Never Fearing Wild Things

(This was first published in Geez Magazine, Winter 2024, Issue #71, “Will These Bones Live? collective hopes for health”)

“Disease and healing are not just physiological processes.  They are spiritual detonations.”

– Marc Ian Barasch, The Healing Path: A Soul Approach to Illness

Bodies speak.  They have stories to tell.

My body is learning to live with long covid, after contracting it in March of 2020.  I used to think that I was well versed in listening to my body, but a couple of months after recovering from covid I wrote: “My body is also trying to get my attention – not an easy task.  For all my grand talk, I do not listen to my body well.”

For me, long covid comes with the insidious brain fog that finds the corners of your mind and steals away words and thoughts before you can grab them.  It lays heavy fatigue upon you, like a wet woollen blanket, keeping you down even after ample rest.  Coming and going, like unwelcome guests, are other symptoms – breathlessness, light-headedness, rapid heart rate, headaches, all peppering your days with misery.

In the early days of this lingering illness I did not pray for healing. I assumed this was due to the mind-numbing fatigue, but came to realize I could not pray for what I did not yet understand.  My body had things to say. It was time to learn how to listen.  It was time to learn a new language.

It doesn’t help when the usual avenues of listening don’t pick up on the story.  The usual battery of medical tests don’t show the reality of long covid, so millions of people are left without medical interventions that could be helpful. They also face, as I have, doctors who simply won’t believe you.

It strikes me now that our faith communities should be places where we learn to listen to this language of bodies – our own bodies, the body of the community, the body of this precious earth.  Sadly, coopted by a culture of productivity and success, we have often failed to learn the language and stories of broken bodies.  In our overeagerness to be well and free of dis-ease, we have forgotten to ‘weep with those who weep’(Romans 12:15).  When we fail to listen to those stories we are impoverished.

On this journey of mine, the Spirit has become my language teacher.

In these early days of language lessons I am listening and I am learning.  I am learning about spiritual abundance that comes from not being able to work.  I am learning about having to sit in stillness and listen to the wind instead, because that is all I can do.  I am learning to notice the nuthatches in the tree and the silent flight of the crane and I’m hearing God whispering “I am here”.  

I’m also learning to question and resist the narrative that tells me I have to be healthy and meet a certain level of performance to be of value to the community.  I’m working half time as that is as much as my body will allow. This is the language of enough – that is, the “enough” each of us has to offer that make our communities whole.  As a leader in a faith community, this has only deepened the questions I’ve long pondered: “Why there are not more variously abled bodies and souls in the fabric of our communities?  Why do we wait for people to be ‘well’ before they are invited to participate?”

Slowly I am learning this new language. I am beginning to hear others in ways I could not before.  I am hearing the beautiful and broken language of this earth. My hope is that we might all participate in these language lessons. Then we can ask for, and act towards, the deeper healing our good Creator holds for us.