Presvytera Melanie DiStefano: Welcome to Family Matters: Fully Human Edition. This is Presvytera Melanie DiStefano, and today I am pleased to join William Christy. William is the son of Fr. Paul and Presvytera Mary Christy. He has been a resident of Raleigh, North Carolina, since 2011.

After moving to Raleigh, William earned his associate’s in arts at Wade Technical Community College; his bachelor of arts at William Peace University, where he majored in English and minored in communication; and his master of arts in English with a concentration in literature at North Carolina State University. William enjoys playing wheelchair basketball, reading ancient Greek, British Medieval English, Renaissance, and 19th and 20th century Russian literature, and watching the Rocky and Creed films. He currently works as a tutor at North Carolina State University and a bookkeeper at Bridge II Sports. His main goals are to work as a learning specialist in academic support and become an English instructor so that he can continue to help college students become academically successful. Welcome, William.

Mr. William Christy: Thank you for having me on today, Presvytera Melanie.

Presv. Melanie: It’s my pleasure to be with you. I recently saw a YouTube video that was featuring you and your dad and your experiences playing wheelchair basketball. Can you tell us a little bit about that? How often you play, how you found out about it, and, finally, how it’s been a positive experience for you?

Mr. Christy: Yes. So I first started playing wheelchair basketball at the age of 13, around seventh grade, and I did this primarily out of trying not to get bullied any more. I was bullied a lot in middle school as a kid, and I was saying to myself, “I want to gain the respect of my peers,” and I thought the only way to do that was through sport, so I tried to see if there was a way to be a part of the men’s basketball team in the school, but there wasn’t. And I was talking with my dad about it, things I wanted to do, like maybe I could try playing a sport like basketball in GOYA, but we weren’t sure what to do in that situation. Then one day one of my friends from school who also has CP told me about this wheelchair basketball team that just formed in Memphis, Tennessee, where I was raised at the time, and he said that he was going to play and he was wanting me to play. My dad and I were both in the room and we were both like: Yes! [Laughter]

So that’s how it started, and currently I play on an adult wheelchair basketball team in Raleigh. Before the pandemic hit, we practiced once a week and we played games like once every month or once every other month. As far as the positive impact, it’s helped me realize that, with everyone that we meet, we’re all a community, and we should be striving for unity because of that. It’s not just in basketball, but it’s also in other aspects of life. So, for instance, when my teammates and I see each other at practice, we would give each other fist bumps, just to say, “Hey, how’s it going?”—a little fist bump there.

Then what I decided to do there, it made me feel like I belonged, so I said, “Okay, I’m going to do that with everyone else I meet,” so at work, at my tutoring job, I’ll fist bump my co-workers, I’ll fist bump my bosses or the people I work with; and if I was at school, I’d fist bump my classmates and some of my professors. It was just an idea of, like: Look, in education, we’re striving to become better teachers and help future students down the line. In tutoring, we’re helping learn the best practical methods for academic success. So we all are in this together as a team; we all have common goals, and we should try to achieve them just like any team sport tries to do so.

Presv. Melanie: So it sounds like you really felt a community in the wheelchair basketball experience, and you’ve kind of applied that principle in different areas of your life.

Mr. Christy: Yes. Yes, I have, and it’s been a founding pillar in my development as a person, so I truly believe that in order to have a peaceful unity with people, we have to start seeing where our common ground is.

Presv. Melanie: Right, that connection with one another.

Mr. Christy: Yep.

Presv. Melanie: So you said you were bullied as a child, and you chose to play a sport because you thought that would be a solution to the bullying. Did it pan out to be that way or not?

Mr. Christy: So I still got bullied even when I was playing wheelchair basketball, but I started to, through the discussions with my father and through going to church services, I started to realize that I could use the wheelchair basketball as an opportunity to just play my emotions out on the court—not cursing or anything like that, but just let my game do the talking; let my shooting, my rebounding, passing be it, and that would be the way I express myself.

Presv. Melanie: I mean, that’s really a common sort of mental health suggestion, is to do something physical when you’re stressed or you have anxiety or anger or frustration of any kind. Just when you can get things out in a productive way. So it sounds like it was a really good fit, at least for you to deal with those emotions.

Mr. Christy: Yes, it was, and it’s been helpful for me throughout my life, too, just growing up and dealing with the kind of stresses that not only you deal with in middle school but you deal with in high school or you deal with in college or you deal with in young adulthood, having jobs. You need that physical outlet.

Presv. Melanie: Right, and that community, too, that sense of community. So if there are other people listening who might be interested in participating in wheelchair basketball, I’m sure there’s an association you can refer people to, to see if something exists in their area?

Mr. Christy: Yes, there is the National Wheelchair Basketball Association, and it’s also on the internet. It’s the NWBA.org. It contains a list of all the teams, from prep (or the kids level) to JV and high school level, and then there’s the adult teams from Division III to Division I, and there’s also inter-collegiate teams. All of them in the name of wheelchair basketball. It’s there; it’s not well known, but it’s present.

Presv. Melanie: Right, and it sounds like it spans a vast way of… a skillset, I guess you could say. It goes into collegiate basketball as well. That’s really cool.

Mr. Christy: Yes.

Presv. Melanie: And it just gives me—I want to plant a little seed to youth workers out there, to think about how we can be more inclusive in our basketball programs, our sports programs, to people who might be in wheelchairs, and that it exists and just to find out what type of wheelchairs we can use so that all of our youth can participate in our programs more.

Mr. Christy: Yes, exactly!

Presv. Melanie: So you are a priest’s kid, a PK, as we commonly refer to priests’ kids. What are some of the blessings and challenges of being a PK?

Mr. Christy: Right, so regarding the blessings, I would say two things. So first, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and have dinner with many priests, bishops, and just get to know them on a personal level and even on a spiritual level. My dad… All the priests that I have known, they all have a common understanding of Orthodoxy, they all believe in the same dogma and everything like that, but what each priest takes away from Orthodoxy is something that’s vital to them and how they grow spiritually as a Christian. That’s what I’m interested in, too, because then it’s something that I can take and I can add to my soul as well, some lessons I can take in.

And then the second benefit of being a PK would be that I have more resources at my disposal to understand Orthodoxy. If I wasn’t a PK and I was having a spiritual issue or a personal problem and I told my non-priest father… [Laughter] I would say, “Hey, I’m going through something.” He might say, “Oh, well, you might need to pray more or just go to church more or read the Bible,” or something, but there might not be… I’m not saying that would definitely be the case, but I’m saying that might happen in some instances, and so there might not be moments where there’s direction, like clear direction. Whereas with a priest for a father, you… My dad would say, “Ah, you might want to read this section in the Philokalia, or you might want to read the ascetical works of St. Basil, or you might want to look up this quote from Elder Paisios.” Things like that, that help me to understand—to want to know more about the faith and to examine it further as I grow up.

Presv. Melanie: Right, so you had access to… We grow from one another’s faith as well, so you had access to a lot of faithful people through people who visited you who were either bishops or priests or likewise, and shared their experiences of their faith with you. And you’ve got your dad there, who’s just right at your hand to point you in a direction, specific direction, specific direction to what your needs were, to what you were handling. So it’s pretty handy, I have to say!

Mr. Christy: Yeah, it is! It’s actually kind of funny now, because I gave a sermon last Sunday at my local church, and I was adding my quotes and stuff from what I wanted to say, and I was just kind of sharing my initial thoughts with my dad, and he said, “You might want to consider this article from the Orthodox Study Bible,” and I’m like: “Oh, that’s cool! I’ll jot that down.” And then there are times where, because, again, I’m a writing tutor and I’ve done this for a living, sometimes he’ll read me his sermons and then we’ll go over them and see how they sound and stuff.

Presv. Melanie: Oh, that’s neat. You get to help him, too. You get to edit Dad.

Mr. Christy: Yep.

Presv. Melanie: That’s neat. That’s very handy, oh my goodness! You mentioned being the writing tutor, and you majored in English, and I wonder what made you choose that.

Mr. Christy: It’s actually kind of funny. When I was a kid, I hated reading. I wanted to just watch pro wrestling and watch movies and play video games. Reading was like the last thing I ever wanted to do, so when I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina in 2011, I was 17, I was a senior in high school, and I was taking a British literature class. We were reading Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and Hamlet for the first time in particular, and those three texts—we read more, but those initial three texts got me hooked in a way, because each of those texts were dealing with some form of religious theme or philosophical theme. I was thinking, “Wow, these lines and these works, they sound deeply Orthodox, these passages here,” because we’re dealing in the medieval world where Catholicism is sort of the mainstay, so it’s close in relation to Orthodoxy. So I was thinking, “Oh, I can add that to a class discussion. What would St. John Cassian say to a text like Hamlet? Or what would St. John Chrysostom say to a text like Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice?”

So that’s been sort of the driving force for my work. I want to provide an Orthodox interpretation in everything that I do, and I felt like with English for me that was the best way for me to keep my faith and to do that.

Presv. Melanie: Wow. You are so smart, William! I really appreciate how you make the theological connections with your study. You’re just sort of… Everything is viewed through that lens of your Orthodox Christian faith. What a powerful example that is to other young people, because as we choose what we want to study in college, to inform that by our faith, everything can be sanctified and be made beautiful for God’s glory. And you just explained that very well in your choice to study English literature.

So obviously from what you’ve been telling us, your faith has had a very prominent role in your life experience. How, if at all, do you think your spiritual journey has been different as an individual with cerebral palsy?

Mr. Christy: So, growing up, externally, I didn’t really show any signs of a sadness or a depression over my cerebral palsy. I was just walking with my walker. It was no big deal. There were times, though, internally, or after I would hear the New Testament gospel reading on how Jesus would heal the lepers or heal the blind and the paralytic; I would sometimes internally say, like, “Well, okay, what about me?” I was young at the time; I might have been in my young teenage years. But as I got older, my dad and I started talking more about the faith, and he was starting to educate me about the faith and I started going to church on a more consistent basis and just coming to things on my own. I came to the conclusion that it’s not necessarily having the disability that’s the sin or who we are as Christians or what our fate is; it’s how we live with our disability. So I can live with my cerebral palsy, and I can have a “Woe is me” attitude—I don’t mean to demean the message by that, but I could also look at it and say, “Okay, this is part of me, but it is not me at the same time.” I could still be a good Orthodox Christian or a pious Orthodox Christian and still have CP and not have to worry about that weighing me down.

Presv. Melanie: So what you described is common, not only for young children, for young people, but I think for caregivers and for people of all ages. Sometimes we have challenges and we wonder why, and sometimes we think it’s possibly because of our sins, that we’re not being relieved of these challenges. I think it’s a very common human experience, but what you also described is a very important truth, that it’s about how we respond to the challenges that we face in life that define us; the challenges do not define us. So we may at times struggle and have sadness over things, but we pick up again, and we just keep going. And you’re a great example of that; thank you, William.

Mr. Christy: Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

Presv. Melanie: So in your experience, what has been maybe one of the common misunderstandings people have about you because you use a wheelchair?

Mr. Christy: Probably that people would tend to think that I’m slow—and this is not necessarily everybody I come across with, because I’m friends with a good amount of people, but if I were to just meet somebody out of the blue, they may have the misconception that they think that I’m slow, and then when they find out that, hey, I got my master’s in English and I’m a tutor and everything, it’s like oh! Well, now they start treating me with respect, and they treat me like a normal person, which, you know…

Presv. Melanie: They just modify how they speak to you, right? They don’t speak as slowly or maybe as loudly. I’m reminded of an experience that I had, embarrassingly, when I was doing pastoral theology classes, and I was visiting somebody in the hospital who had ASL, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and this woman was a very sweet woman. She was on a respirator, and for some reason I felt because she couldn’t speak, I felt like I had to yell at her when I was talking to her, and I had to think about that after I left that first visit with her, because I thought, “She’s not hard of hearing. Why am I doing this?” Sometimes we don’t even realize why we’re doing it; it’s just a response. So, like you said, it’s more out of people not knowing, and then you kind of have to learn—the other person has to learn that you don’t just lump every disability into every category.

Mr. Christy: Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Presv. Melanie: So what is one of—or the most important life lesson you’ve learned, do you think, that you may not have if you didn’t have cerebral palsy?

Mr. Christy: Perseverance conquers all. That’s the lesson that I would probably not have gained had I not had cerebral palsy. I say this because, growing up, I watched pro wrestling, I watched Rocky, like the Rocky films, and now as an adult I watch the Creed films, all the Cobra Kais in the show I watched—this is great—but all those films are about overcoming and being resilient and persevering through adversity of some sort, but in my case if I didn’t have the cerebral palsy, I mean, I look at my living situation: my parents are healthy, and I live in a nice home. I had a great education. But I wouldn’t really have struggled for all of that stuff.

But what’s helped me to realize that I need to struggle was because I have my cerebral palsy so that there are some barriers that I had when going through my education. I had to record lectures to retake notes or I had to take extended time on tests, but those were things that I had to do initially in order to get to do well and to be where I am today. And once I realized, okay, this is something I have to work with and live with, I need to figure out a way to get around it and to rise above it, and then, slowly but surely, I didn’t need those accommodations after a while, because I was… I had figured out ways to utilize my brain and utilize… and not to be hindered as much by my disability, if that makes sense.

Presv. Melanie: Absolutely. So you used your strengths to help you with the challenges you faced.

Mr. Christy: Right.

Presv. Melanie: Which is so smart, and which we all can learn to do with whatever challenges we face. I just have a question maybe: If you could… If there are people, maybe young adults, listening who have a disability of some sort, if there’s anything, any message you want to leave for them to think about, a few words maybe?

Mr. Christy: I was an altar boy in Memphis, and I had to use a walker and everything. So if you ever feel that your disability is excluding you from the faith, talk to your spiritual father; talk to any people that you trust in the spiritual life, and see if you can find a way to serve the Church, whether it’s being a part of the altar or being a chanter or a choir member, or being a greeter or helping with any kind of GOYA events or any other ministry. Being a part of the Church doesn’t require you to be able-bodied. There’s no limit to disability. You can do anything and everything as long as you put your best effort forward and you show your clearest intentions.

Presv. Melanie: I couldn’t have added anything more to that. Thank you for so eloquently offering that encouragement. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, William. I just know God has beautiful things in store for you. Thank you so much.

Mr. Christy: The same for you, Presvytera, and I want to say again, thank you so much for having me on today. It was an honor. This is my first podcast, so the fact that I can spend it with you and talking about the faith and learning from you as well, it’s truly a blessing for me.

Presv. Melanie: Thanks, William.