On Illness and Christ's Suffering

March 2023 Letters for the Road

Dear Reader, 

I was sick for a good two weeks this month, and before you stop reading out of a lack of desire to hear my symptoms enumerated or your sympathy invoked, let me assure you that neither is the reason why I mention my illness. 

To be honest, I hadn’t thought of being sick beyond what I sense is the normal modern opinion–how terrible one feels, how miserable it is to be sick, how much I can’t afford to be sick, and how I might be able to press through my illness to keep up a decent level of productivity. 

But in the midst of my own pressing through, I found an account of Julian of Norwich that has stuck in my head for the last three weeks. Julian was a fourteenth century English woman, renowned for her visions which she recorded in writing. In the text I was reading, the author described Julian’s longing to suffer with Christ, and her way of seeing illness as a means of experiencing a deeper sense of Christ’s passion. Her historical context put illness at the foreground of her experience: the Plague, which devastated Europe for more than four generations, forced Julian and her contemporaries to live with death always before them. 

For Julian, illness was a means of experiencing union with Christ, that in the pains of her body she might share in Christ’s suffering. She writes, “I desirede a bodilye sight, wharein I might have more knawinge of bodelye paines of oure lorde oure savioure” (V 1:13–14).

Julian’s approach to suffering is, I’m guessing, foreign to most of us. For those with chronic illness, the constancy of pain and limitations may prompt this kind of approach, in order to provide a framework in which the daily struggles can be faced. But for those of us who experience illness only briefly and intermittently, it’s more likely that we see illness as an imposition rather than a possibility. Our modern understanding of how illnesses happen, combined with our desires to be comfortable, productive, and independent, makes illnesses seem like irritating inconveniences to be put behind us as quickly as possible. 

I’m at risk of sentimentialising, I know. Illnesses is, decidedly, a result of the Fall and thus part of the way our world suffers under the curse. When we’re sick, our bodies bear witness to the groans of the whole creation as it awaits redemption. 

And yet, the incomprehensible mercy of God is that despite the profound “not good” of our broken bodies in this broken world, suffering and pain do not inevitably bend us toward death. Calvin speaks of the way in which dying “marks off the progress of the soul” of the believer: in other words, even as our bodies waste away, to use Paul’s imagery, “inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Cor 4:16). 

So I have wondered, since reading about Julian, is my experience of hardship (small as it was in a normal flu!), impoverished in some way? Perhaps a cold is just a cold, and there’s nothing else to do except take the medicine available to me and rest as best I can until it runs its course. But I’m wondering now if there’s an experience of illness that sees beyond the pain of sinus pressure and an aching body, not to make heroes of ourselves and our perseverance, but to remember the One whose body suffered and was wounded for our sakes.

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The Greenhouse: Cyclamen and Tomatoes, 1935. Watercolour by Eric Ravilious

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Draw Near 
by Scott Cairns

προσέλθετε

For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered
far to find. And near is where you’ll very likely see
how far the near obtains. In the dark katholikon
the lighted candles lent their gold to give the eye
a more than common sense of what lay flickering
just beyond the ken, and lent the mind a likely
swoon just shy of apprehension. It was then
that time’s neat artifice fell in and made for us
a figure for when time would slip free altogether.
I have no sense of what this means to you, so little
sense of what to make of it myself, save one lit glimpse
of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom.

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This month I finally finished Biblical Critical Theory by Chris Watkin, is a hugely ambitious undertaking to contextualise the Gospel message in relationship to modern and postmodern life and culture, to show how the Gospel “diagonalises” a host of different philosophical assumptions and approaches. “Diagonalisation,” Watkin argues, “presents a biblical picture in which the best aspirations of both options are fulfilled, but not in a way that the proponents of those options would see coming. Through this motif, Watkin over and over again avoids simplistic reductions that characterise our polarised cultural and political conversations. His approach was refreshing and inspiring. 

On the fiction front, I read two books that were unknown to me before friends recommended them: Stoner by John Williams, and We of the Never Never by Jeannie Gunn. Stoner tells the story, from birth to death, of a very average English professor, and his very difficult life. It was beautifully written, and, to my surprise, I couldn’t put it down. We of the Never Never took me much longer. It’s an Australian memoir, written by a woman who follows her new husband into a cattle ranch in the Northern Territory bush in the early 1900s. I resonated with the way the Australian landscape took hold of her heart and wouldn’t let it go, but the slang confused me again and again, slowing my reading considerably. Consistent with the dominant British Australian perspective in that time, it also portrayed the Indigenous people and Chinese immigrants in dehumanising terms, making it difficult to trust the narrator completely. 

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Watch, dear Lord, with those who wake, or watch, or weep to night, 
and give your angels charge over those who sleep. 
Tend your sick ones, O Lord Christ. 
Rest your weary ones. 
Bless your dying ones. 
Soothe your suffering ones. 
Pity your afflicted ones. 
Shield your joyous ones. 
And all, for your Love’s sake. 
Amen.
—Augustine

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On the road with you, 

Laura