Standing in the roadway waiting for a ride, I felt a gentle wind against my face. But it was not gentle to me. In fact it hurt my cheek. So did a single drop of water that later fell on my face.

This pain indicates how the disease called shingles works. This virus comes from chicken pox, an illness that most people get in childhood. When shingles strikes, the virus springs into action, producing swelling in various part of the body and exposing tender nerve endings, usually causing excruciating pain.

A week’s bout with shingles has stirred in me spiritual reflections on the meaning of being sick with a disease like this, one that is not life-threatening but extremely difficult to bear.

First, the experience offers a striking lesson of how complicated human beings are. That a virus can stay lurking in our bodies for so long a time and then suddenly work its havoc on us deserves, if not respect, at least, awe at its power. In her late 80s, a member of my extended family had this experience after a lapse of seven decades between the onset of chicken pox and the outbreak of shingles. We are fashioned with a mysterious subtlety that can continually surprise us.

Another truism that emerges from this illness is my ultimate frailty. Though this particular attack has proven amenable to treatment, other diseases could easily do me in. Getting shingles has given me a lively sense of how I can suddenly be surprised by a serious threat to my well-being.

A deeper realization of my dependence on other people has flowed from coping with this illness. Of course all human beings are always dependent on others, whether they acknowledge it or not. There is no such thing as the person who can go it all the way alone.

In this instance, I depended not only on my spouse who provided me with loving support and care. I also needed the kindness of strangers, notably members of the medical staff at my health clinic. The nurses, doctors, and other staffers there treated me not only with professional skill but also with a gentleness and sympathy that upped my morale.

Though I have not talked with these healers about their motivation, I suspect they have implemented spiritual ideals into their work. These staffers, now mostly women and many among them people of color, express a compassion for their patients that must count in advancing the healing process.

They probably would not use the word, but it seems to me that they manifest love as they minister to fellow human beings when we feel vulnerable. If God is reaching out to me, as I like to believe, God is doing so through their hands.

I also admire them for often being more patient than we patients can be at times of distress. They realize the impossibility of always being successful in their remedies but they seem not to forget the importance of compassion as a universal value.

Even with the gift of all this help, I tend to cope badly. In my weakness I often feel the pain may never end. I understand why some desperately ill people would prefer to die rather than to suffer further. Though I would not choose that way myself and think it mistaken, I can imagine being tempted in that direction.

Thus I come away from the experience with greater sympathy for others in their struggles with disease. So many people, including those who have lived many fewer years than I, suffer so terribly over long periods of time as to deserve all the compassion we can give them.

At the beginning of Lent, I wondered how best to enter into the spirit of penance prescribed by my spiritual tradition. The answer came in the form of something I would never have chosen, namely putting up with the excruciating pain of shingles and its other unwelcome effects.

That same tradition has taught me to believe in the redemptive power of suffering. Thus I like to think of this experience as being of some mystical use to other people as well as myself. There is a community of suffering that may just possibly benefit the world at large. This, of course, should never allow us to give up trying to reduce the suffering of sisters and brothers everywhere but can provide us with some consolation for our own.

Richard Griffin