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 …
Category Archives: Theology of Chronic Illness
‘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 …
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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 …
Gift and Loss
All illness involves loss. At times I’ve read the story of the last fourteen years as a tale of loss after loss–of energy, of mobility, of friendships, of useful work, of reputation, of my own reliability–and when I read it that way it seems like I’m trapped in a collapsing bubble of capability and control. …
Anointing the Sick
First, something from a safe distance: I wrote the homily that follows as part of a class in Celebrational Style (that’s a course in leading worship) while I was at JSTB. The assignment was to create, preside at, and preach for a service of sacramental anointing outside a Eucharistic context. To do that I had …
The Appealing of the Passion
I don’t know whether this will be a lone post, the first of a coherent series, or just the start of some jottings but I thought in the shower this morning that it is about time I tried to write about the experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as a person of faith and, indeed, an …