My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church

by Amy Kenny

Before I learned the name of my disability, I was informed it was probably nothing.

The worst of it wasn’t the hospital tests or even the doctors’ cavalier words. It was the way I had stifled my own screams. For so long I have kept my pain hidden, underground, so it cannot be dismissed by anyone. Smiling instead of wincing, reporting that I am “fine” instead of divulging the truth of the torture, shielding people from the ache of disability slurs, dreading that my wounds will scare people off. But some days, I just want to scream. My body wants to scream out so loudly that no one can deny it, in decibels louder than a lawn mower. I have waited longer than seventeen years for my screaming summer, when everyone listens to my disabled body shriek.

On repeat, they applaud the stories where Jesus healed a disabled outcast like me, without stopping to consider that curing bodies and healing lives are not the same thing.

This woman uses the prayer card to justify imposing her prejudice on a stranger she assumes despises being disabled. I am not confined to my wheelchair. I have not lost a battle to a disease. I am many things, but a tragic defeat is not one of them.

Belonging shouldn’t have the admission price of assimilation.

I don’t have a junior holy spirit because I am disabled. To suggest that I am anything less than sanctified and redeemed is to suppress the image of God in my disabled body and to limit how God is already at work through my life. Maybe we need to be freed not from disability but from the notion that it limits my ability to showcase God’s radiance to the church. What we need to be freed from is ableism.

This isn’t the only time Jesus talks about disability as a teacher and a way to reveal God to nondisabled people. When Jesus encountered a man born blind in Jerusalem, “his disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him’” (John 9:2–3). Just like the prayerful perpetrators who approach my wheelchair with head tilts and side-glances, the disciples interpret this man solely as his disability. They are so caught up in prescribing the cause of his disability that we don’t even learn his name. Do they even know it, I wonder? He’s known as the man formerly known as blind, which sounds like a dad joke about Prince. I hate that he is not given a name, as though he is unknown and forgotten, not important enough to name. I know what it’s like to be reduced to a diagnosis, and I want this man to be given more humanity and dignity than that. So let’s call him Zechariah, which means “God remembers.” Zach is so much more than his blindness. “I am the man,” he confidently enlightens his neighbors, wanting them to know who he really is, in addition to his disability (v. 9). We also get a sense of his personality throughout the chapter: he’s not afraid to challenge authority figures, and he’s feisty. He seems like someone who would use the eye-roll and face-palm emojis with regularity. (Who doesn’t?) Zach advocates for himself w...

Wow. Write this bible verse down.

Religious neighbors then, as now, want disability to stop making them uncomfortable. Insert God here to make ableism seem holy.

Zach received a physical cure in the beginning of John 9 when he emerged from the pool able to see, but his true healing does not occur until much later in the chapter, when he declares, “Lord, I believe,” and worships Jesus (9:38). That’s the moment he’s restored through a conversation with the living God and is finally able to reach the place of worship he’s been excluded from. Jesus is always tearing down the boundaries we put up, and here Jesus reveals the unnecessary barriers of kingdom exclusion. Everyone is now welcome at the table! Zach can worship Jesus anywhere, even outside the temple, even on the Sabbath, even without the permission of the religious elite. That’s the moment he realizes who Jesus truly is: not some random magician or prophet, but the Son of Man. That’s when he’s healed.

What about healing the community’s bias, though?

Perhaps instead of trying to pray away the cane, prayerful perpetrators should ensure that buildings are accessible to me.

Instead of desperately trying to cure all disabilities, the church should do the slow and difficult work of healing the surrounding society by tearing down spaces, practices, and mindsets that are inaccessible to disabled people, even when those spaces are inside the church itself.

My body might be more crooked than yours, but it has earned its spiky edges. My leg might be blue from lack of circulation, but it sparkles like sapphires. My nerves are on fire, but it is fire that releases the sequoia cones that germinate the forest. My spasms are as sharp as ice, but ice is what regulates the ocean’s tide. My disabled body is made of the same stuff as stars.

I thought that I could perfectionist my way out of disability discrimination.

I was trapped on the hamster wheel of performing my worth, my body an “in spite of” instead of a contributing ally in my life.

Complacency is the hardest hurdle to clear.

When I read this passage, I picture Jesus telling the church who fought against the ADA: “Depart from me, for I was in a wheelchair and you gave me no ramp; I was d/Deaf, and you gave me no interpreter; I was blind, and you gave me no visual descriptions. I needed an accessible bathroom, and you did not install one because it was too expensive. I asked you not to insult me by saying ‘lame’ and you laughed at me. I wanted to be included, and you said it would violate your faith commitments. I was disabled, and you did not accommodate me” (cf. Matt. 25:41–43).

Perhaps that’s the real fear loitering beneath the discomfort with disabled people: the realization that you, too, will likely join us one day. We are the mirror you don’t want to see. We embody the future that you are afraid to imagine. Maybe you should learn from us instead of casting us aside.

For fellow disabled people: Remember a time when someone said or did something ableist toward you. Re-create the narrative with words, pictures, or meditations in a way that reimagines the event without ableism. This is not to minimize the harm or accept the ableism, but to try to edit the event in your mind to imagine how God might reassure you of your own belovedness in that moment. How might God remind you of how beloved you are? What would you want to be called instead of the ableist word? How would you want to be treated? Sit in the feeling of the edited moment, emphasizing your own worth and value to the God who sees.

it is based on the notion that if folks are nice enough, we can hold hands, wear matching friendship bracelets, and eventually ableism will disappear. Of course we should be nice to disabled people. But niceness doesn’t cure ableism. I shouldn’t have to audition for my civil rights.

Accusing us of faking disability, using paperwork as an additional hoop that we must jump through, making us prove that we “deserve” our accommodations—all these behaviors suggest that benevolence gave us our civil rights, so spite can withdraw them at any time. It’s as if we’re given a day pass to enter the nondisabled world, but it can be revoked if we’re not grateful enough or don’t perform our disability the way we’re “supposed” to. As though some of us are more deserving of civil rights than others.

Diagnosis is an act of naming what I already told them was true. Diagnosis is a way to get them to believe me.

Most doctors don’t want me to be human. They prefer diseases, diagnoses, and drugs. They want me to be a silent medical chart in their examination process, never asking why or how, never divulging the pain or the effect their instructions have on my life. So long as I follow directions, present a textbook disease to them, and remove all humanity from the appointment, they allow me to attend.

Disabled people bear an unfair burden for what is true about all of humanity; temporarily nondisabled people just don’t realize it yet. Our bodies are not self-sufficient. We cannot rely solely on ourselves. We must become interdependent to thrive. We must learn to promote disability justice to help restore coflourishing among humanity.

In fact, the quickest way to secure an Oscar nod is by playing a disabled character, as if our bodies are props that can be used for accolades but quickly discarded when they become too heavy, too spontaneous, or too messy.

The other major thing that shifts here is Jacob’s hip. Literally. This is not a mark of weakness or punishment in the passage. The new name and new limp are signs of his blessing and covenant with God. The limp is a badge of Jacob’s strength and unrelenting determination, a reminder that he fought, persevered, and would not let go, all night long. Lionel Richie would be proud. The limp is a sign of the prophetic witness that God invites wrestling to create transformation. God even initiates the fight! To consider the limp as a punishment completely misses the way it is described in the passage. It is likely some arrive at that understanding through internalized narratives of disability as punitive. Wrestling reveals something about Jacob we haven’t observed up until this point in the story: He’s a fighter. He’s tenacious. He’s a survivor.

Those of us who are disabled already know how to welcome interdependence as a habitual practice without demonizing our bodies in the process.

Even our pain is a prayer.

I am not your metaphor. My body is not your symbol to use. My crippled body and lame leg do not give you permission to dismiss me as symbolic for whatever you find difficult. Being told over and over again that your body is immoral is exhausting. No, that meeting was not “paralyzing” or “crippling” or “blinding,” unless it was physically paralyzing, crippling, or blinding.

We might have assumed it was acceptable to use a certain word or metaphor; and perhaps at one point it was unobjectionable in our social circles. But once we recognize that the word is expired, we should put down the putrid chocolate milk and drink something else. There are other drinks to be gulped. Grabbing what is right in front of you, even when it is past the expiration date, causes internal damage, discomfort, and expulsion, whether it is intended or not. Disability slurs are past the expiration date. Using disability as a metaphor is past the expiration date. Resisting change that will benefit the least of these is past the expiration date.

Whenever I invite someone to rethink their language, I am taking the time to invest in them instead of dismissing them as a lost cause.

This is what neighbor love looks like in practice: Realizing that you might not understand my pain but committing to taking it seriously.

When I said I wanted to be Wonder Woman, it was so people didn’t think I was a burden, not so people didn’t care for my burdens. It feels more like a condemnation than a compliment: a spiritual bypassing of sorts, where they don’t have to get involved in my liberation from ableism because I am strong enough to endure the pain of it. I am a fighter, but what if I don’t have to be?