Prayer is Liberation

In her 2022 book My Body is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church, Amy Kenny recounts how strangers often pray for God to heal her disability. Kenny’s experience is not unique. Many disability theologians recount similar experiences with “faith healing” and its proponents. These encounters speak to a common but mistaken conflation of healing and cure.

Kenny argues that healing and cure become conflated when the Western understanding of medicine is entangled with understandings of God. Doctors see the disabled body as something to fix, and in turn, those whom Kenny terms as “prayerful perpetrators” uphold God as the ultimate doctor who fixes, cures, and removes all defects from those of sufficient faith.

Kenny argues that the true biblical conception of healing, however, concerns “restoring relationships and integrating someone back into social and religious systems.” She reminds us that the Greek word often used in Scripture for healing is sozo, which means to make whole or

to save. She states, “It’s the same word used to talk about salvation. Jesus’s healing is not purely about a physical alteration but about reestablishing right relationship between humanity and God

and, hopefully, between individuals and community.” Kenny’s interpretation of Jesus’s ministry builds on the work of other disability theologians, who have extensively argued the harmful approaches to prayer as bodily cure and of viewing disability in purely negative terms. Alternate approaches to prayer and disability have instead sought to create more inclusive liturgy, deconstruct harmful approaches and assumptions (i.e. “faith healing”), and utilize prayer as a complement to therapies such as pain management and psychological care. Yet, there are few discussions about prayer and disability that return to the original, dubious question of efficacy. That is, what exactly is healed when the disabled individual prays, and how does prayer effect this healing?

My paper explores the transcendent and consequently liberative aspects of prayer for disabled people. Drawing on her personal experience of disability, Susan Wendell articulates the need for bodily transcendence from the “rejected body.” In her book The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, Wendell argues for a more complete feminist understanding of the body. Rather than be overwhelmed by bodily sensations, Wendell takes an “observer’s approach” to transcend the psychological toll of her physical pain and social isolation. Expanding on Wendell’s conception of transcendence, French philosopher and activist Simone Weil offers prayer as a mode of spiritual transcendence from affliction. I argue that prayer can lead to spiritual transcendence, which alleviates suffering for disabled people through union with the disabled God.