Prayerfully Navigating Chronic Illness
By Madison Chastain
In my body I have found that when it rains, it pours. I was considerably healthy the first 21 years of my life and then, all at once, I was falling apart. I had taken hormonal birth control for a few years to mitigate issues contingent with my iron-deficiency anemia and severe menstrual bleeding. From the moment I got off the pill, the struggles my body had been experiencing were unmasked: chronic inflammation had taken over my stomach, colon, liver, and gallbladder. I experienced gallbladder failure and severe bacterial infection. I couldn’t eat for months, and my period never came back. Years later, I have been diagnosed with PCOS, and my gallbladder failure and chronic inflammation still lingers. I experience mild ulcerative colitis and IBS, and when I get sick, my inflammatory response shuts me down for weeks. I am chronically ill.
My personal and professional life both revolve around disability advocacy and theology. While I personally distinguish disability and chronic illness as separate but sometimes overlapping categories, the ways our Church, work, and personal relationships are impacted by these bodily limitations can be extremely similar. Chronic illness is hard to explain to others, hard to accommodate into our own self-concept, and hard to identify a place for within our religious experience.
Like disability, chronic illness can be responded to in a number of ways by those unfamiliar:
“Oh, you’re still experiencing that? Have you tried….”
“Wow you just can’t catch a break! It’s always something with you…”
“The Lord never gives you more than you can handle...”
Responses like these, while often well-intentioned, are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the “chronic” in chronic illness. Chronic illnesses, like disability, often don’t go away, and certainly not on their own, without medical intervention. What differentiates chronic illness from disability, and what it makes it so much harder to explain and achieve legal and medical protection for, is that chronic illness often fluctuates. At times, a person’s chronic illness can be completely asymptomatic and invisible.
Chronic illness can be extremely debilitating, and impacts every part of a person’s life. Plans must revolve around availability of bathrooms and personal transportation in the event of a flare-up. With common symptoms like fatigue, muscle and joint pain, headache, nausea, digestive and urinary discomfort, lost appetite, weakness, skin irritation, and confusion, it can be extremely difficult to maintain consistent levels of productivity. But if the condition is both invisible and inconsistent, and its symptoms look like those of a common cold or lack of rest, it can be challenging to explain to coworkers and loved ones.
How Chronic Illness Breeds Doubt
While I would never wish the experience of chronic illness on anyone, I am grateful to have someone close to me who also lives with chronic discomfort: My best friend Kasey is also chronically ill, albeit in different ways. She has alopecia, an autoimmune disorder that causes hair loss. Intersecting with her experience are inflammatory symptoms similar to mine: digestive problems, hormonal imbalance, etc. Kasey understands when I feel frustrated by my boss’ impatience with me during a flare-up. She understands the physical discomfort. She understands how difficult it is to visit doctors who turn you away with a flick of the wrist. Chronic illness is a guessing game of “Okay, where did THAT symptom come from? I’ve never experienced that before...” and doctors often don’t know either.
I have found that this cycle of unpredictable symptoms leaves me ripe for health anxiety. Previously called “hypochondria,” medical or health anxiety is a unique kind of experience that manifests as the recurrent and pervasive fear that symptoms or lack thereof indicate some greater problem beneath the surface. This can result in either frequent visits to the doctor, often as a result of disbelief or distrust in an initial doctor’s assessment, or fear and avoidance of the doctor to prevent the receipt of bad news.
I am often scared to go to the doctor and I struggle to trust their feedback when I do. During the height of my illness’ onset, I visited a doctor who told me I didn’t have anything to worry about, and that I could control my pain through diet and exercise. It took an extra month of excruciating pain and my boss referring me elsewhere to discover that all I needed was some antibiotics, and that my pain would not go away without them.
This lack of trust in medical professionals can extend to a lack of trust in my own body. If it is so easy for my body to get infected, why should I trust that it’s working to get better? This distrust can grow into self-hatred. I hate my body for getting sick so often, for feeling unfamiliar, for hurting, for causing so many problems that I see as inconveniencing me and my loved ones. Part of this doubt stems from unfamiliarity: Chronic illness can change a person’s body pretty drastically. From hair loss and weight gain, to new food intolerances and eczema, to mobility challenges and sensory impairment, chronic illness has made my body feel like…not my body. It is hard to trust a stranger. It is equally hard to trust someone you thought you knew who let you down.
This can grow into a distrust of God. Why would God permit me to endure so much discomfort so regularly? Why do we believe the body is good if it keeps screwing up so often? Why would God call me to a place where the medical care I receive is so untrustworthy?
Each of these instances of doubt can be traced back to unfair expectations. It is unfair for us to expect our bodies to act perfectly all the time. If the pervasiveness of chronic illness shows us anything, it is that perfect health is a myth! Everyone experiences some sort of pain, illness, or injury at some point.
It is unfair for me to expect God to immediately heal me. God does not work on demand. Whether or not God performs a miracle in my body does not reflect God’s faithfulness or mine.
It is also unfair for others, especially our family, friends, or coworkers, to expect us to be perfectly healthy all the time. We should examine the ways our responsibilities, both outside and inside the home, are often contingent upon bodily perfectionism. If a mother cannot be ill without it posing a severe inconvenience to the balance of caregiving, then the unfair burden is actually on the mother herself, not on those who must “pick up the slack.” A mother should be able to be sick, guilt-free. Similarly, if a workplace doesn’t prioritize employee health and well-being, then there’s a problem with the workplace, not with you!
How We View Illness Reflects Our Values
Many of these experiences would not be as challenging if we did not live in a society that thinks self-help and “wellness culture” is the height of personal responsibility. With a surplus of supplements, exercise regimens, workout clothes, etc. saturating our Instagram feeds––paired with the deeply-held belief that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and work our way to success––we have come to value achieving perfect health, on our own, as not only the goal but the expectation. This can breed distrust of those who are chronically, physically, or mentally ill: “There must be something you did or did not do to bring this upon yourself! There are so many solutions out there; if you’d done X you wouldn’t be experiencing this.”
Not everyone can simply go to the doctor. We cannot earn our health. If we could, then those who can’t afford to see a doctor or those who will never “achieve” perfect bodily health because of disability would be viewed as beneath those who could.
In Christian circles, this can be paired with toxic beliefs about praying pain away. This is dangerous, completely untrue, and it neglects the very real access challenges that face many marginalized communities. God’s kingdom directly counters the idea that the healthy are those who made the right choices and the unhealthy are those who didn’t or couldn’t. In a Christian world, illness is an embraced part of society. That’s why Christ went out of His way to touch, speak, and dine with the poor and sick.
This is integral to our understanding of our relationship to God. God does not want us to steel-arm our bodies into submission when they are crying out for assistance––what’s worse, the belief that we can do so is rooted in the sin of pride. I’ve written before about the heresy of pelagianism: that we can save ourselves and do not need God’s grace. Our modern wellness culture is a product of a pelagian belief that we can save our own bodies through the right combination of herbs and spices, without need for dependence on God. Even worse, we can position God as the Savior who frees us from our bodies, neglecting the truth that bodily difficulty is simply a part of being human in a fallen world.
Prayerfully Managing Chronic Illness Symptoms
We must turn toward a more integrated and compassionate view of bodies and their role in our faith. One of the best ways I have found to rewrite my own relationship between my body and my faith is to combine prayer and pain management. Prayer is not a replacement for pain management, medication, or therapy. You cannot pray your illness away, your experiences of either temporary or chronic, physical or mental, illness or disability do not correlate to a lack of faith.
However, as Catholics, we believe that we can offer up our pain and suffering redemptively, with particular prayer intentions. Again, if we’re not careful, we can falsely view this as us “earning our holiness.” Instead, we should conceive of our bodily experiences as forms of prayer, as making an offering of our unique life experiences. Christ Himself experienced profound pain, pain that was used as the ultimate offering for the sake of others. Our pain is not the same as Christ’s, but Christ meets us within our own unique pains and sufferings, empathetically and wholly. If our intentions are for our own healing, we can trust that God will respond how He may, whether it be through physical or spiritual healing, seen or unseen, immediately or with time, as we learn through the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick (which, by the way, we should receive in any time of pain or need, not just when we’re at death’s door!) If our intentions are for anything else––and they can be for anything else!––we can extend this same trust, knowing that our laboring under trial never goes unnoticed.
We can also embrace the long-standing tradition of offering prayers of lament, which situate us in praying to God in anguish and disappointment about our pain, without expectations for the elimination of our pain. When we lament in prayer, we permit ourselves to fully feel our emotions and our physical pain. We sit within our pain, knowing that Christ is with us in our prayers. We can beg for the pain to stop, we can confess to God that we don’t know if we can go on, we can shout at God our anger at His permittance of our suffering. This is how we suffer with hope rather than expectation of reprieve.
Some other ways to combine prayer with pain management:
Try the 2-4 Breath: Breathe in through your nose for a count of two, then exhale through your mouth with lips pursed for a count of four. This type of breathwork has been proven to mitigate pain and anxiety. While you breathe, match the pace of your breath to a prayer or mantra. When I experience severe gallbladder attacks, I pace Hail Marys to my breath.
Bring comfort objects to doctors’ visits and pair the experience with some type of joy if possible. At my home in California, my doctor’s office is right behind the local Catholic Church’s adoration chapel! I have always paired visits to one healer with visits to the Healer (and rewarded myself with iced coffee afterwards).
Ask for the intercession of applicable saints. Some good saints to lean on include:
St. Juliana: Patroness of chronic illness
St. Dymphna: Patroness of mental illness and neurological disorders
St. Gerard: Patron of expectant mothers and those with menstrual irregularities
St. Gemma: Patroness of migraines
St. Timothy: Patron of digestive disorders
St. Jude: Patron of desperate situations, including medical mysteries
St. Joseph: Patron of the Church and those who experience doubt and fear
It is also imperative that we do not do these things alone. Chronic illness can be extremely isolating because of the confusion and doubt discussed. Not everyone can have a Kasey, but I wholeheartedly encourage all people, especially women, who experience chronic illness to seek out community with others who also experience chronic illness (even if the illnesses themselves are not the same).
One of my favorite places to go is femUNITY.org. FemUNITY is a relatively new, online community made by women for women, where women can go for crowd-sourced information on medical experiences. Rather than Googling your symptoms until you’re sure it must be cancer, go to femUNITY, directly engage with women and their personal stories, and share your own! They also have an active Instagram account where you can engage with supportive content.
The best thing you can do if you live with chronic illness is share your experience. If you have a flare-up, tell your loved ones! If you have a social media platform, use it to bring attention to your illness! If you belong to a faith community, ask for your illness to be included as a prayer intention! Chronic illness is so much more common than we know. Your sharing just might speak to the heart of someone else yearning for acceptance.
