Chronic illness and health – a meditation on Job, ‘Be Not Afraid’ and my own experience

Chronic illness makes me angry.  And it makes me afraid.  That is it is a visceral rather than intellectual experience.  Sure I can think about it and reflect on it but above all I feel it

 These quotes from the psalms reflect a Biblical theme of challenging and questioning God when we experience suffering and it is replicated most forcibly in Job

 Job has everything stripped from him – family, wealth, possessions but he responds in a remarkably calm manner: the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.  This prompts Satan to ask God if he can attack Job’s body, when he does this Job remains silent except to rebuke his wife who wants him to curse God and die.  Finally his friends come and sit with him in silence as he scrapes the sores which cover his body from head to toe.  Then it all comes out

 In the Be Not Afraid workshops we rarely have intellectual discussions.  They are about personal, visceral experience.  Sometimes we don’t even talk about illness but the focus on chronic illness enables people to talk about a sadness in their life which has a similar visceral impact.  Often we talk about how to avoid bitterness, which is perhaps our version of Job trying to avoid the temptation to curse God and die.

 But although Job’s experience is a personal and visceral one it is not a solitary or individual one.  The main body of the book relates his dialogues with his friends – although dialogues is perhaps the wrong word, essays in misunderstanding might be more accurate.  Pain and illness is one thing but it is an entirely different experience when to this pain and illness are added loneliness, or misunderstanding, or being judged because you are ill, or being accused of sin because of your illness.  Other people have the ability to ease pain and even transform pain into a positive experience but they also have the ability to diminish and demean and extinguish the spark of life within our hearts.

 In Be Not Afraid the favourite story for people to choose is the story of Jacob and Esau which we title “Families: can’t live with them, can’t live without them”.  The care and love which family shows to someone suffering from a chronic illness is perhaps the single most important factor in their ability to cope with that experience.  It is so important because the illness does not only affect the individual but the whole family.  Chronic illness is not a private experience, it is a family experience.  People often talk about churches being family – perhaps the best way to judge whether or not this is the case, is the impact that the chronic illness of one of its members has on the whole church…  and, furthermore, the nature of the church’s response to it. 

 But although chronic illness is not a private experience, it is a personal journey.  This is the purpose of Be Not Afraid – to enable people to go on their own personal illness journey and learn from the experience of entering into the wilderness of chronic illness.

 In my redramatization of the story of Job I conclude with these words

 For Job, whose life was entirely centred around his relationship with God, his illness meant that he had to reexamine his faith and his religion.  As people listened to this reexamination they found it difficult to cope, because it threatened the easy confidence of their own beliefs.  But it is what Job had to do.  This is the opportunity with which chronic illness presents us: the chance to reexamine our deepest convictions, not as an intellectual exercise, but as a visceral journey which demands the full exercise of all our intellectual powers, all our emotional resources, all our spiritual energies, not to mention all our physical courage.  And chronic illness also brings similar challenges to our natural and spiritual families.  But is this a journey which we are willing and able to take?

 A final thought.  We are told at the end of the book that Job received back everything that he had lost and more besides, although nothing is said about his health.  Perhaps his skin continue to trouble him to the end of his life, perhaps for him it was a continuing journey, a reminder of those dark days when he came face to face with God.  An opportunity to continually examine the reality of his faith and his religion.

Joe -- a story about chronic illness