wfn.org | Softbook helps blind minister become a man of vision

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Note #6036 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

GA00088
June 27, 2000

Softbook helps blind minister become a man of vision

	by John Filiatreau

LONG BEACH, June 27 - The Rev. Donald Olinger says his small congregation at
Astoria Presbyterian Church in Queens, an assembly of ethnic groups that
worships in a 70-year-old building long maintenance-deprived, is probably
unique. It counts among its members “one Anglo person, a woman under 30,”
Koreans, Cubans, Nigerians, other Africans, African-Americans, “and a blind
preacher.”

	Olinger, a graduate of Roanoke College, Columbia Seminary and Johns Hopkins
University, is the blind preacher. He suffers from a hereditary form of
macular degeneration that destroyed his vision over a disheartening one-year
period. “In late 1997 I was fully sighted, with vision that was 20/20 with
glasses,”he says, “and by November 1998 I was legally blind. Both eyes are
now less than 20/400. What that means is that I can see something big and
black at the top of an eye chart, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.”

	It’s a familiar story in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  Astoria Church,
154 years old, had about 1,200 members in the mid-1960s but found itself in
a declining neighborhood. It has fewer than 100 members today, almost all of
them at least 50 years old. And now the neighborhood is being
“gentrified,”Olinger says, “two Starbucks coffee shops and a Barnes & Noble
bookstore have opened” in the area in recent weeks, and rents have
skyrocketed.
	
	Olinger, a lifelong Presbyterian, attended the “reunion Assembly” in
Atlanta in 1983 as an observer (“A marvelous experience!”) and one other, in
Baltimore, in 1992, also as an observer. This is his first General Assembly
as a commissioner. The difference between the roles, he says, is that an
observer “can get up and leave when his rear-end begins to go numb.”

	You might think sightlessness would disqualify a person from service as a
commissioner. After all, he couldn’t see to read the millions of words of
the countless overtures and resolutions and rationales and reports and
referrals and motions and substitute motions and statements and amendments
that are the fodder that nourish the church and keep it alive through the
legislative process.

	But Olinger is able to keep up, because he has been provided a “Softbook,”
an electronic device that stores hundreds of pages of text in digital form,
text that he can read with the aid of a magnifying glass. Last year, only a
handful of commissioners used Softbooks, in a sort of shakedown cruise. This
year about 150 commissioners are using them. It’s likely that all
commissioners will have them one day soon, because they’re more portable,
more convenient and friendlier to the environment. Olinger also has a
PC(USA)-provided human reader, Margaret Santos, to help him stay abreast of
the debate.
									
	Olinger says the Assembly process is “not just chaotic, but messy,” and
comments that “the Presbyterian way of doing business is very demanding.”
Yet he exults, “Being here is just a thrill.” He says he’s disappointed that
“once more, we seem distracted by issues of who can and cannot come to
church. Isn’t it time for us to become more open? ... When is the church
going to get back to being the church?”

	He says his own church rediscovered its heart after it learned that “a
much-beloved staff member” had AIDS. “It’s about people,” he says. “We love
people.”

	That’s why the congregation has started an after-school music program for
kids, opened a shelter for homeless women and sponsored classes in English
as a second language.

	Olinger is writing a book whose working title is, “I Can See Much Better
Now That I’m Blind.” He says a Korean woman in his congregation told him,
“Ever since your physical eyes have gone dark, your spiritual eyes have been
burning bright.” And he thinks she was right.

	“Macular degeneration takes away the center of your field of vision,” he
says. “How many people do you meet who don’t see what’s right in from of
them? My blindness has made me learn to focus better to see what’s right in
front of me.”

	The toughest thing about his disability, he says, is “asking for help.”

	“I was always so self-sufficient,” he says. “Sometimes too much. My
congregation has been very supportive, but I’ve had to learn not to be
independent.”
 
				

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