I’m reading Amy Kenny’s My Body Is Not A Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church. Kenny isn’t clear about her own disability or medical condition, but she tells us she has difficulty walking and one of her legs is frequently in pain. In her introduction, she talks about a conflict she feels about a desire to keep silent, so no one will dismiss her pain (a frequent occurance, especially by doctors, she notes), and a desire to scream out and attest to the difficulties of her experience.
“This book is my scream,” she writes.
Kenny, I’m finding, is very insightful, and many of her insights would have been difficult (if not impossible) to reach from the experience of an able body. I’m thinking differently about several things because of her book. At the same time, it is clear that the book is her scream, that she is deeply hurt and is speaking, as I’ve so often heard, “from a place of pain.”
Usually when we say someone is speaking “from a place of pain,” we use that phrase to dismiss them. It’s true that when we’re extremely hurt and extremely angry, in that moment of extreme pain, we may not be at our most rational. But if we were to dismiss all expressions of pain as being irrational as if they were desperate utterances from a desperate situation, we would be missing out on a valuable perspective. Healthy people have blind spots — pain is one of them — and listening to the people speaking from their place of pain is a way for healthy people to fill out their blind spots.
I remember times when symptoms of multiple then-undiagnosed (and therefore untreated) illnesses flared up, and I canceled meetings and spent the day on the couch, generally being miserable. I prayed for the misery to end, to be done with it once for all, but I would often catch myself at the end of this prayer. I wanted to get better, but I didn’t want to forget what it was like to feel this way. The fear of forgetting was intense and sometimes overpowered my prayer for healing. Why was I so afraid of forgetting? Because in the church communities near where I lived, there was so much focus on “healing” by people who seemed to be unaware that suffering was still a thing for a lot of people. I felt like I didn’t fit in, like I was judged for not “having enough faith” because it seemed like, according to their theology, if I had enough faith and surrendered to God, all my problems would be gone. And if I still had problems, I must not be good enough.
It’s easy to slip into a “prosperity gospel” idea of Christianity. If you do the right things, life will be good; if you still experience difficulties beyond the ordinary struggles of everyday life, the problem is you: your lack of faith, your sin, something like that. Hidden in this false theology is a sense of security: as long as I keep my faith (which I have control over), I won’t suffer to any serious degree.
This is simple and easy to understand, which is part of why it’s attractive. But the fact is, suffering comes for all of us, often in surprising ways or in ways that seem completely unjust. Those who suffer greatly despite having an ordinary amount of faith, despite being ordinary sinners like everyone else, testify to the fact that we don’t have control over everything, and we can’t predict everything. Our lives, our bodies, are fragile, even when they seem strong, healthy, and invincible. Kenny argues that her disability is a prophetic witness to this truth, and I think she is right.
Kenny is clearly speaking from a place of pain. But we shouldn’t dismiss her, or others who are suffering. When we listen to those speaking from a place of pain, we can become aware of truth that we hadn’t noticed before, and get a glimpse into our blind spots. We may find that we don’t love our neighbor as well as we thought we did. We may find that we’ve bought into a lie that another person does not have the luxury of believing. We may find that we have a responsibility to love and serve that we had kind of wanted to ignore.
Kenny describes a beautiful prayer room at a church, which she accessed only because her husband was able to carry her up the stairs. It’s these kinds of things that often make her feel excluded at church. No one is intentionally excluding her, but they simply aren’t thinking about her and her need for access when they built the place. And it hurts! Maybe if they had listened to her speaking from her place of pain, they would have thought about her, and people like her, when they designed prayer spaces that were meant to be welcoming to all. There would be ramps and elevators and these kinds of things. She could belong — not simply be welcomed out of generosity like a client, but be an actual part of the community who is missed when she is not around.
If someone is speaking from a place of pain, ask yourself, “Why are they hurting? Am I contributing to that suffering in a way that I didn’t realize before? How can I stop? Is there a way for me to make an extra effort to relieve some of that suffering? What should I do?”
We may find that our hearts are smaller than we realized. And that is an opportunity to grow.
This reminds me of Facebook, where people mostly post happy times, happy memories. Happiness can distort our view, just like pain does. Somehow it’s easier to believe that everyone else is happy and we’re the only one in pain. However, most people are in some pain most of the time. While we don’t need to have daily communal pity parties, it’s important to acknowledge that the pain exists as part of the normal course of life. Sharing the pain helps us to know that we’re not alone. When I listen to another’s pain, I can grow in holy charity.