I had been congratulating myself. I happened to mention to a friend the other day that I hadn't been pestered by any evangelical Christians for a good while.
You know the kind. They accost you in the street explaining how your life will be so much better if you trot along with them and engage in a lot of joyous shouting and generally sublime cotton-woolly good feelings about each other. Or God. But mostly about God.
If you're disabled, though, they always have another tack. They have a cure for you. It doesn't matter that they (of course) haven't the faintest idea why you're disabled, what the disability is, how it affects you, or how you live with it. I used to wonder why they never asked, but of course, none of that matters. They're not interested; and they are not interested because that would mean actually engaging someone and stepping, just for a few moments, outside of the tiny individual-sized narcissistic bubble they inhabit.
They are utterly confident that a few words will fix all. Not just any words, mind you, not even your own, but theirs.
So there I was, limping along on my crutch, feeling quite happy that it was, at last, moderately warm, dry, and sunny, and on the whole life was pleasant. Until Ladbroke Grove Tube station.
"Hello, my name's Francois," he said, getting rather closer to me than I generally like: in London, or any city, I suppose, someone getting within inches of your shoulder is at the very least, about to beg money, a cigarette, or maybe try to pick your pocket. I was prepared for any, but I was actually expecting to have to refuse to give him a ciggy.
(Why do people beg from me so often? It's a kind of inverse charity, I've come to suspect, since it doesn't happen to my non-disabled friends with anything like the same frequency. Because I'm obviously disabled, in a reverse of normal expectations, they seem to assume I will be more charitable to them than anyone else. And give them money for the bus fare, the tube fare, a parking meter, or cigarettes. And these days, the beggars usually look better able to afford any of the foregoing than I actually can. So I refuse. I don't like being taken advantage of like that.)
"I can help you," he says, getting in my way so I miss the green light at the Pelican crossing. I pause, a little taken aback. As you'll have gathered, I'm more prepared to hear why I should help someone else, not the other way around.
"I can pray for you," he goes on. "And that pain will go! Just like that!" (He waves his hand, and a startled bus driver slows at the lights.) I've heard this before. I used to hear it around here every couple of weeks when I stepped out of my flat. How he knew I was in pain, I can't tell. As it happens, I was, but generally it doesn't show, and I'd just called at a friend's flat who is well attuned to my ups and downs and usually mentions it if it does. Apart from that, I'd knocked back some morphia not long before, so it shouldn't have shown anyway.
I wondered, of course, what his approach would have been if I'd been in my wheelchair? He would, I've no doubt. have been even more confident that he could have helped me fold up my wheelchair and walk. Since, in fact, that is possible for me—but, of course, he wouldn't have known that, and wouldn't have asked—I could have provided him with a rather startling example of the power of prayer. For a moment I rather wished I had come out in my wheelchair instead of relying on painkillers and crutches to walk instead.
It would have been interesting to see his face. And what the consequences would have been. Would he have yelled 'Hallelujah' and rounded up the other passers by to bear witness to the miracle? Would I have been dragged along to the evangelical church as an example?
I thought of explaining some medical facts of life; that I was an atheist, so I could hardly see how any prayerful intercession with a non-existent deity could be at all effectual. But I've learnt from experience that others' beliefs don't matter; only theirs, and their confidence in them. I thought also, of asking if he had, say, ever broken an arm, or leg, or had appendicitis, and found the pain disappearing through the intervention of nothing more than a short prayer. But I've learnt from experience also that someone like this would claim exactly that.
Or they would offer up the mantra that suffering is God's will and fortitude bears away all pain. And it ennobles you. The latter being something I've heard from other than Christians as well; and long experience, not just as someone who has, and does, suffer extreme pain, but who's watched people do so as a nurse, has never convinced me there's any truth at al in it.
While all this sprung to mind, for all the reasons I've suggested, it would have been a waste of time and breath uttering it. So I said, rather sharply (and possibly thereby proving that pain—or no doubt from Francois's point of view, atheism—can in fact make you rather short-tempered and less than noble and forgiving) that he didn't know what he was talking about, and to get realistic about it.
I was going to say "Get real", but I do hate that phrase.
At least, as the lights changed and I scuttled across the road, he didn't follow me as I'd expected. "That," I thought, was a display of 'faith' alright; an example of forlorn hope, too; but where I wondered, since like all troubles these come in threes, was the charity?
'Charity' (in the sense of practical help) not something these people at much good at, I think. Even when they offer any, they so often expect their reward not to be in heaven, but in your acceptance of them and their ideas. That you should reward them, in fact. I can't forget one who started off offering to push me around Tate Modern in my wheelchair, who grabbed it, quite unnecessarily, and pestered me with the same spiel. I had to flee to the loo, and if there hadn't ben a queue for the 'non-disabled' one next door who gave him some odd looks, he'd have followed me in.
Fortunately, that must have embarrassed him. even though these people seem to find that very little does, or I'd have had to hide there even longer than I did. There really aren't enough public loos, especially wheelchair-accessible ones, in this part of London to hide from these people in, I've just realised. And would they be charitable enough to give me the twenty pence to get in, I wonder?
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