How Religion Impacted My Growing Up With a Disability

New Year’s Eve 1999 was the first time my parents allowed my siblings and me to stay up past midnight. This resulted in an excellent essay for English class, full of childlike excitement, sparkling cider, and Traditional Scottish farewell song. This was also the first year I learned about New Year’s resolutions. My mom had gotten me a goal chart. That night, with her help, I proudly wrote that by the end of the year she would walk without help.

We clearly had different definitions of “unassisted,” but I believed I would walk alone. I went downstairs and told my father, who was holding a video camera. Did I mention he was trying to walk with crutches? I realize now that this was my audition to play Tiny Tim. And when I was a child, believing that one day God would make me walk, he said that he had achieved it.

I still remember my favorite verses from the Book of Isaiah, which conjured up images of being able to walk without fainting and run with the strength of eagles. Pardon the pun, but Jesus Christ! If that’s not inspiration porn, what is?

As a child, I was prayed for at my first church service, hoping for a miracle cure: a Kool-Aid that I unfortunately drank. I thought that one day I would hear a deep bass voice, echoing from heaven: “Gregorio, you will walk!” Strangely, I never thought about praying more or doing anything special to fulfill our deal. I hoped to be cured because that’s what they promised me. Thus began my tempestuous relationship with God, which I now realize reflects my struggle to relate to my disability.

But one day, I suddenly realized that God would never heal me. Something inside me completely broke. In a scene from the Disney original. Aladdin In the film, Abu the monkey touches something in the Cave of Wonders that is not the magic lamp, causing the cave to melt in on itself. That’s exactly how I felt, and it took me until I was in high school to get over it. Meanwhile, I wrote a lot of depressing poetry and essays in English about how sad I was about never being able to walk. Even more upsetting was that they encouraged me and felt like they expected me to write about my medical history. I felt that the trauma of my childhood experiences in the hospital was the most compelling thing about me.

That’s the problem with miracles. They make us complacent and put the onus on God to improve our lives. When God doesn’t, we feel disappointed and the resulting complex emotions can take years to resolve. But don’t worry: When I finally got comfortable with the fact that I would never walk, I realized that I am “inspirational.”

Let’s address what church is: a gathering where someone with a degree in Bible reading discusses its meaning in our lives. For me it was theater, because my parents would take me out of the wheelchair and accompany me to receive communion. But with the spotlight on me, I became everyone’s inspiration.

I didn’t necessarily think I was inspiring, but I came to believe that there was something about my disability that inspired others. I internalized it. And when you think it’s your job, it becomes an overwhelming responsibility, leaving little room for things like mistakes, complaints, or acknowledging what it’s really like to live with a disability. It had to be inspiring because other people said it was. And I couldn’t disappoint them. This phenomenon reached its peak during Holy Week.

That year, the priest commented that the way someone received communion showed God’s grace in real time. I thanked God that the church was dark as I turned purple with embarrassment. Sure enough, it took me forever to get home that night because people even came up to the car to tell me that I was an “inspiring example of God’s grace.”

In the long term, inspirational porn can cause depression, because you start to believe that you don’t have the right to experience emotions like other people. Or that the difficulties of life as a disabled person are there for you to overcome to inspire others with the example of your strength. This lasted until I was 33, when I told someone I thought the world needed more disabled theologians. The next day I listened to Judy Heumann’s podcast. She was speaking to disabled theologian Amy Kenny, who wrote My body is not a prayer request. I got the book.

Kenny’s reading of the Bible is inclusive. Suddenly I saw myself reflected in these canonical stories that many of us know regardless of our beliefs. God became a Creator who believes in biodiversity and disability became a crucial part of his creation. It was neither a curse nor something to overcome for the benefit of others. Kenny talks about how Jacob’s hip was permanently dislocated after fighting the angel. Disability therefore became a permanent marker of his contact with the divine. The prophet Ezekiel had a vision of God on a throne with wheels. Kenny argues that this could be seen as God using a wheelchair. I would add that in Ezekiel’s vision the wheels are made of angels and other heavenly creatures. The images essentially demonstrate a theological model for care: even God depends on others to move.

Culturally, religion is something that almost everyone can identify with in some way. The Bible teaches that we are all created in the image of God. Therefore, seeing God as disabled is as powerful as the representation of disability in pop culture. For me, thinking about a disabled God helps confront ableism. We all know that disability can be an incredibly isolating experience. Seeing disability as an attribute of the divine gives disabled people their own divinity. In the final chapter of his book, Kenny describes heaven as a fully accessible public space or a night out with a group of friends where everyone’s needs are understood. Seeing disability as part of God’s plan is a first step to achieving that reality.