| THE OBSERVATORY
By Gary Presley
“Why is it not God’s will that I am in this wheelchair?”
As a person assigned by fate to butt-surf through life, I found that a perfect question, especially when someone violates the social commandant, “Thou shalt not discuss sex, politics, or religion. Or disability.”
Once I got a job, a few years into my adventure on wheels, I was bored with the Why? question anyway. I had repeatedly asked it of God Himself. And slicked-hair television evangelists. And my parents. And the dogs. Only the dogs understood the question, but I never received an answer I could live with. Or without, for that matter.
Still, as we wheelies soon learn, some conversational ploy is necessary when ass-planted in a wheelchair: a perceptible physical disability presents an evangelical miracle-opportunity.
Of course, my opinion then was that Jesus should have stuck to feeding crowds with loaves and fishes, walking on water, and tossing money-changers out of the temple. As far as I was concerned, the apostles spent too much time employing illness and disability as analogies for moral failure and spiritual corruption.
… without telling the Biblical literalists.
God can heal you, I often heard from the fervent I met in my journey on wheels. “Come to services. Pastor Bryant is laying on hands. The Lord will lift up cripples!”
If that was so, why had I spent so many years waiting? I could take a good crippling in the name of the all that’s holy as long as I was next on the schedule at the brush arbor meeting. But it had been years. What was so special about this lovely day that He wants to heal? His omnipotence is ever-evident, even to the blind. Why not heal them? Let them see for themselves.
Most of the emissaries of healing in my life seem to have been older women or young men.
The women were diffident, wore scant make-up, dressed plainly, and moved with peaceful assurance.
When I was working at an office job, they would show up not on business but rather in search of shekels— selling homemade peanut brittle or chances on a handcrafted quilt so that their church could replace the Sunday school bus or carpet the sanctuary.
I rarely resisted the sweet love of the Promised Land, handing over a few dollars for a pound of hand-crafted candy or a handful of tickets. And I always said, “Yes, ma’am, God moves in mysterious ways” when the subject of their church and my disability threatened to merge.
On the other hand, the young men were fervent and direct, self-assured, and burned with the holy righteousness of prophet-wannabes. Within them, it seemed, faith had transmogrified into to rhetoric; and rhetoric had been beaten from plowshare into sword, all the better to slay enemies of righteousness: I remained in the wheelchair because I sat ignorant of the utter infallibility of theological epistemology.
Part of me wanted to scream, “Dammit! My ass has been in this wheelchair for years, and you have the gall to say it’s because I’m too lazy to pray or too ignorant to pray correctly?”
The kinder, less self-pitying part of me, remembered we are each plagued by our own holy mysteries.
And that’s the part that kept me from screaming.
Gary Presley is an essayist and author of the essay collection Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio, published by University of Iowa Press.
