Perplexed, but not driven to despair

On this day, 25th July — the Feast of St James, in 1986 I submitted my DPhil thesis in Chemistry. I don’t remember the date of the viva which followed (somewhere in mid-August to allow me to enter the Jesuit novitiate in mid-September) but I do remember the submission day — not as a calendar …

‘Us Too it Endears’

Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended? Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed and all; …

The Differences between Terminal and Chronic Illness

D. G. Myers writes a very frank article, The Mercy of Sickness before Death, about some aspects of his experience of end stage metastatic prostate cancer. You may, for instance, become more conscious of time. What once might have seemed like wastes of time—a solitaire game, a television show you would never have admitted to …

The Frailty of the Body

Three posts to set alongside each other: Sonia Saraiya at The AV Club reflecting on the violence done to bodies in the TV production of Game of Thrones Richard Beck commenting on two posts from Andrew Krinks entitled “Soulful Resistance: Theological Body Knowledge on Tennessee’s Death Row” (Part 1, Part 2) My own Advent reflection …

Changing Categories: ME, CFS, Fatigue

There are some things that are supposed to be sacrosanct on the internet: one of them is that URIs, web addresses to you and me, should never change once they have been allotted. Now, in reality, web addresses get deleted or modified all the time — but I don’t like to be the culprit. Despite …

Choosing Thoughts

Over at Big Think yesterday they had a quote from William James: “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” If only it were that easy! If only our ability to choose were so straightforward! Since I have had ME I find that anxious and stressful thoughts — usually …