Can I pray for you? A conversation with Amy Kenny

Olivia Shivas: A lot of these shared experiences, especially about being prayed for when you have a disability, are just so relatable. Can you describe a situation when this has happened to you?

Amy Kenny: The story that my book starts with is of a woman at my church at the time coming up to me unsolicited and telling me, "God told me to pray for you," and being particularly adamant that that was the case. It's a bit of a conversation stopper when you have God on your side. So when I said, "No thanks, not today Satan," she grabbed my wrist and forced me to listen to her prayer.

This story is my own and of one particular incident, but it represents a number of stories that myself and fellow disabled folks have endured, whether it's at church or at the grocery store, at the public library, in car parks, people come up to disabled folks all the time, ready to pray us away, excited to fix what isn't broken. And I started the book there to give folks a window into what my everyday life is like and what so many of us who are disabled endure all the time from strangers and soon to be strangers. And also to give folks an invitation to understanding this exchange in a different way.

One that is not a healing narrative where one person has power over another person and is attempting to pray away a core part of their identity. But thinking more about how disabled folks are creative and have our own wisdom to share with any community. And our humanity shouldn't be taken from us simply because someone views us as a problem to be solved.

OS: How do you respond in those situations?

AK: Usually I just run them right over with my mobility scooter and never look back. I think it depends on how many spoons I have that day and on what the context is, whether it indeed is a stranger that I have never met before out in a public context or whether it is someone that I have some kind of relational connection to. But generally I share that I don't need prayer for curing because I'm already fearfully and wonderfully made and I'm already whole. And even asserting that is radical and surprising to many folks who are attempting to pray us away.

OS: When I was younger, I just used to just sit there and cry but I've learned to reframe the conversation and think, actually, I don't need prayer for that, but can you pray for something else.

AK: I've done that before too in also attempting to share some of my lived experience with folks in that moment and share that being disabled isn't the hardest part of my day necessarily. It's that I'm tired from a project I'm working on or that I would like support with something else going on in my life and I think at the root of that is really affirming our humanity.

OS: How many times has this happened to you?

AK: Numbers don't go up that high. It happened to me every week at church, throughout my pre-teen and teen years. And it has happened pretty regularly since then, not in church contexts always, but just out in the public sphere. So easily hundreds of times it's happened to me. I think that people are trying to be faithful, but despite that intent, the impact is still harmful. And what I hope people receive from the book is an invitation to a better way where we get to learn from and with our disabled neighbours instead of constantly trying to change them.

OS: How would you respond now compared to maybe 10, 15 years ago? 

AK: When I was a kid, it was hard to respond because I felt like I should have people pray for me or I should be polite or I should listen to someone's prayers because I was still working out my theology and working out how to engage, especially with adults. Now that I have more confidence in knowing who I am and knowing that being disabled is a part of that, and it's a beautiful part of who I am.

OS: Like you're saying when you're younger, you feel like they should pray for you, you should be polite about it. It's like we are conditioned to behave like that as disabled people, like be grateful for what you can get and any help you can get and you know don't offend the non-disabled person. It takes a lot of unconditioning to unlearn that behaviour.

AK: Yeah there's this idea we should be grateful for any crumbs we're getting and I think ableism keeps us grateful.

OS: How do you think you got to that point to really know who you are and, you know, respond differently in those situations?

AK: I grew up in a household that taught me that everyone was made in the image of God and I had the audacity to believe that and even when I wasn't treated that way by folks who claimed to believe that as well. I really held on to that. It also took a lot of time, a lot of patience, and some therapy. 

One thing that was incredibly helpful for me was just witnessing the beauty of the community of creation and how so much out in the world functions in a way that we might term disabled. So trees are crooked and bent and those are words that are used to describe my disabled body mind by the white coats. And lots of animals, kangaroos, can't walk backwards. Their huppity-buppity gait is delightful and we revel in it.

And my gait is usually I use a  wheelchair or mobility scooter to navigate the world and when using a cane have a gait that some have described in not so nice words that I won't repeat here. And there's many animals and flowers and trees that we might call disabled and we think of them as radiant. And so how much more then, can I understand my own bodymind in that way.

OS: Oh, that's so beautiful. It reminds me of when I was younger, because my disability is genetic, me and my dad and my brother, we used to walk wobbly. And we used to call ourselves the wobbly penguins, like as a cute word. But actually, you know, you think about penguins, yes, they're cute when they're wobbly, but in a kind of like a non-disabled view of humans, like, oh, that's not right. But we saw it as something like, yeah, just a quirky part of us.

AK: Yeah and penguins have the highest energy recovery rates of any terrestrial animal. And that just means that they're efficient when they move and their gait is that kind of wobbly style. And yet, when we apply that to humans, we think that that's bad. Elephants are born blind. Lions sleep most of the day. And we think of them as fierce and ferocious, yet us spoonies who need to rest are critiqued. So it was really thinking about how easy it was for myself to think of animals and the rest of the community of creation as divine and radiant and vibrant, and then asking myself, why can't I be any of those things.

OS: That's beautiful. What's your advice to other disabled people who get in these situations where someone wants to pray for them?

AK: I spent a lot of time as a kid trying to convince people and myself that I was worthy of belonging and that I was whole just as I was. And I wish someone would have told me what I now know to be true, which is that my disabled body is so rare that science is still discovering all of the secrets that she contains. That my disabled body is divine, that our disabled bodies are whole and cherished just as we are, regardless of what our access needs are for that day. So I'm not sure that I would have advice for people, except to say that my own journey of celebrating my disabled body allowed me to be present in those moments that are often painful and not be harmed by others' view of what my disability means to them.

I think something that is really important to always say is that disabled people are uniquely creative because we live in a world not built for our bodyminds. So this idea that people want to pray us away doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. One of them being because disabled folks have created everything from texting to touch screens to the potato peeler to Snuggies. And that comes from our unique creativity because we live in a world that isn't built for us. So it's not just that it does harm when people attempt to pray us away, and it makes a lot of assumptions about our worth and belonging. Imagine what we could all create together if we supported and celebrated disabled folks. Imagine how we could all thrive.

OS: That's my idea of heaven.

AK: Right?

OS: It's beautiful.

* This interview has been shortened for clarity and brevity