DISABILITY INCLUSION IN TELEVISION AND FILMS

I have advocated for disability inclusion in the media since the 1980s, specifically for television in various capacities from behind the scenes to on-air staff, and within dramatic series and movies too – in every facet of production, especially casts.

It's still virtually non-existent to see visibly disabled news or current affairs broadcasters. In the 34 years since I was forced to retire, I have, however, been pleased to see more shows and streamed dramatic program series that include characters with disabilities such as HOUSE, and THE GOOD DOCTOR. But they have abled-bodied actors portraying disabled characters. Dr. Gregory House in the series HOUSE is disabled and uses a cane. The role was played by Hugh Laurie who is not disabled and does not use a cane. THE GOOD DOCTOR has its principal autistic character, Dr. Shaun Murphy, portrayed by Freddie Highmore, who doesn’t have autism.  Shows usually have able-bodied actors portraying disabled characters. It's reminiscent of the days when black people were portrayed by white actors with painted faces. 

BREAKING BAD was an example where an actor with cerebral palsy (R.J. Mitte) played a character with cerebral palsy. It’s rare to have that. 

MOVIES: Secular movies have numerous films about disabilities portrayed by people without disabilities, dating back to RAIN MAN where Dustin Hoffman played a character with autism.  

THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON was about a character with Down Syndrome and was portrayed by an actor with Down syndrome (Zack Gottsagen). The movie was the highest-grossing independent film of 2019!

 

[Nb: It’s divinely ironic to note that a highly successful Oscar award-winning disabled actor has spent his career portraying able-bodied people. Sir Anthony Hopkins has Asperger’s.]

 

Christian movies about disability using actors with disabilities are rare. Two that readily come to mind are TOUCHED BY GRACE (2014) and JONI (1979). 

OUR HOUSE IS A VERY, VERY, FINE HOUSE

 

Musician David Crosby has died. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were a favourite band of mine back in the 1970s. Their harmonies were so tight for the day. Crosby’s personal life was in shambles, but he gave the world some great music. My personal favourite was Our House.

 

When I was diagnosed with aggressive multiple sclerosis in 1984, my wife, LaRee, and I were terrified. I previously worked for the multiple sclerosis association so I knew the terrible places MS could take people. 

LaRee had to watch me start to decline. It broke her heart, but she is a realist. We sold our house and built a wheelchair-accessible home. It was our house where we would live a life we knew was going to be hard, but there would be good times too. 

 

“I’ll light the fire,

You place the flowers In the vase 

that you bought today."

 

Wide-eyed terror of neurological dysfunction took us on a wild rollercoaster ride. The MS attacked my ability to speak, then it would relent. My hearing was affected. My vision was affected. My legs would go spastic and my coordination was impaired. I’d lose the ability to walk or the use of my right arm. All these things would come without warning and no guarantee of remissions. Each remission would return most but not all previous functions—particularly in my legs and arm. A crippling fatigue would overtake me and all I could do was watch life happen just beyond my reach. But LaRee still loved me. 

 

"Staring at the fire for hours for hours and hours,

While I listen to you play your love songs all night long

For me, only me."

At times it seemed as though the two of us and our love was all we had.

"Come to me now,

And rest your head for just five minutes,

Everything is done."

Protracted periods of time were spent convalescing. Months turned into years. Years became decades. Then I developed cancer. Our house became a nest, its rooms filled with sunshine coming through windows. We knew Christ was with us illuminating our way. We transcended our lot in life. 

 

"Such a cozy room,

The windows are illuminated by the evening,

Sunshine through them, fiery gems,

For you, only you."

For more than 35 years we have lived in our house. It is built on love. Its walls have seen tears and laughter, sad times, and good times. Terror and God’s comfort—often at the same time. Our children grew up in our house, and our grandchildren come to visit from time to time. Consolation turned to contentment. 

"Our house is a very, very, very fine house,

With two cats in the yard,

Life used to be so hard,

Now everything is easy cause of you."

 

And then in 2018, something wonderful happened. After so many years paralyzed and in an electric wheelchair with end-stage multiple sclerosis, God raised me out of it to walk again and He returned the use of my right arm. We had expected my next house would be a nursing home.

 

Yes, life used to be hard. But it has also been good. Now everything is easier because of You, my Lord and my God. LaRee and I live in our house, a very, very fine house that You gave to us. We are content to know that Christ is in control. His love and our love fill the rooms.

Now for your listening pleasure, here's Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young performing Our House.

  

 

It is a day of reflection. Fifty-three years ago today my father died while he and I were downhill skiing in western Canada. He had a massive heart and died in my arms. He was 52 and I was sixteen. My world crumbled. But as God so often does, He used a tragedy to open new possibilities. 

My grief was so intense that the next few months were just a blur. Then in the early Spring of 1970, a girl I had been sweet on for as long as I could remember, telephoned from Ottawa, Canada, 3 thousand miles away. She expressed her condolences about the loss of my dad. That started a love affair that has lasted to this day. In October we will be 70 and married 50 years. 

Beauty can come out of tragedy. Joy can replace sorrow. Trust God's plan for your life, even if you're not sure what it is. There is one. (The trinket I'm holding in the photo to the right was given to me by my wife the year my father died. It says "Me and you, you and me, that's the way it will always be.")

HERE I AM LORD

 

In my darker moments, the thought crosses my mind: Are we witnessing the collapse of western civilization as we know it? The pandemic keeps dragging on and the COVID virus keeps mutating—isolating people from each other. Interconnectedness is the glue that bonds and unites communities.  It seems like a lifetime ago since public gatherings were not a public threat. 

Each week, I hear about another school shooting or some lunatic with an automatic weapon spraying bullets into a crowd or shopping mall. The ancient moral code not to kill the most vulnerable amongst us has been breached and trampled and discarded.  Last year there were 44 million abortions in the world. What was an abomination to previous generations throughout the ages is now considered a “reproductive right.” Euthanasia of the sick and the disabled, the mentally ill and people living in poverty is being championed in my own country of Canada. I’ve watched mayhem and destruction in cities across America, while police stand aside or are defunded. Lawlessness abounds. We have heard rumblings of the “nuclear option” in the Russia-Ukraine war. Need I go on?

 

What does all this mean? Are we really facing the end of the western Christian civilization that gave rise to human rights and freedoms never before experienced throughout history? What will replace it? Marxism? Anarchy? A new world order of which the world’s people do not yet understand what its ramifications will be? We’ve been told by new élites at the World Economic Forum, like Danish parliamentarian, Ada Auken, that by 2030 we will own nothing, have nothing, every transaction will be monitored right down to the minutia of life, and yet we will be happy—or so she says.[1] Will that include Ada? Will she own nothing? Only time will tell. Methinks not. The new 21 Century élites will lord over the unwashed masses (that’s you and me).  

 

If Auken’s 2016 predictions of a Brave New World Order are what is in store for us, how should Christians respond? Apocalyptic survivalists advocate stocking up supplies, arming ourselves to the teeth, and hunkering down in bunkers. But that is not what Jesus told us to do. He told us to 

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”[2] 

That’s what we are supposed to do regardless of what is happening in the world. Even if our worst fears come to be, we praise the God who saves anyone who believes in His Son Jesus Christ.[3]

 

“It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks." "Lord Holy Father, almighty and eternal God, through Christ our Lord. For through His Pascal[4] mystery He accomplished the marvellous deed by which He freed us from the yoke of sin and death, summoning us to the glory of being now called a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for Your possession, to proclaim everywhere your mighty words, for You have called us out of darkness into Your own wonderful light. And so, with angels and archangels, with Thrones and dominions, and all the hosts and powers of heaven, we sing the hymn of Your glory as without end we proclaim: holy, holy, Lord of hosts heaven and earth are full of Your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed it is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

 

Do not blush at such lofty proclamations about the redeemed people of God. We were made for glory. We all have a yearning, a longing for the transtemporal. If you look deep within yourself and think of your earliest recollections at the dawn of your memory, you will discover a joy was present that may have contradicted your circumstances. You did not understand it, it was simply there. Before you experienced rejection or callous neglect, verbal or physical abuse, before life’s disappointments and failures, there was a sense of—for lack of a better term—cradle joy. Perhaps you still experience, on very rare occasions, what C.S. Lewis called 'raids of joy'. 

Maybe they are triggered by early morning sunlight shining into a window in a certain way, or the distant sound of somebody's shoes on a linoleum floor, or the smell of freshly cut grass, or a certain piece of music. For me, I may experience a sense of that primordial joy in crisp autumn air and long shadows of late afternoon, if a gust of wind blows through evergreen trees. I believe those flashes of joy are evidence that you were created for the glory of heaven. C.S. Lewis wrote about this in his marvellous essay The Weight of Glory. If you haven’t read it, I urge you to do so. 

 

Sometimes when I have tried to console an inconsolable infant, (one of my children or grandchildren), I've wondered if she/he was, in a primordial way, yearning to be bathed in the love of God that was present in utero. The baby was not tired, sick, or hungry, nor did he/she need a diaper changed. 

 

God has given us life and wants us to spend eternity with Him through Christ’s cross and resurrection, through faith. we can experience a foretaste of heaven when the Holy Spirit indwells us. 

 

I believe evangelical and faithful Catholic Christians can find unity through the Holy Spirit, not arguing points of doctrinal difference. It will come in knowing Christ and having a personal relationship with Him. Together, perhaps we can stem the tide of a monstrous "great reset" that is being planned. 

The "great reset" of the global economy may soon be thrust on the world. Read the article in the link in footnote No. 1.  I suspect if the world Ada Aukenn envisions comes by 2030, it will be anti-Christian to its core and hostile to all that is holy. We will be expected to replace Christ with a type of animism that worships nature. 

In 2020, Prince Charles—now King Charles—spoke at the annual Davos Summit in conjunction with the World Economic Forum. They put out a slick propaganda video promoting the new world order. His Majesty said, in part:

"We need to evolve our economic model, putting people and the planet at the heart of global value creation. If there is one thing we have to learn from the crisis is we need to put nature at the heart of how we operate."

We do not need to put nature at the heart of how we operate! We need to put the Creator of nature, Jesus Christ at the heart of how we operate. This is central to Christian living. True followers of Christ understand this and will not replace Him at the heart of how we live with some new-age concoction of earth worship. The architects of the new economy at the World Economic Forum may detect, by our behaviour and countenance, the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. I certainly hope they do. And I suspect that it will ultimately alienate us in the world and separate us from the world. Another word for this is sanctify.  

 

“…to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord both theirs and our grace to you and peace from God our Father in the Lord Jesus Christ …” (1 Corinthians 1:2-3)

 

We are united and sanctified in Christ by the Holy Spirit, to take the Good News to the world at all times and in all places:  

“But as many as received Him to them He gave the right to become children of God even to those who believe in his name.” (John 1:12)

 

This is how we respond to whatever future is in store. Followers of Christ respond: “Here I am Lord; I come to do Your will.”  

 

Be ready and willing to do what Christ told us to do. It hasn't changed. Go into the world and make faithful disciples for Him everywhere. And when the darkness threatens to overwhelm, remember what He told us:  “… I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

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[1] Ida Auken, “Welcome to 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, And Life Has Never Been Better”, Forbes Magazine, 10 November 2016. https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/shopping-i-cant-really-remember-what-that-is-or-how-differently-well-live-in-2030/?sh=5fabc94f1735

[2] Matthew 28:19-20.

[3] John 3:16. Cf. Romans 5:8.

[4] Pascal – Of or related to Passover or Easter.

CONFIDENCE VERSUS OVERCONFIDENCE

 

My wife says I’m over-confident. I know, it runs in the family. My grandfather was that way. During the Great Depression, when he stood in breadlines, he demanded toast. 

 

Confidence is good. Overconfidence is not. A Christian can be confident in the Lord and that He will take care of him/her regardless of circumstances. It’s unbecoming for a Christian to be over-confident. It can lead to undue self-reliance, arrogance, and turning away from dependence on God. Never presume God’s will.

 

There were times, terrible times, when aggressive multiple sclerosis stripped me of basic daily abilities—like dressing myself or cutting my own meat at dinner, or even getting out of bed. And yet Christ’s presence was ever-present. His still small voice whispered, “Be not afraid, I Am with you.”[1] The sicker I became, the more real and profound His presence became. 

I was able to be confident in the Lord and accept what I was going through was serving a spiritual purpose for my own good.  In 2012, I was diagnosed with cancer. Again, that still small voice whispered, "Be not afraid, I Am with you.” A blanket of His peace descended on me so that I could finally say, “Not my will but Yours be done, Lord.” I could finally accept with confidence that nothing happens outside of God’s control. There was a purpose in what was happening to me. Decades of MS terror taught me that. I was content with wherever cancer would take me. Christ’s love would be with me. 

 

As I was waiting to go into surgery, my wife asked, “Are you afraid?” Certainly, there was concern, but I can’t honestly say I felt no fear. A blanket of God’s comfort inexplicably suppressed or extinguished wide-eyed fear. My gurney was wheeled into the operating room. As the anesthesiologist was about to put me to sleep, a well-meaning but annoying new-age nurse was telling me to relax and think of meadows, bunnies and butterflies. It wasn't necessary. I was trying to pray to the Creator of all the meadows, the bunnies and the butterflies—and the Cosmos. Before the oblivion of anesthesia, again those words came to me. “Be not afraid, I Am with you.”

 

God was in control and He placed me in the hands of a skilled surgeon. I’m happy to say that eleven years later I'm cancer free. Not only that, I’m walking again after many years, and no longer wheelchair dependent. 

You see, I can be confident in the Lord regardless of what happens in this life. Yes, I can be confident in the Lord. Overconfidence would be registering for ballroom dance classes. 

MDP

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[1] See Isaiah 41.10 & 13, John 6.20., Revelation 1.17. Cf. Matthew 8.26 & 14.26-27, Mark 4.40 & 6.50, Luke 12.7, John 14.27.

CURRENCY OF THE SOUL

 

Decades of suffering with a degenerative disability (MS) caused me to deal in the currency of my soul. (It is what makes us human and defines who we are.) With God's leading, I was able to cross a raging river of grief to discover a new self. The old Mark was gone as surely as if I had died. I needed to grieve that loss and search for a new self and self-identity. A new Mark emerged—different to be sure—but no less alive or vital than the previous Mark. My soul answered Yes to the critically important question: Is life worth living, even in what seems to be hopeless circumstances? 

Viktor Frankl was a survivor of Nazi death camps. In his remarkable book "Man's Search for Meaning" he wrote: "Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose." 

My wheelchair was like a prison that housed my broken body, but it also helped liberate me spiritually by driving me inward to deal with inner brokenness. I came to understand that my value is not connected to who I am, what I can do, or even my intelligence. It comes from simply being. Everyone has immeasurable value for no other reason than they were endowed with the indelible Image of God beginning at that spark of life we commonly call conception. 

Frankl also wrote: "If there is to be any meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering." 

There is. ... 

I'm seventy years old. Most of my adult life has been spent struggling with the anguish of multiple sclerosis and creeping paralysis.  In 2018, God unexpectedly raised me out of my electric wheelchair to walk again. What am I to make of it? My interior life is in full bloom. I have placed all of my life in His hands. I am finally willing to accept whatever is His will for me in for this year, and beyond. It is a peaceful place to be. That is the meaning that suffering gave to me. — Mark

A MAGICAL CHRISTMAS MOMENT IN JULY 1957

 

I was raised in a one-horse town in western Canada during the 1950s-1960s. Somewhere in my little grey cells rests an early childhood memory. It happened in the middle of July 1957. 

The day was hot and still. My parents loaded my brother and me into their 1950 Chevy for a long bumpy trip to Edmonton (Alberta). They were meeting a wholesale representative from a toy company to buy Christmas stock for my father’s store. They didn’t breathe a word of it to my brother or me.

When we arrived in Edmonton, I remember walking down sweltering July sidewalks holding my father’s hand. (He told me that he needed to hold my hand so he wouldn’t get lost.) We went to a Canadian National Railway luxury hotel named after Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald.  In all my four years I had never seen such grandeur.  (The Construction of the MacDonald Hotel began in 1911 in a distinctive 16^th castle style of a French chateau.)  A doorman dressed in a Yeoman guard’s uniform ushered us into the lobby of the hotel. My father leaned down and whispered that the doorman must have been waiting for me. I looked around with wide-eyed wonder at the elegant surroundings. It was a mini-culture shock! Vivaldi quietly played over the intercom not Hank Williams on a jukebox singing “Howlin’ At the Moon”. There was no dust bane on the floors of this hotel. We walked down a magnificent long hallway with glistening marble floors under Persian runner rugs. Men wore well-pressed trousers and shiny shoes not Drayton Valley oxfords (rubber boots). Women in this hotel had all their teeth. People “dined” in a dining room and the menus had pages with entrees. A waiter in a tuxedo had a napkin on his arm. People in my town ate at the Wild Cat Café (without the aigu). The menu consisted of, well, wild cat – or so the locals suspected. The name of the waitress was Thelma and she wiped arborite tabletops with a rag that smelled of bleach. She chewed gum and sauntered up to customers to ask, “What’ll yous have?” 

 

The Macdonald Hotel was a different world from what I knew. My family entered an elevator with shiny dark cherry wood panelled walls.  An elderly man wearing a MacDonald tartan blazer pushed a glistening brass handle and took us to our floor. 

Have you ever noticed how irrelevancies can stick in peoples’ memories?  One of mine was passing a hotel housekeeper pushing a hoover vacuum cleaner with a small light near shining on the floor that did not have the slightest speck of dirt or lint. I remember thinking it must be a very clean hotel indeed. Then a terrible thought crossed my mind: What if my mother saw that vacuum cleaner! She might want one! Nothing would be left undisturbed in our house. My colony of earthworms under the rug in my bedroom would be doomed!   

 

What do vacuum cleaners with lint lights and earthworms under a rug have to do with the story? Nothing. I digress. Back to the story. 

We walked down a long hallway and stopped at a huge heavy door. My father knocked. The massive dark cherry wood door slowly and silently opened to reveal . . . Christmas! There before me was tinsel and Garland and Angel hair and a fully decorated Christmas tree declaring a magical world of Christmas—in July! The tree’s lights twinkled and blinked to welcome us. Music from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker was playing in the background. Rows upon rows of tables held samples of new toys for merchants to order. I looked up awestruck at my smiling father! He and the toy salesman laughed. 

 

Every conceivable toy was laid out before me. Everything glittered, twinkled and sparkled in Christmas colours.  This was heaven to a four-year-old boy!

 

My dad picked me up to watch the elaborate precision of a toy train hustling through miniatures mountain tunnels, across trestles, into a little alpine village where tiny lights shone inside wee shops, a little church and tiny houses with snow-covered roofs.  A little gate rose and fell to stop little toy trucks and cars from crossing the tracks while the toy train whistled and chugged past. I felt like Gulliver in Lilliput.[1] I, the boy-giant Markus, watched the goings on of a magical miniature world, from his father’s arms.

 

Then, as though saving the best for last, the salesman opened another big door to an adjoining room. In there we found bicycles, tricycles, sleighs and a large assortment of outdoor toys! There was a salmon-coloured Dick Tracey pedal car with whitewall tires. It was just my size! And the toy salesman let me drive it back and forth down the hallway, right passed the housekeeper pushing the vacuum. Wow! In my mind, that toy salesman was promoted to the stature of Geppetto. [2]

 

But alas, all good things must come to an end. My father ordered his stock for the next Christmas and we left the grand old Macdonald hotel and entered the hot summer day. The magic of Christmas in July melted away. Everything was ordinary and commonplace again.

(My father & I in his store (December 1957) with some Christmas stock ordered the previous July.)

A little boy’s experience with Christmas in July was embedded into my memory and fondly remembered even into old age. 

May this old man wish that sweet childlike joy and longing that lies in each of you a most blessed and merry Advent season. Here is a Christmas song for you. (Hope you like John Rutter.)

Mark

 

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[1] Jonathon Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 1726. A tale of Lemuel Gulliver who finds himself shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput inhabited by people only a few inches tall.

[2] Carlos Collodi, The Adventures of Pinoccheo, 1883.