“If I had two hands, I would be more arrogant than I am now, I would have made a lot of money, and I would have hurt a lot of people.”
This is what Rick Curry, a Jesuit brother based in Manhattan, says of his disability. He was born without a right forearm, making him a different person, he is convinced, from what he would have been otherwise.
About his disability he comments further: “My disability means nothing to me and it means everything.” Having only one arm has not stopped him from achieving many of his life goals. And, positively, it has given him a spiritual reach that is making a difference.
Brother Curry founded and directs the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped, with a residential school in Maine and a theatre in New York City. Now age 59, he has been working with the disabled (that’s what he calls people with handicaps) for 25 years.
In his experience, disabled performers have special gifts and he identifies four of these. For one, they enjoy much greater powers of concentration than do others. They also understand audiences, as if they were barometers walking into a room. Disabled actors and actresses have learned to “accept their own instrument.” Finally, they understand conflict and drama, and they see into what audiences need to understand but usually do not.
Despite a lifetime of trying to cope with it, Brother Curry still finds challenges in accepting his disability. “It’s very painful to this day to meet people,” he confesses openly. After a recent fundraiser at his theatre, he came home exhausted. Having to encounter so many people and smile at them wore him out.
But he continues to appreciate the spiritual values that disability has brought him. “The great gift of being born different,” he says, “is celebrating others’ differences.” It helps him to know what minorities of all sorts go through. Also this difference is the vehicle for what he calls “the grace of empathy.” He has been enabled to feel for the suffering of other people no matter who they are.
Brother Curry goes so far as to claim: “At this stage of my life, I’d rather have one arm than be bald.” When I asked him if he really meant this, he told me: “I am so secure with my disability now that I don’t want to be left with the problem of cosmetics.” Getting a hair piece or trying to cope with baldness in some other way would be upsetting to him.
Another benefit of disability is that it can stir greater trust in God. But Brother Curry’s record here is mixed. “Every morning I place my trust in God,” he says, “but by noon, I have taken half of it back.” Humbly he confesses: “There are a lot of other problems with me.”
Despite what he says about the importance of trust, he considers his own disability as a source of independence. The role of trust in his life coexists uneasily with the need to make his own way independently in a not always sympathetic world.
In some of his self-assessment, Brother Curry shows this independent streak. “I didn’t go into the religious life to hide,” he explains. Though he knew he could not become a surgeon or a priest, he chose to work in ministry, closely associated with priests. “I love being a brother,” he says, and adds proudly: “I’m an arrogant bastard. I have a Ph.D.”
In phrases that sum up the main convictions of his life, Brother Curry says: “You can only praise the Creator with the gifts God gave you. I believe disability is a gift.”
When I share with him my later life experience of having a lifelong disability, my lighthearted statement makes him laugh out loud. “Other people catch up with you,” I tell him, referring to the physical problems so many older people have. It obviously strikes a chord in him, my noting how aging introduces many to what some of us have always known.
Talking with this vibrant man of spirit has enlarged my worldview. Like the rest of us, Rick Curry is clearly a man of mixed and conflicted feelings about himself. But his central insights into the role of disability in human life offer much to ponder amid the hazards of daily existence.
Richard Griffin