“Much of the church has forgotten that we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection.” That’s the first sentence of the blurb on the back of this book – one of the books some of us read together in Lent: My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice and the Church, by Amy Kenney. I talked about it a little on Maundy Thursday; I’m going to say a little more right now. 

One core question Kenney raises in this book is whether people see her body and other disabled bodies as marring the image of God, or as enlarging our image of God. Is a disabled body something that needs saving and redeeming, or needs care, respect, and deep understanding? She explores the mindset of ableism, and the many obvious and subtle ways it manifests in churches. Here’s a definition of ableism, which Kenney quotes from Talila Lewis: Ableism is “a system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, excellence, and productivity.” 

Kenney asks us, “What if everything we think about bodies – every idea that some bodies are better than others – is wrong?” (149) She challenges the “deficit lens” that sees disabled bodies primarily through what they cannot do, and suggests a very different framing: “We are a parade of extraordinary experiences that can teach the world about what it means to be embodied.” (110, 113) She distinguishes between the physical experience of disability, and the social experience of disability – and argues that the social experience is often more difficult than the physical aspect. 

People and institutions are resistant to learning, supporting, accommodating, and including – so disabled people are devalued and shut out in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with their actual physical state of being. Kenney writes, “The hardest part of being disabled isn’t the pain, it’s the people. It’s trying to explain.” (116) 

Late in the book she sums up her mission: “I am just one disabled girl, sitting in front of the church, asking them to love us. We need to learn from the embodied experiences of people with different types of disabilities to deepen our understanding of God, Scripture, and an embodied life of faith.” (158) 

“Much of the church has forgotten that we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection.” That’s our Gospel story this morning – the risen Jesus, still bearing the wounds of his crucifixion. Kenney talks, briefly, about Thomas. He reminds her of the many people she’s met who respond to her disability by trying to make sense of it, to fit it into a theology where every story has a happy ending, or a concept of health where every malady has a cure. She writes, “Thomas seeks to understand what can’t be fully explained… Perhaps instead of [trying to make sense of disability], we should welcome its disruption to our limited understanding of how bodies function.” (51) 

But more than Thomas, the wounded Jesus is important for Kenney. She writes, “The disabled God, on the cross, is the one I most relate to. I’d probably still follow that Jesus even without the resurrection.” (166) A few pages later, she proclaims: “I refuse to be ashamed of my disabled body because it displays the crucified Christ. It is twisted and twitchy and tired, but it is triumphant.” (169) 

You may have heard people draw a distinction between curing and healing, with curing defined as a more biomedical process focused on eliminating disease, and healing as a more holistic, sociocultural process of becoming whole – a process that may or may not include a cure. In our book group, we had a fascinating and inconclusive conversation about a related issue: the words wellness and wholeness. I wondered out loud about the words I use when I’m praying for folks. 

We found that some of us felt resistance to the world wholeness because it implied measuring someone against some standard of right or complete. But others of us likewise had a resistance to the word wellness because of the company it keeps – the baggage of the wellness industry and fads like celery juice and beef tallow, and the ways “wellness” has been used as a euphemism to privilege bodies that look a certain way. To use either word in prayer – in church – it feels like we need an expansive, holistic, joyful understanding of what we mean by it, and it’s hard to pack all that into a prayer! I still don’t have good answers here, but I’m grateful for the way the conversation stretched my awareness and curiosity. 

What does it mean to be well? What does it mean to be whole? What does God desire for us? What if God’s desire for us is not to conform our bodies or minds to some norm, but for us to be free from pain and to be welcomed and loved by community? 

The challenge of the book, of our conversation about it, and of today’s Gospel, of Jesus’ risen, redeemed, imperfect body: There isn’t a way people should be. There’s just us, together. And the holy joyful obligation of that is to listen and learn and become a community where we can each be our whole selves.