends at the end of 26
Kirk Patston: he's speaking about God, and he says, By God's power, God turned up to see by His wisdom he cut right head to pieces by his breath. The skies became fair, his hand pierced the gliding serpent.
Kirk Patston: Because what Joe does, he moves into this mythological with a poetic sort of way of talking about God, which is.
Kirk Patston: which is.
Kirk Patston: it's more elevated than the friends get to. So what I love the the place of See monsters and mon mon monstrous creatures in the Book of Job is really important, because they
Kirk Patston: their literary coat hangers in a sense for otherness. You know the the monster is the other that I can't reduce. I can't. You know I can't understand. I can't account for I can't defeat. So
Kirk Patston: it's like jab you saying to his friends, You think God's this agent of reward and punishment. But no, he's playing with monsters.
Kirk Patston: you know you. You don't get it. He's playing with monsters, and then he says in this morning, but the and these about the outer fringe of his works. How fine the whisper we hear him! Who, then can understand the thunder of his power?
Kirk Patston: I think what you're saying there is that Jive actually understands divine otherness. How faint the whisper! Who can relate to his path and saying, I can't keep. I can't keep
Kirk Patston: embedding myself in this dialogue with you, friends, because you actually don't believe in divine otherness.
Kirk Patston: So I think that's quite lovely. And then, in terms of literary form.
Kirk Patston: Jive
Kirk Patston: Jove, I think, then actually does become a bit too much like his friends, and wants to
Kirk Patston: do one last 10. But look, let's trial one last time, can we can we reduce God to retributive theology and force him into a court room?
Kirk Patston: And then, of course, the book of Joke introduces a random new character.
Kirk Patston: as though to say, okay.
Kirk Patston: you thought this was all reducible, and God would be the next character to speak.
Kirk Patston: We're just going to introduce a new random character called you like you, and just delay
Kirk Patston: just delay the resolution because God is so free
Kirk Patston: he can do what he likes, and he'll he'll turn up when he's good and ready, not because you
Kirk Patston: tell him to. So it preserves divine otherness
Kirk Patston: again.
Kirk Patston: Then I think it's really important to note
Kirk Patston: that
Kirk Patston: God wants to talk about the und domesticated animals and the monsters
Kirk Patston: that I think that's God saying, we really need to have a discourse about other nurse.
Kirk Patston: and to do that i'm going to talk about ostriches and donkeys and wild oxen.
Kirk Patston: and they him off. And
Kirk Patston: so I think, and I actually think there's a whole lot of sociology as well as theology going on.
Once you realize that
Kirk Patston: they all these sort of weird creatures are placeholders for otherness.
Kirk Patston: I mean it. Not just that. That's you know. I'm not reducing into that. But yeah, they they performing that rhetorical work.
Kirk Patston: There's I think, some really interesting
Kirk Patston: comments that I could go into if you want me to.
Kirk Patston: Yeah, I think that that would be wonderful if if you could elaborate on that. Yeah. So this is where I think this is. This was the sort of the you recount. This is the paid it, I think
Kirk Patston: of my
Phd work.
Kirk Patston: So.
Kirk Patston: For instance.
Kirk Patston: when
Kirk Patston: when Joe, even when Jove was imagining his society in his last speech.
Kirk Patston: he imagined a world where it seemed they were the worthy poor, and the unworthy poor.
Kirk Patston: So
Kirk Patston: he he actually names people with disability. He says he was eyes to the blind and feet to the line when he's when he's doing his when he sort of surrenders in a sense, to a legal
Kirk Patston: framework and says, okay, let's do. Let me do my best shot in terms of a legal framework. I was a really good guy. I was eyes to the blind. I was speak to the line, so I cared for my family. And then, beyond that, I cared for the widow, the fatherless, the blind, the lame.
Kirk Patston: But interestingly, he always he notes that they gave him back honor.
Kirk Patston: and really he sort of. He says he, he, he his life, and he's on a shame
Kirk Patston: framework, and it all seems sort of so neat and tidy
Kirk Patston: that
Kirk Patston: what what's really disturbed him is that the boys whose fathers he wouldn't even let s sleep with his sheepdogs?
Kirk Patston: They are now laughing at him.
Kirk Patston: So the the experience of being laughed at by boy Little boys
Kirk Patston: really upsets job. That's really key to his lament.
Kirk Patston: and he imagines there's this group of people
Kirk Patston: who are almost like animals. See? Sort of says they're in a nameless brood, and they bray, and they sort of they. They search for food in the wilderness. So Jobs got this notion that there's this unworthy poor. They like criminals.
Kirk Patston: but there's some group of people who are right on the margins
Kirk Patston: that, and he doesn't feel he owes them anything.
Kirk Patston: and they are the ones laughing at him.
Kirk Patston: So it's. So. I'm just raising that because in the discourse up to before God speaks.
Kirk Patston: Our imagination has been taken
Kirk Patston: to the very ages of the village.
Kirk Patston: where there are people making animal noises trying to find food.
Kirk Patston: and they're laughing at Job, and that's terrible.
Kirk Patston: Then God says I made the donkey.
Kirk Patston: and he's right on the edges of town.
Kirk Patston: and i'm making it rain there so that he's got food.
Kirk Patston: and he's laughing at the city.
Kirk Patston: And so God takes up this notion of laughter.
Kirk Patston: which I think is a again. It's another one of the technologies of otherness. Isn't it. We laugh at
Kirk Patston: the other, we mock them. We find what's funny, and laughter in a sense.
Kirk Patston: if you sort of step back from what laughter is about. It's when something happens that's in the wrong place.
Kirk Patston: We laugh because it was other. Something was unexpected, and we laugh.
Kirk Patston: But the Hebrew word for laugh. It's a bit like English we can laugh at and laugh with
Kirk Patston: the Hebrew word for laughter stretches from mocking
Kirk Patston: to dancing and celebrating.
Kirk Patston: and I think, God it God uses that
semantic range
Kirk Patston: to say the donkey is laughing at the city. Well, yes, he's mocking it.
Kirk Patston: but he's also got this playful, I think, celebratory way of being in the world
Kirk Patston: where the donkey says it's really good that i'm not in the city
Kirk Patston: where somebody can tie me up or put a saddle on me.
Kirk Patston: You know it's it's lovely not to be domesticated. It's lovely to be free
Kirk Patston: out here
Kirk Patston: in the wild.
Kirk Patston: and if Joe's got is to here
Kirk Patston: Jave could start to think. Oh, my goodness! There was this group of people who, I thought were beyond help.
Kirk Patston: who are so marginalized that I had no moral responsibility toward them
Kirk Patston: that God is looking God's Day with them.
Kirk Patston: and he's looking after them.
Kirk Patston: fading them.
Kirk Patston: And they they're actually enjoying themselves. They laughter
Kirk Patston: it doesn't. Just have this sting of mockery, mockery.
Kirk Patston: but has this element of play.
Kirk Patston: And then he, you guys on to the ostrich the wings of the ostrich flat joyfully, that I cannot compare with the wings and peers of the stalk. She lays her on the ground. She's unmindful that a foot may crush them.
Kirk Patston: for God did not endow her with wisdom.
Kirk Patston: or give her a share of good sense.
Kirk Patston: Now that's very provocative. If you read that with a disability lens
Kirk Patston: now you could. I could end up in a tip some terrible places here, theologically, so I feel I have to be really careful.
Kirk Patston: but i'll just just to to leave it at poetry that God's happy to create creatures who do not have their share of good sense.
That's really
Kirk Patston: provocative, I think, in terms of
Kirk Patston: what does God, the good Creator choose to do in his world in terms of the variety
that he wants to create.
Kirk Patston: and but then the ostrich laughs as well. Yet when she spreads her feathers to run, she laughs at horse and rider
Kirk Patston: again. You could say there's a mockery there. Yes, there is. But there's also a play.
Kirk Patston: and
Kirk Patston: I think what what you start to see is that when God
Kirk Patston: describes others like this this strange
Kirk Patston: on the edges, aspects of his creation, the donkey, the ostrich.
Kirk Patston: even the
Kirk Patston: god's posture toward them
Kirk Patston: is gracious.
Kirk Patston: He wants to provide rain for them.
Kirk Patston: It's full of wonder.
Kirk Patston: He, he, he, God, seems to enjoy taking His time, especially with the beemoth and the leviathan.
Kirk Patston: He really enjoys taking his time.
Kirk Patston: describing them
Kirk Patston: as though
it
Kirk Patston: he really is quite proud of his handiwork of what he, what he's done here.
Kirk Patston: and so then that sort of led me to read a bit about what's one that, and wonder is
Kirk Patston: one of the devices we can use in
Kirk Patston: social relationships of otherness.
Kirk Patston: It's, and it's a different from stigmatizing, or, you know, segregating, discriminating.
Kirk Patston: That's this lovely posture of curiosity.
Kirk Patston: And
some some riders have said
Kirk Patston: that when we sit in wonder with the other that in a sense the the barriers between us dissolve away.
Kirk Patston: and we notice the goodness
Kirk Patston: of the other.
Kirk Patston: So again, it's sort of it's. It's, it's it's teaching a little bit indirectly.
Kirk Patston: that
Kirk Patston: God just takes his time in talking to Joe, and we luckily get to overhear it.
Kirk Patston: He just takes his time describing the ostrich and describing the donkey, and describing the wild ox
Kirk Patston: and the war horse.
Kirk Patston: because it's just worth taking your time, and just noticing
Kirk Patston: and wondering
Kirk Patston: at things. So
Kirk Patston: that's sort of really interesting
Kirk Patston: to me.
Kirk Patston: So that sort of this that that gave me the category of wonder.
Kirk Patston: And then with the bacterial lens, If if
Kirk Patston: if the if the donkey
Kirk Patston: can laugh at the city.
Kirk Patston: then God in God's economy, it's not just for the city to laugh at the donkey.
Kirk Patston: but the donkey has the right to laugh back at the city.
Kirk Patston: and there you've got reciprocity and
Kirk Patston: and dialogue going on, and it's really like. So the the donkey laughs, the ostrich last Leviathan
Kirk Patston: laughs.
Kirk Patston: and really interestingly, in the Psalms.
Kirk Patston: When you describe God's relationship with Leviathan.
Kirk Patston: it's the word frolic in some English translation. It's the word last again, that God what they've got to last, and
Kirk Patston: one of my supervisors in my Phd. Where it was a Jewish Rabbi.
Kirk Patston: and he said, there's always this. There's a Jewish catechism. He sort of thing that says one is Yahweh doing. What is the law doing? He is playing with Leviathan.
Kirk Patston: That's that's the answer.
Kirk Patston: So
Kirk Patston: And that's again
Kirk Patston: theologically
Kirk Patston: to ask, what is what is God doing today?
Kirk Patston: He's playing with the sea monster?
Kirk Patston: That that's that is such an otherness conception of God. But if God today is playing with the same monster, what is he asking of me when I encountered the other?
Kirk Patston: You know he's asking me to play to frolic.
Kirk Patston: and so they so you can see what i'm
Kirk Patston: what i'm starting to get from the Lord's description to job
Kirk Patston: is a sociology of dialogue and reciprocity.
Kirk Patston: a sociology of laughter
Kirk Patston: which perhaps we could turn into the word play a playfulness.
Kirk Patston: And then well, we're getting wonder, the the just, the time it takes.
Kirk Patston: And so you can set to see
Kirk Patston: we're getting a new paradigm here for social relationships.
Kirk Patston: and I live with somebody who's intellectually impaired, and on the autistic spectrum.
Kirk Patston: and over he's 25 so the the decades of doing that
Kirk Patston: I've learned that one of my most constructive postures is
Kirk Patston: play
Kirk Patston: and wonder
Kirk Patston: and laughter.
Kirk Patston: I think when I, when Jeremy was sort of under 5, I I got clinically depressed. I mean we also had a door to die. So we had a whole lot going on
Kirk Patston: that.
Kirk Patston: you know. I I I could get myself terribly caught up in
Kirk Patston: sin, judgement for
Kirk Patston: disability disability is tragedy. Oh, my goodness, what's happened to our family?
Kirk Patston: Why, we caught in these cycles of
Kirk Patston: the Tragic
Kirk Patston: or I I could realize okay.
Kirk Patston: There is 25, and he still wants to sing Wiggles songs like that to children's. I think it's known in America, you know.
Kirk Patston: Why not? You know what I I could say, oh, what a tragedy that my 25 year old wants to watch the Wiggles.
Kirk Patston: Oh, you know seeing in the fall have really ruined our family. God is able.
Kirk Patston: you know, if you, how am I going to account for God's goodness in this, or
Kirk Patston: do I say, oh, yeah, gosh, that's a good song of the week. Why why do we all get up and dance?
Kirk Patston: And so now we've got a way of being together in wonder and play.
Kirk Patston: and it's it's just a different
Kirk Patston: way of being in the world with the other.
Kirk Patston: and it's a it. Anyway, it's a book of job that delivers that
Kirk Patston: to me.
Steph Judd: I mean cook the week it's did top the triple jay hottest 100 at least that out. Not Australian listeners. That's
Steph Judd: one of the mainstream
radio channels
Steph Judd: so much to learn from admire. And the Wiggles. Thank you so much for that. That is just so tremendously helpful for me. When one of the things that I think
Steph Judd: I've picked up from the way you've stitched together these
Steph Judd: different ideas is that so often
Steph Judd: in a lot of the ways that particularly Christians, have thought about disability. It has this moral freight to it
Steph Judd: in that. The way we interpret disability it is. It is that there's that that punitive component, or there's a lack of faith, or there's something that's
Steph Judd: you know, something that's gone wrong, and on you know
Steph Judd: oftentimes that the the the
Steph Judd: the weight of that, the burden of that of that is born by the person, either with the disability or by those who are close to them. In trying to almost like tea leaves like divine
Steph Judd: what what? What's caused this? Whereas when you.
Steph Judd: when you introduce
Steph Judd: these ideas of the and finalizability
Kirk Patston: of so much of what we encounter in our lived experience of
Steph Judd: the world
Steph Judd: ourselves. God.
Steph Judd: that invitation to wonder
Steph Judd: Yes, and play is actually a massive relief.
Steph Judd: because you just you're free to just engage with
Steph Judd: things you find in the world on their own terms, rather than trying to find
Steph Judd: cosmic meaning behind behind them.
Steph Judd: So thank you so much
Kirk Patston: i'll, I'll just that it's interesting that
Kirk Patston: Job's relationship with these children in chapter one
Kirk Patston: is full of moral freight in your language.
Kirk Patston: Have they done something wrong. I better offer sacrifices.
Kirk Patston: His relationship with his children is different. In Chapter 42
Kirk Patston: he names 3 goals
Kirk Patston: and he calls them
Kirk Patston: Jav. Cinnamon
Kirk Patston: and horn of Eye shadow.
Kirk Patston: really playful names.
Kirk Patston: and the writer doesn't worry about their sin, but notices that they're beautiful.
Kirk Patston: and then, and God gives to his daughters and inheritance
Kirk Patston: which in the patriarchal culture is unwarranted and needless.
Kirk Patston: It's an act of
Kirk Patston: playful grace.
Kirk Patston: My daughters are beautiful, and I can give them an inheritance along with their brothers.
Kirk Patston: and i'm not narrating my children in terms of sin and sacrifice anymore.
Kirk Patston: so that's pro. And again that when I sort of saw that I thought, yeah, I yeah, this is. This is what the
Kirk Patston: the books inside there is the gender, the other the othering of women.
Kirk Patston: In chapter one. And you know the woman is the temptation who will want me to curse God and die?
Kirk Patston: No, the woman is the the beautiful
one.
Kirk Patston: so it isn't. That's another little lens into it.
John Anthony Dunne: Hmm.
John Anthony Dunne: I love that, and really appreciate the way that you've shown us how Job presents to us a sociology of dialogue, play, and wonder as a as you described. And I'm. I'm. Curious to hear. You know, as we kind of wrap up this conversation in this series to hear a bit about how you
John Anthony Dunne: how this plays out in terms of the your current ministry with the
John Anthony Dunne: with our place Christian communities. If you could tell us a bit about how the work that you've done on Job and that sociology of dialogue, plan, wonder, manifest themselves in in that ministry that you're currently part of.
Kirk Patston: Yes, yes, yes, so so it's a ministry. That's it's got 2 arms. One is trying to resource and inspire the church to be a place of disability inclusion
Kirk Patston: which, and
Kirk Patston: I think probably Louise Gos will spoken a bit about that. And actually she's now come to. She's now going to be working for our place Christian communities, i'm delighted to say, doing a lot of that church education and consultancy work which is so good at
Kirk Patston: the other dimension is, we're trying to take on the hard question of disability accommodation.
which is a very in
Kirk Patston: probably across the world. But I think in Australia, real estate and
Kirk Patston: and disability. Yeah, housing and disability are amongst the most complex of social problems. And so we decided to try and tackle both of them at once. Madly.
Kirk Patston: What we're imagining is a bit like the work that a large does.
Kirk Patston: Can we create? Can we buy houses that are walking distance from healthy churches?
Kirk Patston: And can we with with disability funding here at the moment, we probably do need to group 2 or 3 people with disability together to get some economies of scale. That'd be nice to not have to do that. But
Kirk Patston: you know money is not infinite. I appreciate that.
Kirk Patston: What we're gonna try to do, though. Is have somebody who doesn't live with disability, living in the house, so that there's real
Kirk Patston: relationship and dialogue and conversation around the dinner table
Kirk Patston: to then, and to have this a church that's equipped, that values the roles of those people.
Kirk Patston: and then to have
Kirk Patston: frequent meals and celebrations in that house where the church is invited, so that it's not an institution that is about segregating and keeping people away from society. But it's actually a hub of
Kirk Patston: play, Wonder celebration.
Kirk Patston: dialogue, and if beautifully just on Sunday night. We've we've bought a house, and it's too small, and we're desperate for money to extend it. But we've made a start.
Kirk Patston: and we had after church, I think about 18 people stroll down the street and came here for dinner.
Kirk Patston: and our son, with intellectual disability and autism, hosted
Kirk Patston: that dinner welcomed people, said Grace
Kirk Patston: with support, structured a little bit of reflection of time on the sermon that we'd heard that not structured helped people pray. So he, you know he was in that ministry role, and what was lovely at least, you know I did the cooking.
Kirk Patston: What what was lovely was at the end of that night another couple said: You know what we should come back here next month and say, your mom and dad don't have to cook. Gera. How about we cook?
Kirk Patston: And I thought, Bingo, we've arrived
Kirk Patston: at it so now Jarra can host a meal. It's beyond him to cook and cook a meal for 18 people.
Kirk Patston: but somebody else can do that. And
Kirk Patston: with. So then, with Jere, create that highly social
Kirk Patston: reach
Kirk Patston: context. Walking distance from the church that becomes part of Church
Kirk Patston: live.
Kirk Patston: So I think that was. That was just a beautiful.
Kirk Patston: and yet of what's possible. And sadly in Australia at the moment there's a lot of political discourse around what's going wrong with our disability, accommodation, Terrible stories, 250
Kirk Patston: of violence, abuse, neglect, and exploitation.
Kirk Patston: and really.
Kirk Patston: for all of those things? The answer is, Stop segregating people and
Kirk Patston: get people in real relationships. I mean, that's
Kirk Patston: That's the answer to so many of our otherness issues. Isn't it, get people in real conversation.
Kirk Patston: And and so that's what we're saying with people it with people with all kinds of this on the way of critically focusing on intellectual and autism because they are the ones who have the most. Everybody with advocacy around housing and so on. You know experience. So
Kirk Patston: surround them with real friendships and dialogue, and the violence, abuse, neglect, exploitation.
Kirk Patston: issues, I think, might be anywhere near us
Kirk Patston: pressing, you know.
Kirk Patston: Well, Dr. Patton, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for sharing about your work on on Job and and the work that you're currently doing with our with our place, Christian communities, and just really appreciate your time and everything that you shared with us. Really, really fun to talk with you thing, and thanks for your insightful questions. It's great.
Thank you.