Morning Thanks

Garrison Keillor once said we'd all be better off if we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing. I'll try.

Sunday, May 25, 2025

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 42

 

“My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, 

saying to me all day long, 

‘Where is your God?’"

 I am, regretfully, descended from a distinguished line of fulsome hypochondriacs.  A former minister of ours, who was once my grandfather’s preacher, once told me that a half century ago, when my grandfather was felled suddenly by a heart attack, an old friend of both of them appeared shocked. “Maybe he was sick—we should have believed him for all those years,” that friend said.        

 It’s in the genes.  Maybe I shouldn’t go that far.  Can hypochondria be in the genes?  Talk amongst yourselves.

 My mother had it too, as any of her kids will tell you.  There was always something ailing her.  The doctor could never quite find it, which meant she just saw more of them.  My mother—bless her soul and I loved her dearly—was not a good argument for nationalized medicine.

Maybe I have it too—I’d like to think not, but who knows?  When first we were married and living in Arizona, I started thinking my arrhythmia, a condition I’ve had for as long as I can remember, was developing into something awful.  It’s embarrassing to admit it, but I was under some stress at the time, newly married and unsure of myself in graduate school, problems which, today, seem all that life-threatening. 

I went to see a doctor—we’d just moved so someone I’d never seen before.  He took some tests, shrugged his shoulders, and said that I needed someone to tell me I wasn’t sick. Which he did. End of symptoms.  I am my mother’s child.

 Maybe David’s talk about pain in this verse—“bones in mortal agony”--is overstatement.  He’s trying to make a point about his spiritual anguish, drawing on his poetic license.  It’s a figure of speech.

 On the other hand, maybe his physical pain is hypochondria. The tentacles of his stress reach into his joints, his muscles, even his bones. He hurts all over. Pass the Tylenol, please.

Maybe depression—his deep sense of alienation from God—is the occasion for his physical ailments.  Maybe he’s got thyroid problems, a frequent association.  Maybe he had some chronic pain—an old war injury—before he felt “down in the dumps.” Chronic pain often accompanies or even triggers depression.

My sisters and I often shook our heads in wonder at our long-suffering father, who always appeared to believe my mother’s phantom pains were real.  He must have learned—as we had to—that denying those pains was never going to get him or her anywhere because what Mom felt in her bones—real or not—was always real.

Good doctors will admit that we are all more than the sum of our physical parts.  In hospitals all over the world, miracles still happen; and we call them that because we don’t know—nobody does—how human will intersects with our physicality. Today, I stumble around with neuropathy, looking for magic cures. I'm ready to try CBD. 

That’s why I believe David's testimony, even though I’m a life-long scoffer.  The pain he felt in being seemingly abandoned by God crept, cancer-like, into every atom of his fiber.  He could feel the presence of God’s absence in his bones, in his cartilage. 

I don’t think it’s overstatement. God seemed gone, and that pain, to him, was real—as it can be to us, hypochondriacs all.

 Can there be great pain for those who believe he’s always near? Perhaps they’re the only ones who feel it?

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