The Power In Noticing

(Note: Today’s guest blogger is Charity Lofthouse Cricco – a professor, gifted musician and Spiritus community member. Charity is also part of the newly formed SCC for people living with chronic illness and/or disability of some kind. We’re grateful for Charity’s contribution today!)

A long-time friend, someone who was like a second father to me, passed away last August at 87. A news producer and journalism professor for five decades, he would often say, “a story always has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.” His advice meshes well with the stories told about Jesus’s meeting people facing illness and disability. The beginning is an account of their suffering and ailments, sometimes chronic and lasting for decades; the middle is their encounter with Jesus; and the end is their healing, presented as a literal event and related to their faith, courage, or perseverance. Their faith makes them well, then they are well. 

One of the readings for today, Numbers 21: 4-9, makes God’s part in its story arc explicit: The Israelites, weary and complaining in the desert, are bitten by snakes sent by God, then saved when Moses makes a statue of a serpent. God afflicts when you doubt, God heals when you believe. In the New Testament, Jesus is much kinder, though the impacts of earlier beliefs remain: people’s afflictions are still viewed as curses from God. If only Jesus could meet everyone who had faith, then everyone would be healed. 

I developed Long Covid after a mild case of Covid-19 in May 2020. I am still able to work and my disability is invisible to most everyone I interact with on a daily basis. Unlike a static disability, where the symptoms or nature of the disability is consistent over time, Long Covid is a dynamic disability, with symptoms and severity that change day to day and week to week. I can no longer exercise without severe fatigue; I now have asthma; I have to limit my daily routine and take substantial precautions to avoid exertion and infection, including colds and Covid-19. My wife, whom I married at Spiritus in June 2018, can no longer work because of Long Covid. As we enter a time when the world is returning to old routines, those with disabilities or chronic illnesses that prevent them from leaving their homes or participating in in-person events are losing the access that made more interactions possible during the past three years: zoom meetings, virtual gatherings, a shared sense that they were missed or worth the effort of accommodations. Our supposedly post-Covid world is one that wants the story to end so badly that for those of us who remain in the middle of chronic illness or disability, it often feels like we are on our own, cursed by fate if not by God.  

Ministering to and journeying with people with chronic illness and disability means being willing to pay attention to the ways the world continues to cut them off from community. Even groups that try to create welcoming spaces can inadvertently forget to ask who is not there, who is unable to gain access now, and who has always been cut off from our community due to ableism. Catherine Meeks writes about racial healing as a process of paradox, wherein progress and failure are both true: “It is a challenge to learn to hold competing truths in your head and heart, and it is very difficult to inhabit the space created in the area between competing truths… When one can hold this type of understanding in one’s head and heart and find the energy to stay in the space created by it, much good can be achieved.” It is in the profound, sacred spaces of this contradiction—God is my help and my strength and I will never be healed from this illness—that we learn to live with Meeks’s contradiction. We seek to welcome those living with illness and disability and we still live with structural ableism, even in the ways we talk about or think about God. 

Poet Pádraig Ó Tuama says, “there is power in noticing.” Jesus was willing to notice and love the chronically ill and it is up to us to show how to do this without a certain ending to the story. Too often, being chronically ill or disabled is the loneliest work – my hope is to cultivate a heart open enough to be a Long-Covid Christian in a post-Covid world.