My friend Sam is blind. One morning he was walking along, sipping his coffee, when suddenly he heard a clink and a splash. A stranger, likely assuming Sam was begging for money, had thrown coins into his coffee cup.

How often, upon seeing a disabled person, do we jump in to help? And how often is our unsolicited help actually disruptive? Real accompaniment is different. Real accompaniment is consistent, radical and transformative. It requires authentic listening and dialogue, as well as an ongoing commitment to breaking down the societal barriers that disabled people encounter each day.

One of the many examples of accompaniment in Scripture is the story of the paralytic who is lowered through a roof to meet Jesus (Mk 2:1-12). When I was growing up, every homily I heard on that passage focused either on the friends who helped the paralytic or the man’s sudden ambulation after meeting Jesus. I hear something different.

I have quadriplegic cerebral palsy and use a power wheelchair. Wherever I go, I encounter physical obstacles and barriers. Several years ago, I was able to join Donald Senior, C.P., the late president of Catholic Theological Union, on one of his trips to the Holy Land. I saw Israel’s rugged terrain and experienced its brutal heat. I can well imagine the challenge of getting to Jesus in Capernaum. (I explore this further in my monologue “The Point of View of the Paralytic,” where I imagine the man’s day as he prepares to meet Jesus. It will be included in Centering Disability in Worship, edited by Rebecca F. Spurrier and Bekah Maren Anderson, to be published next year by IVP Academic.)

Certain themes in that biblical passage speak to me, including the following.

Ordinariness. The paralytic is an ordinary person who simply wants to hear Jesus’ words. In our own time, one in four people in the United States has a disability; we are the largest minority group, and anyone can join us at any time. Some of our conditions, like mobility impairments, are visible, while others, like lupus, may be less apparent. Disabled people are friends, lovers, neighbors, coworkers and service providers. The paralytic in Mark 2 may have been married, may have had a family. Disabled people are also ordinary in their holiness and their sinfulness.

Preparation, creativity and perseverance. Out of necessity, the paralytic who meets Jesus is likely a careful and creative planner. He has to decide what time to leave, what chair or mattress to bring, how to gain access, and whether or not to ask the crowd to help him enter. Disabled people are the most resourceful people I know. We often must be fierce and tenacious to address daily needs, protest unjust systems and protect our most basic human rights.

Notably, the Gospel does not say that the paralytic is seeking a cure from Jesus. Most disabled people do not spend our days pining for a cure. We live our lives.

Agency and interdependence. The paralytic makes intentional choices about his plan to meet Jesus. He and his allies work together. He also facilitates his allies’ access to the love that Jesus offers.

Living with a disability means living in a world of interdependence, with giving and receiving. Both are holy. The friends and family of the paralytic practice radical accompaniment and are an example to us today.

How we interpret disability

The theologian Carmen Nanko-Fernandez asks, “While our Christian tradition teaches that all are created in the divine image, do our interpretations of sacred texts betray an option for physical and mental ‘wholeness’—whatever the heck that is—as hidden criteria for the Imago Dei?”

I would say yes. There has been a long history of the Bible being read through a dominant perspective—the voice of the white, Western, heterosexual, nondisabled male. In This Abled Body, the theologian Kerry Wynn names this dominant perspective “the normate hermeneutic.” Dr. Wynn asserts that “the further one moves from the normative image, the more powerless and marginalized one becomes.”

Our conventional interpretations look at disability through the medical model: The person with a disability is impaired in some way and needs fixing. We show disability as “other,” as separate from the rest of humanity. We like to see disability in one of four ways: especially bad, especially good, a service project opportunity or an object of inspiration.

Disability as “especially bad.” We may acknowledge Jesus’ words that “neither the blind man nor his parents sinned” (Jn 9:3), but our language, hymns and preaching are filled with sensory and physical disability metaphors that imply distance from God. How often do we say, “deaf to God’s voice,” or pray to cure “blindness”? In interpreting the biblical healing narratives, how often is the sole emphasis on Jesus’ cure at the expense of Jesus’ other lessons within each narrative? Have you ever gone to Mass, or any church function, and had a stranger offer to lay hands on you to “cure” you? I have. This is a common experience among people who have a visible disability.

Disability as “especially good.” Another interpretation holds that those with disabling conditions are divinely blessed people. Parents of young children with Down syndrome often hear that their children are “angels on earth.” But this way of thinking can encourage passivity and inaction. It ignores needs like physical access, sign-language interpreters, quiet rooms and online services. It sidesteps the need for equity in housing, education, employment and health care. The message is that the disabled should take suffering in stride because there will be great rewards in heaven; society, and the church, are off the hook.

Disability as an opportunity for a charitable service project. Some see disability as an opportunity for service, an opportunity to “do something,” to feel good about ourselves. For years, we saw this phenomenon as we watched a poor “crippled child” on the stage plead for money on the Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethons for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. We could donate our 10 bucks and move on.

Disability as an object of inspiration. The fourth interpretation is the objectification of the perceived life of the disabled, for the benefit of the able-bodied. Think of all the memes on social media that aim to motivate us by depicting a disabled person doing an everyday task; we are not only inspired, we are reminded to be grateful that “we” are not “them.” Using somebody else’s disability to inspire yourself is sometimes called inspiration porn.

Each of these four interpretations depicts disability as “other,” as separate from the rest of humanity. And each perpetuates oppression and separateness.

Consequences in society and in faith spaces

We also see evidence of this “othering” in our health care system. People with disabilities have less access to quality health care, greater food insecurity and challenges in getting caregiving. 

Disabled individuals who receive federal disability benefits can even be penalized if they get married. And last year’s Big Beautiful Bill further cut support by slashing more than $900 billion from Medicaid and special education. 

Our literature and our movies still portray people with disabilities as villains or pitiful people, for whom suicide is a noble option. An illustration by Amy Hasbrouck and Elissa Small, shared by the Canadian group Not Dead Yet on its website, depicts a representation of the untenable choices faced by many: A wheelchair user discovers that the office of a Suicide Prevention Program is inaccessible—but the office of an assisted suicide organization next door has a wheelchair ramp.

Even some Christian organizations have made decisions shaped by the four cultural interpretations listed above. The Association of Christian Schools lobbied for, and won, an exemption to the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 for all facilities run by religious groups, including food banks and thrift shops, saying that the act would violate First Amendment rights. The attorney William Bentley Bell, representing the A.C.S. and other Christian groups, wrote at the time that “nothing has been shown to indicate that there is a national necessity to apply the ADA Bill to churches, religious schools, and other ministries.”

Take a moment to imagine the wounds inflicted on disabled people who find that their churches see no “necessity” to welcome them. I hear all the time from disabled people who feel unwelcome and unsupported at faith institutions. Studies by Erik W. Carter, a professor of special education at Baylor University, have shown that large numbers of families with disabled people leave their churches for precisely this reason.

It is hardly surprising that the disabled social worker Erin Murphy would write, “In a world where many churches say, ‘All are welcome,’ I wonder whether this applies to disabled Catholics like me?”

Authentic accompaniment

So how can Catholics authentically accompany disabled people?

Pass the mic. Share the floor so others can speak and be heard. For example, disability studies is a relatively new academic field with a new lens. As we learn in This Abled Body, this field does not define disability as a “problem” within the person but instead looks at it as “a complex mode of interpreting human difference, not unlike gender, race, or sexuality.” Thinking in a more nuanced way allows us to recognize disability as a part of the rich tapestry of God’s human diversity. It allows us—no, demands of us—that we attend to the perspective of the disabled.

Get back to our roots and remember what Jesus teaches. Jesus meets disabled people where they are and as they are, as when he invites himself to Zacchaeus’s house. Let’s have more accessible spaces with interpreters, quiet rooms, accessible bathrooms and online spaces. Let’s widen the table, as Jesus did, and think creatively so that all can feel at home in our faith spaces and communities.

Jesus asks Bartimaeus and the man at the pool of Bethesda what they want from him rather than automatically assuming they want a cure. Let’s ask people what they want from our church and theology spaces and truly listen to the responses.

Jesus transforms the crowd and helps societal outcasts to become part of their communities. Let’s allow ourselves, guided by the Spirit and through Jesus, to be transformed by those on the margins.

Jesus recognizes and praises the boldness of the hemorrhaging woman (Mk 5). Let us recognize the boldness of our wounded members who show up and advocate for their needs. Look for and find the positive contributions that the marginalized bring.

We may say that disability is not sinful, as Jesus reminds us in John 9; but when we preach with metaphors equating impairment with distance from God, we imply just such a connection. Let’s take care with our language.

Jesus did not erase the bodily wounds of his crucifixion in his post-resurrection body. Let us act with care to not seek to erase disability or disability perspectives.

The theologian Robert Schreiter’s first principle of reconciliation is that God centers the victim who has been wounded. We can do that here. Perhaps accompaniment means considering a disability and theology program in our universities. Maybe it means making our seminary programs more creatively accessible for all. Maybe it means intentionally planning accessible academic study trips and pilgrimages from the beginning so that disabled people and elderly people can more fully participate and experience our faith’s sacred sites.

We can also learn the history of the disability rights movement and be better allies for fair housing, health care and societal supports. We can recognize that disability affects all of our social justice concerns. Think, for example, of the autistic person picked up by ICE and overwhelmed by the noise, chaos and hostile rapid-fire interrogations. We can recognize that the rights of disabled people to live in the community rather than an institution is under attack through Medicaid cuts and threats to the 1999 Supreme Court Olmstead decision that recognizes institutionalization as discrimination.

Authentic accompaniment of disabled people is not optional but a moral Christian call.

As Father Senior once said, “The more different pieces you have there together in the assembly, the more sacred it is. That way no beauty or truth is excluded.”

[Read next: Meet the Catholic schools serving students with special needs]

This essay is adapted from a talk given at the Fourth Annual Schreiter Institute Spring Symposium, “Breakfast at the Seashore: Reconciling Stories of Accompaniment,” at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago on May 5.

David Gayes is a theologian and disability rights activist. He lives in Illinois.