Posts filed under 'Theology of Fatigue'

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 to get to grips with the sacrament’s underlying theology and found Jake Empereur’s book Prophetic Anointing: God’s Call to the Sick, the Elderly and the Dying to be really helpful.

The Sacrament of the Sick can’t promise healing–indeed for a long while it was only offered to the dying!–but it must pray for it confidently. How do you handle that? Empereur’s argument (as I recall) is that anointing recognises the prophetic vocation of sickness. I remember the homily divided the congregation (of classmates) right down the middle. Some thought it was powerful; other’s hated it. Luckily the professor fell in the first group…

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8 comments April 14th, 2007

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 erstwhile theologian.

Suffering is an important issue for Christian theology. All religious belief systems hold out some kind of promise of some kind salvation from suffering; but Christians have had to contend from the beginning with the fact that the founding figure of our faith suffered, died, and was buried. We have had to make sense of the Passion and Resurrection. How do we say that suffering can be the locus of God’s own activity without making God a monster or an incompetent?

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4 comments April 13th, 2007

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