PROFILES IN CATHOLICISM: An Interview With Mark Davis Pickup

  

To read Profiles In Catholicism: An Interview With Mark Davis Pickup click here.

 

CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES AND AUTHENTIC COMMUNITIES

From 2006-2016 I was a columnist for a Canadian Catholic newspaper. In one of my columns, I wrote about children with disabilities and their authentic inclusion within the human community. I received a huge response from families with disabled children and people of goodwill who thanked me for writing it. The grandchildren I referred to are adults now and will have their own children. Maybe their great-grandfather will take them to a playground—except I will be walking. In 2018, God raised me from my electric wheelchair to walk again as an old man, after decades of paralysis. (It's strange: As a young man I needed a wheelchair, as an old man I walk. It should be the other way round)  Below is the column I wrote so many years ago. It was a long way from then to now and I'm happy to say that accessible playgrounds are everywhere.

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It was a beautiful sunny day for a man to be at a playground with his preschool grandchildren. That’s exactly where I was. I took my grandson and granddaughter to a playground at a nearby elementary school; one child sat on my lap while the other stood on the back of my electric wheelchair as we whizzed our way to the playground. 

 

The place was packed with children of various ages having fun at afternoon recess. I had to watch from the safety of the grass because my wheelchair would get bogged down in the soft sand. 

 

“Look at me!” cried my grandson as he hung upside down from the monkey-bars. My wee granddaughter stood at the top of a slide waiting for me to look at her before she slid down laughing. Zoom! It was so good to be alive and breathe in the fresh April air; it was good to feel the sun’s warmth on my back after a long winter. To be surrounded by such childhood joy warmed my heart.  Joie de vivre!

 

Sweet inclusion

 

Something else made my heart soar. I noticed four children with visible disabilities in the middle of playful mayhem. One child had a withered arm, a second had cerebral palsy, a third with Down’s, and a fourth child was deaf.  It was good not to see “program” or “strategy” to include them. It just happened.  The children simply took each other’s differences in stride and played together.  

 

I sensed that what was unfolding before my eyes was the way God wants life to be—and children were leading the way! They didn’t need behavioral psychologists or experts to show them how to include children with disabilities. They just played. I also sensed that adults and experts need the children’s example more than the other way around. We all do.  

 

Some people are very good at ensuring special needs children are a part of their communities and included in normal childhood. The school I just mentioned is a shining example. Integrated schools are valuable vehicles to teach acceptance and inclusion of people with disabilities. The able-bodied children of that particular school seem to have incorporated this important life lesson into their daily lives. 

 

Why are so many adults such slow learners? Why do I still hear resistance to the integration of children with disabilities into public schools?  

 

Dichotomy of the age

 

At the same time as some children with disabilities were frolicking with my grandchildren at the playground, other children were dying at the hands of experts.  That’s the dichotomy of the age.  We can be so enlightened yet so savage toward children with disabilities.

 

Why are eighty percent of pregnancies involving Down’s children aborted? Nearly fifty percent of pregnancies involving babies with spina bifida end in abortion.  Why is that?  Why are pregnancies scrutinized—with a search-and-destroy mindset—for the slightest anatomical or genetic anomaly or imperfection? Disabled newborns are routinely denied nutrition and hydration in hospitals across North America. Why does modern medicine, and bioethics believe severely disabled children are worthless—so worthless they do not deserve life itself?  Tell that to the four children with disabilities I mentioned playing happily in the schoolyard.

 

I have actually heard some people say it’s unfair to bring a profoundly disabled child into the world.  Feminist icon, Betty Frieden, referred to disabled children in utero as “monstrosities.” She was wrong, so utterly, terribly wrong.

 

People are not monstrous, ideas are.  Deformity or disability can cripple a person’s body or cognitive function. But it is ideas, stone-hearted and brutal ideas that cripple human hearts. It is the logic of darkness and ignorance that stunts the development of character and denies any embrace of love and acceptance to the disabled, the handicapped, or the genetically flawed.  That may be the way of the world but it is not the way for followers of Jesus.  Those who have encountered the living Christ know that all humanity is imperfect, yet still loved by God.  God cares about each individual’s development within a larger common good.  

 

Transformation

 

Real inclusion is concerned with the development of each individual as an integral and indispensable part of a community. Authentic communities of concern understand that every person has something to contribute to the common good.  Sometimes that contribution takes the form of simply being present and being welcome.  

 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says this about the common good:

 

“In keeping with the social nature of man, the good of each individual is necessarily related to the common good, which in turn can be defined only in reference to the human person: … By common good is to be understood “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach there fulfillment more fully and more easily.” The common good concerns the life of all.” (Nos. 1905 & 1906)

  

Put another way, it’s liberty within social form and constructs. 

 

We must take care never to judge the worth of another human being! That is not our right. Humanity’s social nature calls each of us to take care never to close the door of loving acceptance of any human life, regardless of their physical or mental state. 

 

Pray for God’s help to transcend beyond self-focus to become other-focused. Seek to understand more than being understood.  Embrace even when your natural inclination is to repel. Be equally concerned about the common good as individual fulfillment.  Do this and you will begin to see, unfolding before your very eyes, the way God wants life to be.  I’m convinced of it.

 

CANADA'S CONSERVATIVE PRAIRIE LION

 

I was going through some old files and came across a note from Canadian Christian conservative icon Ted Byfield. Canadian Senator Paula Simons once called Ted the "godfather of Canada's modern Conservative Movement." Ted Byfield was my friend, as he was to my son and my father. Ted's wife Virginia died in 2014, after 65 years of marriage. It must have been like tearing off a limb. I don’t think he ever recovered from losing her. He responded to my wife's and my condolence card.

 

 

 

The suffering he referred to was me enduring 30 years with aggressive MS. But that fire I went through would pale in comparison to losing my wife, LaRee. We are both 71 and have been married for over 50 years. We are one, just as Ted and Virginia were. Ted's gone now: He died at his home on December 23rd, 2021. He is with Virginia and our Lord, the Creator of love and marriage.

 

In 2022, a biographical book about Ted Byfield’s life, written by Jonathon Van Maren, was published with the title Prairie Lion(available on Amazon here). The inside cover of the book dust jacket says:

 

“For more than half a century, Ted Byfield was one of Canada's
most significant public Christians, and his life's work included the founding of a religious order, the formation of several Christian boarding schools for boys, a series of influential magazines, laying the groundwork for a political movement, writing books, and serving as editor on a magnificent 12 volume history of Christianity, THE CHRISTIANS: Their First Two Thousand Years. He gave voice to western alienation when there were a few others who would, and help create the consensus that resulted in the first Conservative majority government in decades." 

You can purchase one or the 12-volume set here or here.  (My son Dean Pickup was the art director for the series.)

 

Now, nearly three years after his death, an evening to honour Ted Byfield will be held in Edmonton, on September 25, 2024. Speakers include former Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, Albertan Premier Danielle Smith, Canada’s Leader of The Conservative Party and Leader of the Official Opposition in Ottawa, Pierre Poilievre, and a keynote address by Preston Manning.

 

For tickets click here