Helena Mary Cole

I read book not long ago about a teenage girl named Daisy, a violinist hoping to get into Juilliard and who was born with cerebral palsy. CP varies greatly in how much it affects the person’s mobility, and Daisy could walk, but all the same, her CP was otherwise detectable in the way she moved, a visible disability. The love interest of the novel had an anxiety disorder. The book fell under the category of Young Adult fiction featuring disabled characters, and I try to read as many of those as I can find because that’s exactly the same kind of novel I’m trying to get published. It’s a good idea to know what else is on the bookshelves in one’s specific genre. 

Daisy was Catholic and attended mass every week with her family. She had a constant uphill struggle in the novel (it wasn’t the main conflict) against Catholics with rude, ableist attitudes, and this finally culminated in Daisy showing up for mass one Sunday and finding that the pastor had decided to dedicate the entire hour to praying for her to be cured of her CP. Without asking her first. 

So, this was super confusing to me. I’ve been attending church my entire life and I have never seen anything like that happen on a Sunday morning, not in forty years of being an evangelical Protestant or ten years of being a Roman Catholic. It was clear to me early on in the narrative that the author had never attended mass, or else hadn’t in a very long time, which struck me forcibly as another example of a fiction writer not bothering to do proper research. Evangelical Protestant Sunday services can differ depending on the denomination, but the Roman Catholic novus ordo is exactly the same every day the world over. Would it have been so much trouble for the author to pop in to the closest parish and maybe sit in on mass once or twice? Printed materials are available on the order of the mass, so it’s not like it’s hard to find these things out. Every time an author has their protagonist walk into a church for a Roman Catholic mass, I can tell in the first sentence whether or not that author has ever actually attended one. HINT: I have yet to come across one who has. 

And so I began to develop a bit of an attitude towards this particular author in that regard. I thought, with some snark, “Running short on villains were you? Decided, oh, I know what to do – I’ll just pull a few evil Cathoics out of my back pocket and voila.” Honestly. 

But this author was physically disabled, as disclosed in the bio on the back of the book. And I think I know now where this scene with Daisy and the unsolicited healing mass came from. 

In my online research for writing a physically disabled character, I came across a lot of videos, by wheelchair users, that had some variation on the title, “Things Not to Say to a Wheelchair User.” That tells you something right off the bat: one attracts a lot of insensitive comments from strangers if one is wheelchair dependent and out and about in the community. It happens often enough that every wheelchair user with a YouTube channel dedicates a video to the subject at some point. And one of the things that’s very frequently on the list of things not to say to a wheelchair user is: “I’ll pray for you.” 

The unsolicited “I’ll pray for you.” Apparently, they get this often from random strangers. It generally comes from Christians, and some physically disabled people will be gracious enough to concede that they can see where it’s coming from, that this Christian who’s a perfect stranger to them wants to be supportive. But at the same time, my fellow Christians, listen to what they’re telling us. They’re saying , “Don’t say that to us.” No matter how good your intentions may be, it is never well received. In fact, it is downright hurtful. 

Prayer is a widely misunderstood thing in a post-Christian society. It’s no longer a given that most people are Christian, or even pray at all. From the outside, people think of Christian prayer as a heavenly wish list. You ask God for stuff. You ask God to solve your problems. On the inside, we are all in different stages of learning that prayer isn’t mainly about that at all. Petitioning God comes into it, sure, but the main goal is to sacrifice one’s own will to become more aligned with God’s. But if you’re approaching  someone you don’t know who’s in a wheelchair, tapping them on the shoulder and saying, “I’ll pray for you,” the person hears, “You see my disability as a problem that needs fixing. You’re trying to fix me.” 

The assumption is that all wheelchair dependent people are miserable because they can’t walk, and that all their hopes and energies are focused on being able to walk someday, and you, random Christian, can make their day by letting them know that you support them in that with your prayers. What’s really happening is your imagination is leading you astray. 

In the case where a person has sustained a traumatic spinal cord injury (which certainly does not account for all wheelchair users – that’s just the situation I focused my research on), it’s common for the person to go through denial, a phase where they may be really determined to walk again. They may or they may not go through that. Some people do recover the ability to walk, to varying degrees. Some are looking at a lifetime of wheelchair use either way. But denial is considered as part of the process of coming to terms with their injury, a natural step on the way to eventual acceptance, and getting on with life as a disabled person. If you’re a total stranger to that person, you don’t know where they are on that journey. You can see how unhelpful it is to assume they must be perpetually miserable about it. In any case, anyone who’s really paying attention will see that wheelchair users pin their hopes and energies on society learning how to accommodate them better, not on figuring out how to overcome their disability, which they have no control over. 

It’s easier to look at other people, and make decisions about their problems, and about how to solve them, than it is to look in the mirror and start with oneself. The medical model of disability: “That person can’t climb those stairs. There’s something wrong with that person.” The social model: “That building doesn’t have a ramp. There’s something wrong wtih that building.” The onus for change is on us, not the physcially disabled in our midst. 

The unsolicited “I’ll pray for you” is creating the impression that Jesus promotes the medical model of disability. Some wheelchair users who hear this from Christians can be reluctant to come to church because they think that they’ll be surrounded by people who might demand change from them, or might view their disability as the result of weak faith. I’m not saying that miracles don’t happen – THEY DO. I am saying that God grants miracles on a case-by-case basis. We don’t know what God may be doing in anyone’s secret heart of hearts, or how He may be doing things. A humble Christian leaves all that to God’s wisdom. 

So maybe don’t tell a stranger “I’ll pray for you” just because you can see they are physically disabled. If you want to pray for them, please do it silently and secretly. I am pleading as a Christian who has seen something ugly in the world, caused by some Christians. Hopefully a minority. I don’t know. On the one hand, who doesn’t need an extra Hail Mary just to get through their day, no matter who you are? Sometimes, I do that for random people I pass on the sidewalk. I’m thinking, okay, here’s a person who crossed paths with me today, and that’s great. Nobody’s life is easy, everybody struggles with something, so God, let this Hail Mary speak to whatever that may be for that person. If I happen to do that because I crossed paths with a wheelchair user, well, they don’t tend to mind so much if you’re doing something for them that you’d do for anybody. But they don’t have to know you did that. God loves secret deeds. Why are you voicing the fact that you’re praying for a physically disabled stranger anyway? Are you hoping for a pat on the back? 

Well, it grieves me. It grieves me that this novel about the violinist named Daisy got published as it is, possibly under the assumption that the unsolicited “I’ll pray for you” also means that unsolicited healing masses get said for specific physically disabled parishioners on a given Sunday. I can see it happening if the person asked for it, but not if they didn’t. For whatever reason, the author didn’t bother to look into what goes on at mass, to discover how unrealistic the scene she described was, and neither did the beta readers, the agent, the editor, the publisher…. The fact that no one would question that Christians are doing that sort of thing is grievous, and I hope that we can heal the wound that created it.

We can start by not making any assumptions about what the lives of physically disabled people are like.