CNS STORY: Jesuit founder of program for handicapped says 'disability is a gift'

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CNS Story:

CURRY Dec-17-2007 (990 words) With photo. xxxn

Jesuit founder of program for handicapped says 'disability is a gift'

By Beth Griffin
Catholic News Service

NEW YORK (CNS) -- The life of the imagination has no physical boundaries and people with physical disabilities can use their imagination to face life's difficulties. That is the enduring message of Jesuit Brother Rick Curry and the organization he founded 30 years ago, the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped in New York.

The message is taught in classes and demonstrated by the example of Brother Curry and those who work with him. He said about 15,000 people have participated in the group's programs since its 1977 debut.

The New York-based not-for-profit organization provides theatrical training and seeks to create a safe haven in which artists with physical disabilities qualify for and obtain work in the performing and baking arts. It integrates the able-bodied and the disabled in its programs.

Brother Curry, 64, is a native Philadelphian who was born with one arm. In an interview with Catholic News Service, he laughed as he described trying to convince his first-grade teacher that he should be eligible to take piano lessons because he had the only requirement she stipulated: a permission note from his mother.

He joined the Jesuit order in 1961 and served as a baker, tailor and high school English teacher and founded the theater program at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, a Jesuit university. He earned his master's and doctoral degrees in theater and formulated the idea for the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped while he was a graduate student at New York University.

"Disability is a gift," said Brother Curry. "I truly believe that my arm is a blessing. It's demeaning to think that the Lord would place us in a situation where there is not a great blessing."

The National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped's performing arts classes and workshops are conducted in the spring and the fall in New York. In the summer, the program relocates to a renovated school property on Penobscot Bay in Belfast, Maine, where the curriculum includes theater, a writer's workshop for wounded veterans and a year-round bakery program.

The Writer's Program for Wounded Warriors is the organization's newest program. Brother Curry said that he was invited to meet with recent war amputees five years ago. "It deeply troubled me," he said. "Every single one of them desperately wanted to tell me their story."

The program is a 10-day opportunity for combat veterans to reflect on their experience, write their story with the help of professional playwrights and perform it as a dramatic monologue.

"We're enhancing their reading and writing skills, giving them two more branches on the tree of knowledge," said Brother Curry. "We're also giving them an audience and a chance to interact with others and begin their healing."

He said, "Let's not have these extraordinary men and women who are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan be lost, like some after Vietnam. They need the life of the imagination."

Most participants are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Vietnam veterans also have participated.

Brother Curry said veterans get the opportunity to interact with other people living with disabilities and see their "lives beyond the disability," in the structured and informal parts of the residential experience. The staff and the participants are chosen to complement one another.

"It is totally choreographed by me," said Brother Curry. "It is about as spontaneous as brain surgery."

The disabled population is a "huge patchwork quilt," said Brother Curry.

"Able-bodied people clump the disabled into one group, but there are myriad shades and needs," he said. "The best folks to help the disabled are other disabled folks. We can get together and celebrate being disabled and then go back into the real world."

Some theater workshop participants perform later in the summer on Long Island as a small cabaret group.

Participants in the baking program learn the art of baking bread and the mechanics of operating, managing and marketing a commercial mail-order bakery. The National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped bakery sells four varieties of bread and also offers dog biscuits in four flavors to honor the service of dogs as guides and companions.

Brother Curry is taking a break from the day-to-day leadership of the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped to study for ordination to the priesthood at Washington Theological Union. He lives with Georgetown University's Jesuit community.

"No one is more surprised than I am," he said. "I never wanted to be a priest. It grew from the outside in, not the inside out."

Brother Curry said that conversations 10 years ago with a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who was a triple amputee became "very personal and deep. He asked for absolution and from the look in his eyes when I told him I couldn't give it, I think he felt betrayed."

"I was meeting more and more of these people and I realized they needed sacramental healing," he said. "This is an extension of my ministry. I really want to be of service and I believe it is why I was called."

He said Washington Theological Union is "cool. The professors and students are from lots of different communities. They are really terrific people who believe in training ministers for the church."

Not so cool are his three new least-favorite words: "midterms, papers and finals. I'm a little old for that kind of stuff," he said with a groan.

Brother Curry hopes to be ordained a Jesuit priest in the summer of 2008.

The National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped honored veteran television journalist Mike Wallace with its Argyle Award at a Nov. 19 dinner celebrating its 30th anniversary.

The "60 Minutes" correspondent was cited as a person of integrity and longevity who "speaks truth to power." Wallace downplayed his support of the organization and noted that the award was named for a dog, Brother Curry's first companion animal.

END

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