I am scrolling through Episcopal News Service’s job listings and weighing the adjectives in the job descriptions. One posting describes the ideal priest as energetic. Mentally I strike a line through that posting because I know what this parish means: non-disabled. It won’t say so outright, but I’ve learned to read between the lines.
I know lots of disabled priests — more than your average person does, anyway. If I have been somewhere talking about disability, sometimes they will follow me to my car to talk privately, or they might maneuver me into a conversation between just the two of us. They want to tell me their story, because I am safe. They know that as a fellow crip, I won’t betray them. I won’t think they are weak; I won’t wish that they were more “energetic.” They don’t have to put on a show for me — the Everything Is Just Great show that disabled people put on for public consumption, especially disabled people in positions of leadership, and doubly so disabled people in positions of spiritual leadership.
When I was doing my chaplain internship in a local hospital, I talked to my mentor — an amazing, empathetic, highly skilled professional chaplain — about some of my misgivings. Most of those misgivings involved my use of an electric wheelchair for covering the long distances necessary for hospital work. But it was my first time using one, and I was apprehensive that being in the chair might be a hindrance to my ministry and to pastoral connection. What if the wheelchair were all patients saw when they looked at me? What if it got in the way?
“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” my mentor reassured me. “Definitely not once they see how articulate you are.”
I was puzzled for a response; after all, I hadn’t expressed a worry about my ability to speak. And then I realized that her brain had leaped to the assumption that many able-bodied people make when confronted with a visible disability. The unspoken, unconscious assumption that physical incompetence must mean incompetence in other ways too was lurking underneath my friend’s words when she implicitly advised me to be extra articulate to make up for my wheelchair.
As it turns out, I didn’t need to worry about the pastoral connection. I found that in almost every patient’s room I entered, I was at a distinct advantage. Unlike every other medical or spiritual professional who came into the room, I was not looming over my patients. I was immediately at eye level, and that made connection easier, not harder. Unlike pretty much every other person who came into the room, I wasn’t standing outside of their suffering; my wheelchair signaled that I was in it with them, that we were in this together. It wasn’t some magic fix to every tough pastoral situation I encountered, but it helped far more often than it hurt.
The disabled are somewhere between 13 and 25 percent of the American population. The discrepancy in that number comes from how you define disabled; the Pew Research Center relies on the Census Bureau’s 2021 numbers, while the Centers for Disease Control puts the number at more like one in four Americans, or 25 to 28 percent. The census relies on self-identification, while the CDC looks more closely at medical statistics. (And if you’re thinking, That’s one heck of a discrepancy, ask yourself why it is that people might choose not to identify as disabled.)
The global average is much lower because, outside of wealthy countries, the disabled don’t survive at the rate they do here, thanks to 20th medical advances. Those advances have made living longer possible for everyone, not just for disabled people, and the older humans grow, the more likely we are to experience one or more limiting disabilities. Of course there are other ways our number grows; unlike other minority groups, we are the one demographic you could join tomorrow. You are one car accident, one synaptic misfiring, one bad doctor’s visit away from being one of us. There are more of us every day, and if it seems sometimes like we are everywhere you look, it’s because we are.
One place you are very unlikely to find us, though, is in a seminary curriculum.
I asked about this at my seminary, because I had assumed that training for encounters with disability would be a big part of pastoral education, at least. “Well, that’s what hospital chaplain training is for,” someone explained when I asked. I opened my mouth to point out that “sick” and “disabled” were not the same thing, and that if all your encounters with the disabled involved a hospital room, you were going to have a skewed picture of disability, but I shut it again and said nothing.
If my seminary is anything to go by, a substantial number of seminaries are churning out graduates who are unprepared for pastoral engagement with what is probably the largest minority group of the American population.
It’s a vicious circle: future priests are radically unprepared to engage with disability, which means they are unable to teach their parishioners a way out of their unquestioned prejudices and assumptions, which means that when those same parishioners get together to imagine their next priest, it doesn’t occur to them that disability might be something more than an attribute to be overlooked. It will not occur to them that disability is an identity that adds value. I’m not saying all disabled clergy have some special spiritual wisdom; I’m suggesting that it’s a valuable thing to stand in a different place in the room, and see what the view looks like from there.
Because we are doing so little to break the cycle of ignorance and prejudice in the ways that we educate our leaders, future priests learn to keep their heads down. They learn not to disclose. They learn to stay in the crip closet, or pay for it with their careers. Until December 14, I was just a transitional deacon, so I could write things like this article and not pay a price for it; I didn’t have a job or any immediate prospects of one. Not for lack of trying — I applied for several jobs in my diocese and more outside it. But I discovered an interesting thing, which was that places where I disclosed my disability early on tended to quickly lose interest in me. I advanced in the search when I had not yet disclosed, or when I had only interviewed on Zoom.
“I don’t know what to do with this information,” I said to a priest friend. “It can’t be for the reason I think it is, right?” But I was silently thinking, Tell me it’s not that, tell me it’s not that.
“Well,” she said with a shrug, “it’s data.”
And after all these months, that’s how I am coming to think of it too — just more data to be entered into my calculations when I navigate the world, more data to add to the endless calculations that any disabled person must do. There is a certain kind of mental exhaustion that often accompanies disability, a level of tiredness that comes from having to think ahead about the ways you will move through the world, about the level of energy you have left to spend, about the optics and risks/benefits of certain situations. I say “often” because I don’t speak for all disabled people, and many disabled people experience the world differently than I do. We are a vast and diverse bunch, and no one elected me spokesperson.
So I go to parishes, and I talk. I wait for the people who will approach me privately afterward. I’m fortunate, because mine is a diocese that has decided that the disabled are worth caring about, and I am part of the diocesan task force on disability justice. When an email came out inviting application to the Episcopal Church’s interim bodies and important committees, I scrolled through eagerly, looking for the one on disability that I could apply to. It wasn’t there. That’s more data.
The reason that swims beneath all that data, of course, is fear. Sooner or later, if they’re lucky enough to live that long, the chances are that most human beings will experience some kind of disability. Their mobility might become as limited as mine, or even more limited. A visibly disabled person thus becomes an uncomfortable reminder not just of human frailty in general, but of our future. So disability is a thing that we flinch from — as a society and as a church. We don’t prepare our priests for it, and we don’t want our priests to be it. These priests, my fellow clergy, have absorbed the lesson that disability is a liability at best, and a source of shame at worst. These lessons produce a mountain of data that shows how disabled people are misunderstood and avoided in our pews, and welcomed only grudgingly at our altars.
Let’s gather better data.
The Rev. Mary Grace DuPree is priest in charge of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Covington, Georgia.