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Listening is a really difficult skill to master. When others speak, we are quick to formulate responses before they are finished. We struggle to hear what they are truly saying because we interpret their words through our own agendas. When we find ourselves under indictment, we quickly grow defensive.
When reading Amy Kenny’s second memoir, My Disability is Divine: A Joyful Witness that Defies Ableist Nonsense, the first goal is just to listen. We are gifted with the stories of a Christian who loves Christ and the Church despite being dismissed and diminished by so many because of her disability.
We need to listen because Kenny has become vulnerable in order to pass along wisdom we desperately need to understand. She describes how her pastor once told her that he felt “uncomfortable around disabled people” and how an elder in the church complained about her serving communion because “it’s too awkward to have a broken body up there.” As a scholar and disability rights advocate, her experiences and expertise can illuminate aspects of our own lives, our congregations, and our society that continue to harm our neighbors living with disabilities and hold all of us back from enjoying true community.
If we are able to listen — to silence ourselves and hear what Dr. Kenny has to teach us — then we will discover aspects of God’s story that we have overlooked or ignored, because her book is more than a denunciation of what is wrong in the world. It is also a witness to the beauty that emerges when the effort is made to put things right.
She describes how disabled people adapt to a world that often is not designed to include them. At a time when many in the church are eager to condemn social sins, the systemic barriers to access often go unmentioned and unaddressed in both our wider society and in the very buildings from which such denunciations are spoken.
Yet, Kenny is not only a critic who points out what needs to change. She also invites us to see how the necessity of overcoming environmental obstacles has sparked incredible innovations from within the disability community that benefit everyone. From communication tools to sensory devices to cruise control, all of us reap the creative rewards of inventions that arose from inequitable circumstances.
Within the book, there are also powerful reflections on how disability can be lonely and excluding, while also fostering connection and interdependency. The reality of disability quickly disabuses us of our cultural celebrations of independence and forces us to recognize how much we rely on each other. At the same time, different disabilities can create physical pains or social exclusions that separate and harm.
Ultimately, though, the core of this book is not about social critique or cultural analysis. Those arguments and the other material in the book are all rooted in a theological vision. Readers are asked to understand and affirm a basic Christian idea that too many refused to accept: disability reveals the Divine to us. Those living with disabilities bear the Image of God to the world.
This beautiful reflection unpacks much of what that implies. In disability, there is value that goes unrecognized. There is radiance that must be noticed. There is joy that cannot be silenced. Yet, that is what many in the church have sought to do.
“One of the uncomfortable truths is that disabled people are often treated with more love, respect, and kindness outside of church walls than within,” Kenny states in her final chapter. “We can change that. We can co-create a world where disability is not vilified but venerated. We don’t need to apologize for our existence or explain our joy. We can celebrate and radiate our disability wisdom to the world until one day, talking about disability and joy in the same sentence won’t seem suspect or even surprising.”
Given the opposition and rejection Kenny has faced, this book is an audacious effort that trusts readers to approach it with open minds that were previously closed as to the meaning of the Christian faith and to revise their own perceptions of what disability involves. It presumes our willingness to listen and be changed by what we discover.
“Disability is a creative force that invites us to dream up a new world,” Kenny writes. “Imagine what we could design together if we stopped thinking of disability as a loss and recognized it as a variety of experience, including many gains. Imagine the world we could create together if we were united not by who we condemn but by who we champion. Imagine if we stopped demanding gratitude from one another for meeting basic access needs so we can roll, walk, stim, and sign our way to co-flourishing.”
To realize that world requires us to listen not only to what Kenny has to share in My Disability is Divine, but also to what Scripture conveys to us about the nature of God, the sacred value of all human life, and the flourishing we are meant to experience when all of us recognize the interconnectedness we share now and forever.
As a public witness,
Beau Underwood
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