The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 3 no. 1, Spring 2023 Invited Commentary ISSN 2563-9374 Care in the Messy Middle Thomas Reynolds PhD Associate Professor of Theology, Emmanuel College, Toronto tom.reynolds@utoronto.ca In an ordinary day, woven into the fabric of my various activities is a series of unresolvable tensions that coalesce around an ambiguous word, “care.” I am both a care-receiver and a care-giver, and the line between the two is blurry. Living with chronic depression and complex anxiety disorder as well as being a single parent with an adult child on the autism spectrum creates complexity, even as I live with privilege as a white, straight, cis-gendered male who is a tenured professor. The embodied texture of care in my life is at times so beautiful and joy-filled my heart gushes with gratitude, while at other times, so rough, chaotic, and overwhelming it shrinks my spirit and alienates beyond what I can talk about. Mostly, however, the days are a comingling of these, a messy mixture of anguish and delight that does not conform to tidy narratives and packaged answers but, in its own way, and in the company of others, does live into a kind of hope. It is important to begin by noting that the meaning of care entails a whole constellation of features, many freighted with negative baggage. Care and violence, for example, have been connected, such that care can be a function of paternalistic control and management, systems of power (whether, for example, family-related, medical, or faith-based, etc.) presuming a posture of “knowing better” that supports practices of doing “to” or “for” others. Often this plays out in seeking unilateral “cures” for disability and mental health challenges. 1 Care conjures horrible histories of institutional and custodial care aimed at fixing or regulating stigmatized bodies, those deemed unruly or abnormal in an ableist society captivated by normalcy. 2 Additionally, care labour has been gendered and domesticated as “woman’s work,” under-valued and invisible. 3 And colonial legacies play a role, too, “programs” of care embodied in multipronged systems of injustice – from the legacies of residential schools, racist migration policies, and undocumented care labour, to restrictive public health care policies, privatization and the commodification of care services, and more. 4 The problems here relate also to histories of care in Christian traditions (which I am part of, and which shape me in complex ways). A primary example is how care has been framed as charity, as self-less and sacrificial giving to “others” represented as needy, passive recipients. The effect of this often amounts to moral postures as well as material practices of condescension and pity. Correlative to these 4 See Akemi Nishida, Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022), esp. 14–17. 3 See the literature in feminist ethics of care and political economy of care. For example, Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 2 For an excellent study of the failures of institutional “care” in Canada, see Madeline C. Burghardt, Broken: Institutions, Families, and the Construction of Intellectual Disability (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018). 1 See Eli Claire, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), see esp. ch. 1. It is no accident that care and cure are etymologically related. 8