Surprisingly, it was not until about three years ago that I started intentionally inviting God into that area of my life. For years I prayed about my relationships, my family, my monastery, my priesthood, my ministry as a teacher, my TV show, my recipe testing--but I had left God out of my diabetic condition. At that time I was preparing to give some workshops for the Aquinas Institute at St. Louis University, and I offered to give one on diabetic spirituality. I figured that if I had to prepare to talk about this topic, it would make me take my own diabetic condition more seriously and integrate that part of my life into my spirituality. As I have said before, spirituality isn't just icing on the cake, but it's not the whole cake either, because cake is just dessert. Spirituality is the whole banquet of our human experiences oriented toward God.
I started investigating the topic of diabetic spirituality online, and made a surprising discovery: there wasn't much out there. At that time the things I found pretty much fell into two camps: 1) the view that diabetes is a evil spirit of Satan, and you must cast it out of your body by claiming the healing power of Jesus; 2) the view that diabetes is the result of your being unable to let go of your negativity and embrace the true sweetness of life. If these viewpoints work for some people, more power to them. As a mainstream Catholic, I find it difficult to relate.
There are a few other resources that have come around since I began my research (including some with regard to Zen and other forms of meditation) , and I hope to investigate further and report back to my readers. At the very least, let me say this: in 2011, Cynthia Cordova of catholic University wrote a doctoral dissertation titled: The Lived Experience of Spirituality among Type 2 Diabetic Mellitus Patients with Macrovascular and/or Microvascular Complications. She studied veterans with Type II diabetes, and discovered a host of benefits from including a spiritual dimension to diabetes self-care. She concluded that
(S)pirituality expands the consciousness of the participants to meet the challenges