January 2, 2009 - Hope Begins in the Dark

It’s a new year. Most of us are very glad to leave 2008 behind, with all the economic turmoil of recent months. May we have much better news in 2009!

There’s some encouraging news already on the cancer research front. A researcher at Cornell University named Michael King has developed something he calls a “lint brush” for the blood – “a tiny, implantable device that captures and kills cancer cells in the bloodstream before they spread through the body.”

This tiny, tubelike device contains a special protein called “selectin” on its inside surface. As blood cells flow through the tube, free-floating cancer cells bond to the selectin and are held there, so they can do no harm. Early test results indicate that about 30% of cancer molecules stick to the selectin on each pass. Since our blood circulates through the body constantly, this means that just one of these devices can eventually filter the body’s entire blood supply. Each repeated pass results in more cancer cells being corralled on the surface of the tube. Then, a second protein is released, causing the cancer cells to die.

I wonder if this device could work in the vessels of the lymphatic system, just as they do in the bloodstream?

Another article tells how scientists are scanning the ocean floor to discover new compounds that can be developed into anti-cancer drugs. The University of California at Santa Cruz has a set-up whereby sea-floor sediment is piped into special, chemical-scanning robots, that analyze them for compounds that could be useful to the pharmaceutical industry.

From the article:

“In its first year of operation, the lab has already had two interesting hits. One, the as-yet-unnamed product of a rod-shaped marine bacterium, is 98 percent efficient at killing the parasite that causes African sleeping sickness, a fatal disease common in sub-Saharan Africa. The other, dubbed ‘tamoxilog,’ is biologically similar to tamoxifen, a drug commonly used to treat breast cancer, though preliminary tests suggest tamoxilog is twice as powerful.”



Maybe the next big lymphoma drug is at the bottom of the sea, waiting to be discovered. Stranger things have happened.

Christian essayist Anne Lamott has written: “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”

I doubt if Anne was thinking about the inky darkness of the ocean floor when she wrote that. Her words are oddly appropriate, though: for this is surely a story of hope that begins in the dark.

Wedding 2008

December 30, 2008 - Christmas Haste

Christmas has come and gone, without a blog entry. That’s mainly a function of my being so busy.

It was a good Christmas. Ania was back from Chapman University for the holidays, and Ben continues to be living here at the house, as he works full-time giving guitar lessons. My mother, Shirley, is now living back in New Jersey, having moved up here from North Carolina in September. Brother Jim came down from Boston for the holiday. From Claire’s family, we welcomed her sister Eva and her daughter Elizabeth (who also live in our house), as well as her brother Victor from Baltimore, with his kids, Chelsea and Nick; and Claire’s sister Ramona, from New York City. There were a few friends here, besides.

It made for a full table at Wigilia, the traditional Polish Christmas Eve vigil supper from Claire’s family tradition, which we somehow squeeze in between the 7:00 and 11:00 pm Christmas Eve services. (Here’s a picture of Claire spreading some straw on the dining-room table, assisted by Murphy the cat – the straw goes under the tablecloth, and is symbolic of the straw of the manger.)

A few days before the holiday, we had about 30 members of the Youth Connection group here for pizza and snacks, after their annual Christmas caroling expedition to homebound and nursing-home folks.

As for the Christmas Eve services, we had the usual children’s service at 4:00, followed by Candlelight Services of Lessons and Carols at 7:00 and 11:00. My sermon, “A Hasty Christmas,” focused on that line from Luke’s Gospel that describes how the shepherds “went with haste” to Bethlehem.

It’s a perfectly ordinary phrase, but to me it seems to offer a basis for reflecting on how many of us tend to approach the holiday. There are two kinds of haste: the stressful kind that pushes you, and the wondrous kind that pulls you. While the shepherds may have had good reason to fear the angels (who, in good biblical tradition, were anything but gentle emissaries of sweetness and light), I like to think they rushed down off that hillside because of the wonder of Word-made-flesh that was apparent in that humble stable.

From the sermon:

“There is another kind of haste, besides the sort that pushes us. There’s also the haste that pulls us. It’s the same sort of haste grandparents feel, as they’re waiting in an airport lounge to go visit their new grandchild for the first time. It’s the sort of haste a young man feels, when he’s off to pick up that special young lady to take to the prom. It’s the sort of haste that says, ‘Come on, let’s go – every minute we delay is a minute we won’t be there!’

It’s the sort of haste we’ve all come to know, when Christmas is at its very best. It’s not the tyranny of the to-do list, but the joy of a churchful of people singing carols; the glow of the candlelight, passed from hand to hand during ‘Silent Night’; the swell of the organ, as we roll into that first stanza of ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful.’ It’s the sort of haste that beckons us onward, that wins cold hearts over, that pulls us out of the December doldrums and sets us gently down into a holy place, a place of light and love and faith.”

One of my growing edges, in these days of watch-and-wait monitoring of my lymphoma, has to do with maintaining the right kind of haste in my life. Better to be pulled than pushed. Better to be motivated by wonder than by worry.

It's a tough balance to maintain – but I’m working on it.