Yun Men, teaching his community, said: "Sickness and medicine mutually correspond; the whole world is medicine. Now what is the self?"
Zen Koan

Its gonna take a fierce love
To get us home before the sun goes down.
Charlie Murphy,
from the song 'Fierce Love'

This is a book about coming home. When we contract a debilitating illness like CFS we are thrown into a whole new world. All our expectations and plans are lost; we are fearful, confused, angry, frustrated, despairing. We no longer even know who we are. How are we to deal with this situation? Can there be any good in it?

The sense of questioning invites us to look deeper into ourselves. The world we find there is very different to the one we have hitherto lived in. At first we consider it alien to us. In fact we are coming home to a way of being and acting that will sustain us no matter what we encounter in life. In this way of being, paradox seems to be everywhere and we are often surprised. What seems like a form of death turns out to be the beginning of a new way of living; where we expected punishment we find compassion; that which was other seems now to be self; our vulnerability becomes our strength; and just when we seem to be most alone, the world is full of companions.

The home we come to turns out to be a journey rather than a place, in which journey we most truly become ourselves. As Fr Hansen says in his Introduction "faith is more about openness of heart to take the journey, to keep moving forward, than it is about reaching any imagined destination".

This book is clearly written by someone who has commenced that journey and who may be for us a guide or companion to help set us on our way, to take those first few halting steps. It contains much wisdom and a great deal of compassion. Fr Hansen suffers from CFS and he clearly understands and has personally dealt with the issues which face someone with this illness.

Each meditation in the book is centred around one of these issues and consists of four parts - a selection from St Luke's gospel, an address to the Lord by the sufferer (here called the Pilgrim), the Lord's reply and a concluding prayer by the Pilgrim. According to Fr Hansen's suggestion the way to use the book is, in the manner devised by St. Ignatius, to select a meditation or a phrase or image from one of the meditations and then use that as a subject for contemplation over a number of days until you feel ready to move on to another subject.

Acknowledgment: Reprinted from M.E. and You, newsletter of the CFS/ME Society of NSW Inc.

Reprinted from Emerge, September 1993.