HUGH FOY offers a reflection on his own experience of disability and the theology of liberation.

Like many Open House readers I have been involved in politics and campaigning in multiple forms. Having grown up in Bridgeton in the east end of Glasgow, I had what is often now called ‘lived experience’ of poverty. It was there in my family and neighbours. That experience was to live with me for the rest of my life, long beyond the period when poverty remained a part of it. Poverty is trauma, it seeps into the soul and identity, producing fears and imposter syndrome in the long term, even for many who escape its clutches.

This experience fundamentally shaped my political and theological understanding of the world. By the 1980s, like many, I was immersed in the theology of liberation with its unapologetic commitment to the option for the poor, its condemnation of oppression, and its inspirational vision that contemporary and historic issues of class for workers and peasants cannot be ignored in any serious reading of scripture. I met Catholic and non-Catholic Christian fellow travellers over the decades, some with a family and personal history like mine. I also met others who let go of the good fortune and privilege their lives had offered to embark on lives of solidarity with those more unfortunate that they had been. This dynamic of solidarity is often lost today. We need a new theology of solidarity, which transcends the futile notions and debates on what qualifies a person to speak out on contemporary issues.

Hugh Foy is Director of Programmes for the UK Region of the Xaverian Missionaries. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.