Lyndsey Medford

I found this book to be a bit of a slog because it felt very repetitive and preachy. I had to wade through a lot of stuff, but I found a huge amount of gems for my disabled, healing body. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in justice/fighting Empire, and especially anyone with chronic illness and/or disabilities.

The following gems are just a few of the many gems that I found in this book to give you a feel for what you can discover in this book:

"Justice means striving for a world where we don't put unnecessary obstacles in each other's way."
"The Law of Moses even provides for priests to give an atonement offering for unintentional, communal sin."
"When I asked my body if she was trying to share something with me -- the same way I'd learned to greet depression -- she answered. My symptoms improved when I avoided certain foods. I had more high-energy days overall when I took care to slow down on low-energy ones. I came to notice that my joints held stress within them as pain and inflammation and learned how to process stress better. I also made hard decisions to help avoid it; I practiced yoga and gave up, at least for a while, on working full time."
"It took a long while to accept that, while much had been given to me, much had also been taken from me."
"The more that sick women are told we have imagined or caused our own suffering, the more we wonder if somehow we did want to suffer all along."
"Disability access upends our national religion of efficiency."
"Jesus shows us [with his scarred resurrected body] that a 'healthy' or 'whole' or redeemed body is not one without fissure, not an independent, unaccommodated one, not one that makes other people feel comfortable."
"It's very well to reject the idea that our value lies in our labor, but that doesn't diminish the desire most adults I know have to be useful, to at least occasionally make some contribution to others' lives. For some of my disabled friends and me, this is a great, perhaps an existential, struggle. My hunch is that the real root of our struggle isn't that we never do anything for anyone. It's that we were taught from early ages that the kinds of contributions we can make don't 'count.'"
"Mutual aid efforts emphasize structures and cultures that encourage reciprocity, seek equity, and build community and political power among people who understand themselves as both givers and receivers."
"Jesus was not in the business of making people more productive, tidy, or correct. His healings righted relationships within people through an experience that empowered them to right relationships between themselves and others."
[The above is one that I recommend reading about in the book & then meditating on with the stories of Jesus healing people in the Gospels!]
"Do we really have a loneliness epidemic, a domestic abuse epidemic, an opioid epidemic, a gun violence epidemic, and on and on.... Or do we have a series of interlocking cultural and systemic failures leaving huge segments of our society trapped in chronic pain and ongoing trauma to the point that all these problems overlap and intertwine?"

The last sentence of the book is: "We're here to know the God who was wounded and the God who heals, every day, all over again." Amen!… (plus d'informations)

I have seldom felt so alienated by a book and did not get past the third chapter. As an atheist, I am used to being outside of a book's worldview. I have read books that have a strong Christian element without any difficulty. It's the world we all live in.

However, this book is one of the few I have felt to be alienating. I imagine it might feel alienating to Jews, Muslims, Buddhist, and perhaps even some Christians in that it is so completely captive to one view of the relationship between an individual and God. She might think she's ecumenical, but that intense "personal relationship" is singularly evangelical.

I think the marketing of this book is deceptive. As someone with chronic illness and constant pain, I was eager to read this book and feel some anger with how the unceasing evangelism of the book is effaced from the marketing. Yes, I expected some "spirituality" but I did not expect the singular worldview that excludes all other experience. It was completely alienating.

I passed it on to someone who is religious and has RA, I think she will like it a lot.… (plus d'informations)

My Body and Other Crumbling Empires by Lyndsey Medford was not exactly what I was expecting, but ended up being just what I needed.

I thought it was going to be more of a resource on how one can cope with chronic illness. While I know every dis-ease is different, I thought she would be giving examples of her daily life and how she navigates it to make the pain more tolerable.
Medford does do this but it’s more in a broad way that encourages the reader to embrace their community and focus on what is good in the world, which may sound trite but the way she writes I never felt that way.

I appreciated how she recognizes that she is privileged in many ways, one of which is where she has the financial ability to not work so she can focus on healing, but time and again, she acknowledges that so many people in this world can’t for so many reasons. She also delves into many of the other injustices in regards to the health care system and in communities without giving a step by step guide to activism. But the way she writes makes the reader feel like they are snuggled under a fuzzy blanket on the couch with a cup of tea talking with a good friend.

I also liked that while she talked about Jesus and correlated some of his teaching to what is going on in the world and detailed it to healing, she wrote it in such a way that if you are not religious you can easily skip those sections and continue on with her thoughts and the story of what she’s been through.

After I finished reading My Body and Other Crumbling Empires I did feel uplifted and felt a renewed energy to get out and become more involved in the community.… (plus d'informations)

In My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World That is Sick, Lyndsey Medford takes the reader on a journey through her own lifelong chronic illness and its intersections with our chronically sick world. Medford skillfully weaves a narrative of body in place that brings the reader into the realities of navigating complex illness in the American medical system with a gentleness that doesn't shy away from how lonely and painful that experience of illness can be. She acknowledges her own perspective, and its shaping by her social location. Rather than prescribe a solution, she continually returns to the space of complexity and accountability she has found for herself in her own healing journey.
Throughout this, she comes back to the complexity of her own faith journey. The God-talk is grounded and does not interfere with the reading as a non-Christian reader, rather, it is a call to remind herself and her faith communities to live in the kind of clearness and compassion that Jesus' narratives of healing modeled: ones where healing is not just about removing illness, but returning people to their communities and relationships with each other: a universal message that comes through and is timely for modern gathered communities to hear.… (plus d'informations)