When life is permanently altered, the big questions don’t wait. Neither do the well-meaning people who think they have the answers
Growing up, my mom was a devout Catholic. Mass every Sunday. Communion. Confirmation. The whole routine. She made sure I went along with it, whether I questioned it or not.
So, when I joined the Navy, my dog tags said Catholic. It was more habit than belief, if I’m being honest. Years later, I was lying in a bed at Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego with a broken neck, my mom sitting beside me, when a Catholic chaplain, Lt. Cmdr. Jim Danner, walked in.
By that point, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’d stepped inside a church since enlisting. When he asked if he could pray for me, with my very Catholic mother right there, it was awkward. Out of respect for my mom, I bowed my head and went along with it.
One afternoon while my mom was at the canteen buying me more chocolate-flavored Ensure protein shakes, Jim made his usual visit. That day, instead of bowing my head, I started asking questions — the kind that surface when your life has been permanently altered and you’re heavily medicated.
Questions about how an all-powerful, all-loving God could justify my paralysis. About why my family had to suffer, too. And beneath all of it, the question so many of us eventually ask: What did I do to deserve this?
What surprised me was that Jim didn’t preach. He didn’t try to correct my thinking or steer me back toward faith. He just listened. And whenever something needed to be done, anything at all, he was the first to help. No strings attached. No expectations hiding behind kindness.
That kind of presence stuck with me.
Years later, I became friends with Army Chaplain Justin Roberts, who put words to something I had already felt. He told me he learned in a war zone in Afghanistan that sometimes listening in silence says more than words ever could. Faced with a high rate of suicidal ideation in his unit, he developed a way of keeping his guys alive by simply sitting next to them, silently.
These days, Justin makes films that shine a light on courage people don’t usually see. His most recent release, Fighting Spirit: A Combat Chaplain’s Journey, explores the role chaplains play in war zones, often at the exact moment soldiers need them most.
Justin once told me, “A chaplain can’t fix a broken body. But we can sit close enough that hope remembers how to breathe.”
I love that. It captures something Jim understood instinctively. Sometimes it’s not about answers, it’s just about showing up.
And it turned out that was exactly what I needed.
These days, you won’t find me in church unless it’s for a wedding or a funeral.
That’s not to say spiritual support doesn’t matter to me, or that chaplains don’t have a role in rehabilitation or life after injury. Quite the opposite. But the role religion plays after trauma is complicated and deeply personal.
In military hospitals and Department of Veterans Affairs health care facilities, chaplains are there to care for the mind and the soul, while doctors focus on the body. They don’t replace medical or mental health care, they complement it.
The problem is that when someone experiences trauma, religion often enters the conversation immediately, whether the person asks for it or not. Friends, family and even clinicians can assume faith isn’t just helpful, but necessary.
Yet the reality isn’t that simple.
I remember reading a large spinal cord injury (SCI) study that found only about half of participants said religion or spirituality was important to them. The other half said it simply wasn’t central to how they made sense of their lives, before injury or after. That alone challenges the idea that faith is a default coping mechanism.
For those who do lean on religion or spirituality, the research is fairly consistent. Positive forms of religious coping, such as prayer, support from a faith community or finding meaning through belief, are often linked to better emotional adjustment and higher life satisfaction. In those cases, religion can be a genuine resource. It can offer structure when life feels chaotic, language when suffering feels unspeakable and connection when isolation hits hard.
But there’s another side that doesn’t get talked about enough.
Religion isn’t automatically protective. Studies examining negative religious coping, such as feeling punished by God, spiritually abandoned or believing your injury is a personal failure, show higher levels of depression and anxiety after SCI. It’s the same faith framework, but with very different outcomes.
That matters because people with SCI already face elevated risks of depression and suicidal thoughts, especially in the early years. For some, faith provides reasons to stay alive. For others, particularly when belief is tied to expectations of miraculous healing or the idea that “everything happens for a reason,” it can make things worse when the body doesn’t heal.
Research doesn’t show religion as a simple shield. It shows a relationship that’s deeply personal, unpredictable and sometimes fragile. And then there’s the social side of religion, the part no study can really measure.
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve been told I should pray so I can walk again, and it doesn’t feel comforting. It feels like my body is being treated as a problem that needs fixing instead of a reality that deserves respect. And when strangers approach me and begin praying, it feels invasive and almost dehumanizing, as if my paralysis exists to give them spiritual purpose or pleasure.
Good intentions don’t cancel impact.
Religion can be powerful for people who choose it. It can also be irrelevant, unwanted or even harmful for people who don’t. There’s no solid evidence that prayer restores spinal cord function. What religion does influence, for better or worse, is meaning, mental health and how someone learns to live in a body that no longer matches expectations.
Coping after paralysis isn’t one-size-fits-all. Faith helps some people survive. Others survive without it. The most humane response isn’t to prescribe belief, it’s to respect choice.
That includes the choice to say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” That choice deserves just as much respect as faith itself.
Jim never tried to fix me, and Justin reminds us why that matters. Both understood something many of us still resist — presence isn’t passive, and silence isn’t failure.
So, before offering a prayer, a platitude or an explanation for someone else’s pain, it’s worth asking what you’re really doing — helping the person live in the body he or she has, or easing your own discomfort with the person’s suffering.
If faith has a place after paralysis, it isn’t in trying to change the outcome. It’s in showing up without conditions, staying when it’s hard and knowing when your words aren’t the most important thing you can offer.
As always, please share your thoughts with me at al@pvamag.com.
