Save Me From the Cure Evangelists

This is An Unquiet Mind, a National Magazine Award-winning column by s.e. smith that explores disability identity and its interaction with the world at large.

As a child in Greece, we were always praying to the saints to heal us. The church smelled like incense, candles, and cigarettes, the priest like sour wine, the Saturday liturgy stretching on forever, until I pulled at my father’s shirt and we left the cool darkness of the church for the outside, hot and breathless, silent save for those who were taking a break, still smoking, talking in loud voices about the fishing. “Kalimera,” they would say, and “Kalimera,” we would say, and then we would escape into the olive groves, surrounded by the buzzing of insects and the shimmering heat, suffocating even in the morning hours.

“The saints can’t even fix the carousel; how can they fix me?” I said in school one day, and I got the ruler. My father fixed the carousel, ordered the parts from Athens. They arrived on the same boat as Giorgos’s toilet, which didn’t fit his plumbing, so it sat in his backyard instead. Seemed to me like the saints should have seen that one coming, but I didn’t say that out loud; Sister Eleni’s aim was remorseless.

People who pray especially love praying for the broken. If you’re visibly disabled, they’ll stop you in airports, gabble over you on trains, grab you by the arm when you’re walking or wheeling or hobbling down the street, break into your meal with a friend at that nice restaurant to tell you they’re praying for you. Sometimes they ask first, but only in the way that someone who has already decided to do something is asking for permission, convinced that they are in a state of grace, that praying for you will be their good deed, the thing that gets them good in the books with god. You are a fetish object, an icon on the wall, a candle to be lit by rote, murmuring prayers as they shake out the match. When you say no, they are often offended, and people will tell you later that even if you don’t believe, you could have let them go ahead and do it, but you are a grown-ass adult, and this time there’s no nun to slap your palm with a ruler so hard you see stars.

When they’re not praying, they’re evangelizing—and I don’t just mean that they want you to get right with Jesus, to see the light. No, something about the long tradition of exerting religious control over disabled people—of treating disability as a sin or a curse from god, something to be repaired with righteousness—has morphed into the cure evangelist: that urgent, ardent representative of the nondisabled world. There is an inherent queerness about disability, the difference, the body, the mind, something that turns the self into an object, a thing to be mended or at least hidden. It upsets cure evangelists to see evidence of disability, right there in front of them. It has become a kind of religion for them, and better to ask forgiveness than permission. They just want to help.

Cure evangelists want to spread the good news, and while they’re not always holding Bibles with tissue-thin pages and gilded edges, they possess that same confidence that their way is the right way; that their targets can be brought to heel/heal; that the rules of polite society—no invasive questions, dear—can be suspended because of the urgency. There’s yoga and crystals and vitamins and meditation, of course, but also some treatment or another that they’ve heard about and believe will magically fix everything: stem cells, or some medication their husband’s coworker’s friend’s cousin heard about. A second opinion from a different, better doctor. Not taking the medication as prescribed. Essential oils. Chiropracty. Surely there’s some fix. Pray to the saints to fix you.

There is something crushing about knowing that people harbor a secret wish that disabled people were nondisabled.

There is something crushing about knowing that people harbor a secret wish that disabled people were nondisabled—like them—or that they think disabled people are in some kind of holding pattern, waiting for the day they wake up nondisabled and get on with their lives. It cultivates a deep wariness, tempered with fear, of everyone, friend or stranger: Is this going to be the day someone disappoints, reveals the tremendous gap between our two lives?

I think sometimes about the other parts of me that people think are broken and need fixing—the things that they pray for, the things that we’re supposed to hate about ourselves and tear away. Sometimes the church is progressive now, says it’s okay as long as you don’t get in anyone’s face about it, but the Eastern Orthodox Church sure isn’t, and neither are their sundered brethren in Rome. The “cool pope” says queers like me are okay now so long as we exist in some kind of liminal space where we aren’t actually, you know. Love the sinner, hate the sin, but the sinner is the sin. Pray to the saints to fix you.

I wonder, sometimes, if they ever consider how it feels to hear an endless tide of comments and questions like this, how their words drag the body over hot coals and make it feel like a sin, a wrongness, something I did. My body is no longer my own, instead something that society owns and plays with as it will, something lumpy and misshapen and sad, edges feathered like old paper. Every fleeting hand I put up in protest is summarily batted down, while people drone about all the things I should have considered doing to be less broken, all the things I could do to fix myself if I cared enough. When I close my eyes, I am back in church, tasting incense at the back of my throat, saints glaring down from dim alcoves, flaking gold leaf drifting through the candlelight.

One may smile and smile and be a villain, I think, looking at rictus grins in hollow skulls and attempting to tune out the voices that hem me in with their confident prattle, feeling my hand tingling where once a ruler lay, wondering whether I can wheedle a sweet bun out of my father—who will order the parts from Athens if he can, but likes the carousel broken just the same, because you can still sit on it and watch the boats go out and listen to the waves, shhhhhhhh on the rocks, and no one will be there to tell you to repent.

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