April 30, 2011 – Living Hope

Came across this little gem of an article today, in the online edition of Coping With Cancer magazine. It’s by Anne Lawton, an oncology nurse, and it’s about hope.

Hope, she's come to realize, is “the only word that matters” in her business.

Anne’s learned that, from the patients’ standpoint, the nature of hope changes over time. At first:

“People hope their doctor is good. They hope they make it through surgery, and they hope their cancer is treatable. They hope they can tolerate the chemotherapy.”

Later on in the cancer journey, many find themselves hoping for different things:

“They hope for a cure. They hope for a nice, full head of hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows. They hope the neuropathy and the other side effects go away. It's no longer just survival they hope for; they want their life back. They have a lot to do, and they hope the cancer never comes back.”

And if it should happen that the cancer does come back? Hope changes yet again:

“They hope for a life worth living, with few cancer-related side effects. They hope to live long enough for graduations, grandchildren, weddings, or that trip of a lifetime. They hope to complete their "bucket list.”

Finally, in some cases – though Anne doesn’t go there – when patients opt for hospice care, the hope is for freedom from pain, a clear mind, the opportunity to say farewell to loved ones and to know they’ll be provided for. A good death, in other words. When the time is right, no apologies are necessary for hoping for that.

Viewing hope as a continuum, can we really say it’s the same hope at the end of such a journey as at the beginning? I’d say yes, it is – although the hope has changed and matured. It’s grown, just as the patient has grown all through this troubling, painful, emotionally-taxing – and, yes, sometimes even spiritually-uplifting – journey.

1 Peter 1:3 celebrates how God “has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Living hope. I think that ol’ apostle was onto something.

By God’s generous grace, hope is alive. It grows and changes as we grow and change. Hallelujah!

April 27, 2011 – This Is the Life

This Easter, I preached on the topic, “This Is the Life.” While, for many, it’s a phrase that conjures visions of shady cabanas on tropical beaches, shrimp cocktail and umbrella drinks close at hand, I was thinking about something different.

And no, I wasn’t thinking about what this guy means by the phrase, either:



“This is the life” is Jesus’ promise to his disciples in John 10:10, as he proclaims, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” It’s a promise they wouldn’t begin to understand until after the resurrection.

This whole matter of abundant life takes on a different cast when that life includes cancer. What does it mean to “have life abundantly” when that life, for a cancer survivor, includes a low-level sense of foreboding that’s always lurking somewhere?

I think Matthew’s account of the resurrection supplies an answer. It employs a curious turn of phrase, describing Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” (probably Jesus’ mother), as they rush from the tomb, having heard the angel tell them Jesus has been raised from the dead. Matthew says, “they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy...”

Whuzzat? With fear? And great joy? Sounds like an oxymoron.

No, it’s no oxymoron. Our emotions are seldom simple and elemental. They’re often mixed.

Actually, there are times in life when fear and joy do coexist. Try to imagine the first time you fell in love, and realized that person you loved felt the same way about you. Did you ever feel more alive than in that moment?

And wasn’t it also true that, having asked that special person (or having been asked) to go out on a date, and having heard that person say yes (or having said yes yourself), the thought suddenly occurred to you that you would have to actually participate in said date, and you would somehow have to avoid making an idiot of yourself? Fear and great joy!

Or, think about the most significant graduation ceremony of your life, that highest level of education you’ve completed. If you were able to attend such a ceremony, recall the joy of accomplishment you felt that day, in cap and gown, looking around at the grinning faces of all your classmates. Remember, too, the other thought that came to you at that moment: “What am I going to do tomorrow?” Fear and great joy!

Brides and grooms on their wedding day, first-time parents driving that baby home from the hospital – on these and many other occasions in life, fear and joy coexist. Not without some tension between them, perhaps, but there it is. This is the life.

The two Marys were likely feeling something similar, because the first thing the risen Jesus says to them is “Do not be afraid.”

This has nothing to do with whether or not they may happen to disbelieve what they’re seeing, or whether or not they suspect it may be some sort of ghostly apparition, some wraith vomited up from dark places to bedevil them. No, I think they realize who it is, and can at least grasp the bare outlines of the paradigm-busting wonder that’s taken place. I think the two Marys are afraid because they realize what the resurrection is going to mean for their lives.

Surely these wise women realize that, if they continue on as Jesus’ followers, and go tell the other disciples the good news they’ve just heard and seen, they’re going to unleash into the world a powerful force that there will be no stopping. From this day onward, they’re going to be riding a mighty wave that will propel them onward with terrific force – and at times that position on the crest of the wave will be a dangerous place to be.

Yes, of course they’re going to do it, of course they’re going to bring the good news to their companions. But their fear and their joy are intermingled.

This is the life. This is the new life God has given them. Yes, perhaps they recalled hearing Jesus say he’d come that they might have life, and have it abundantly, but until this moment those had been nothing more than inspiring words, a rhetorical flourish. How could they possibly have known that new life would come to them through the nail-pierced hands that now rest on each of their heads, and through the nail-scarred feet they are even now washing with their tears?

The Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard once described this aspect of the Christian life using a very vivid image. He said that sharing the Christian faith with others is like handing them an extremely sharp knife.

A sharp knife is a useful tool. The greatest chefs, in fact, take meticulous care of their knives, sometimes even packing them into special carrying cases and bringing them home at night, so no damage will come to them. No one, Kierkegaard goes on, would think of handing a sharp knife to another person as one would hand over a bouquet of flowers. It’s just not done.

One of the first things we teach kids, in our church’s Cub Scout Pack and Boy Scout Troop, is how to safely hand a knife to another person. The boys don’t earn their “Totin’ Chip” – the special wallet card that allows them to carry a pocketknife – until they learn how to hand an open knife to a fellow Scout handle-first, and not let go of it until the other person says, “Thank you” – indicating he’s got it safely in hand. That’s because a knife is a useful implement, but it’s also dangerous. You’ve got to have a healthy fear of knives before you can use them safely.

Faith is just that sort of tool for living life as a cancer survivor. Most of us aren’t going to be cured, physically, by our faith. For whatever reason, God doles out complete spiritual healing only rarely, and according to no logic we can understand. Yet, if we’ve learned how to take this elegant tool in hand and use it safely - preventing it from slipping and causing further injury - we’ll find ourselves much better-equipped for living through days and years of remission and relapse, of tests and treatments.

Christian faith doesn’t put an end to fear. It does, however, take the natural, human fears we all have and puts them in perspective. Without the inner peace that comes of faith – which we Christians describe as knowing the risen Christ – the ordinary fears of human life can rage out of control, wreaking havoc in our lives, and in the lives of those we love.

The crucial difference comes from the other part of the equation: the “great joy” that counterbalances our very human fears. We can still seek it, even in the midst of cancer. Even a cancer-burdened life is still life, and Christ has promised that, in him, we can live abundantly.

The Social Poets: Posts Roundup at Dennys Blogs - 28 Feb 2011

The Social Poets: Posts Roundup at Dennys Blogs - 28 Feb 2011 - Choose from world news analysis combined with the best political cartoon opinion, celebrity watching, science and health news, arts, poetry, funny photos, serious photography, funny videos, great satire, awesome food and spiritual thoughts.

November 7, 2010 – Gratitude on the Radiation Table

Paul Bresnahan is an Episcopal priest who served with me on the writing team for the internet sermon resource, The Immediate Word, back when I was working as the team’s convener. Recently I came across a blog post of his, reflecting on his own cancer experience. Here's an excerpt:

“Prostate cancer struck me well over a year ago, and I have been living with Jesus as I always have and then journeyed through surgery and now radiation. God has given me the privilege of sharing my journey with others who gather with me in the waiting room at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. We share our joys and sorrows, our hopes and our fears, our aches and our pains.

We cheer one another along. Last week when I was called for a radiation treatment, I quipped: ‘My turn to shine.’ My companion for the day told me that the entire waiting room erupted in laughter as I left the room. ‘Who is that man?’ several asked. ‘He is my parish priest,’ was the proud answer. And thus the witness to Jesus' love and healing touch tickled those within the Cox Center for Cancer Treatment at one of the world's great hospitals.

Inside the treatment facility, as I lay on the table with a giant metal fork rotating around me and beaming its rays within my body, I saw the hand of God and sensed a healing touch within me. I saw no vision other than the hand of science and medicine ministering to me out of the gifts God so generously bestows upon the care giving community in my home city. The beaming rays of radiation give me the gift of healing and of life, and I am brim full of gratitude.”

It’s so true that the eye of faith can sometimes glimpse the hand of God in all kinds of things. Even a piece of radiation therapy equipment.

August 31, 2010 - Creativity and Cancer Survivorship

Today I run across this little gem, an edited-down version of a talk by Monty Python member John Cleese on the subject of creativity:



Cleese may sound like an odd choice, at first, to give this sort of talk, but in fact - alongside the brilliant loopiness of his television and film projects - he’s long had interests in being a serious academic. For a while he was Rector of the University of St. Andrews, where I did my Ph.D. (alas, just before my time there, so I never met him). He transformed the Rectorship - until then, a largely honorific, student-chosen position - into one that engaged with the University administration on a number of issues of importance to students.

The advice Cleese gives here is down-to-earth and practical: especially what he says about the importance of “sleeping on” a problem, and also of constructing boundaries of space and time for regular, serious reflection.

Running his remarks through my theological filters, I’m struck by how many times he dances right up to the line of saying something spiritual, but never quite steps over it. (No surprise there, because he doesn't believe in God.) For example, when he attributes creative breakthroughs to the work of “the unconscious,” he could have said “the Holy Spirit” - but doesn’t. When he’s talking about the need to carve out time for focused pondering, he could have said “quiet time for prayer and contemplation” - but doesn’t. Certain parts of the Christian spiritual tradition, such as monasticism, insist on a daily schedule (the liturgical hours) that’s meant to nurture precisely the sort of creative engagement Cleese is calling for, and have produced some wonderfully creative people (ranging from Thomas Merton to Dan Berrigan to Sister Wendy of the art-appreciation videos). We Protestants may be a bit behind the curve on that one, but even we have traditions of spiritual practices that foster creativity and holy insight.

So, what does all this have to do with cancer survivorship? Cleese doesn't mention any connection, but I was led to reflect on something many of us survivors have experienced: how the enforced down-time of a chemotherapy regimen crashed into our otherwise busy, over-committed lives and forced us to spend time reflecting on things we’d otherwise never have thought about (or perhaps not until some long-postponed retirement - and maybe not even then, judging from what I’ve heard from some retired people who report being busier now than when they were working).

It was during the enforced down-time of my chemotherapy, for example, that this blog was born. Since having that experience, I haven’t even needed to try to schedule time for creative reflection. I’ve simply done it (at times to the detriment of some of my more routine obligations, but what’s a credit-card late fee or two, if you’re staying more spiritually grounded as a result of obsessing less over the small stuff?).

Whatever stage of the survivorship journey we’re in - whether in treatment, in remission, in relapse, or in that blessed land some are bold to call “cancer-free” - it helps to let go of the urgent worries from time to time and put them to rest for a while, even if only for the few hours of a good night’s sleep (if that’s possible, health-wise). It also helps to set up those boundaries Cleese is talking about, so we can grab a little time for ourselves, away from the frenetic rounds travel to one medical establishment to another, and trying to respond to some of the demands of our normal lives when we’re not doing that.

Stephen Covey, in a memorable illustration I’ve referred to earlier in this blog, called it “sharpening the saw.” If you don’t stop your ceaseless sawing - back and forth, back and forth - from time to time, and pause to sharpen the saw-blade, you’re doomed to steadily decreasing effectiveness.

So, let’s hear it for self-care, on the cancer-survivorship journey! A major part of self-care is refreshing ourselves at those creative wells, where our spirit is free to engage with the Spirit of the Lord.

June 3, 2010 - Touched By an Angel

“During my illness, I had the presence of an angel that came and visited me...” This is a remarkable video, from the Livestrong website. The speaker is Matthews Brown, a leukemia survivor. It’s just under 4 minutes long, so it won’t take too much time away from whatever else you’re doing.



In the course of my ministry, I’ve heard some remarkable stories of spiritual experiences. I’ve never seen an angel, myself (at least, not the supernatural variety). Based on what I’ve heard from others, though, I’d say Matthews’ experience is unusual, but not as unusual as all that. Things like this happen to people more often than you may think.

We’ve all heard the truism, “God never gives us more than we can handle.” I found that to be true of my own cancer experience. From the square marked “Go,” it looks like it's a long way around the spiritual Monopoly board, but you do find yourself “passing Go” from time to time and collecting $200.

Let us give thanks for unsolicited, grace-filled experiences, through which we learn what remarkable spiritual resources are available to us, and how deeply we are loved!

If you’re a cancer survivor, how has the spiritual side of the experience been for you?

April 20, 2010 - Hope IS a Miracle

This past Sunday, I preached on the story from the Acts of the Apostles about the raising of Tabitha. It’s one of a small number of biblical passages that recount not merely a healing, but the raising of a person from the dead. Although the Apostle Peter performs the miracle, it’s clear he sees it as the work of the risen Christ.

Preparing my sermon, I was struck by a rather unusual detail. Before performing his miracle, Peter cleared the room. Why was that?

I figure it was because Peter was none too sure of his ability to do anything helpful. This isn’t a sick woman, he thought to himself. It’s a dead woman. Dead is dead (unless, of course, you’re talking about Jesus’ resurrection, but that’s a story for another day).

You’d think, had Peter been more confident, he’d have practiced a little showmanship. You know, given the miracle some pizzazz. Wow the crowd.

But, no. Peter will have none of that.

When in doubt, pray. Having no other option, that’s what Peter decides to do. Falling to his knees, he offers fervent prayers to God: to get him out of this situation, to do something to help this grieving community – and, yes, even this poor, deceased woman, wherever in heaven or earth her soul may be.

After praying, Peter turns to Tabitha and simply says, “Tabitha, get up.” She does! The crowd outside is astounded when they see their beloved Tabitha, alive again. It just may be, though, that the most befuddled person in the village that day is Peter himself.

Many of us have been there before, in situations that seemed hopeless. It’s a story repeated time and again, in hospital corridors and family waiting rooms, as a doctor says to an anxious family, ”I’m sorry, there’s nothing more we can do.”

We’ve all heard of deathbed miracles, of course, but we also know these are few and far between. I told the folks in church on Sunday that the one miracle I have seen, time and time again, is how hope – that most persistent of Christian character traits – has a way of arising out of even the darkest of situations.

Sometimes that hope is as simple as being able to persevere, to get up and face another day without falling apart emotionally. Sometimes it’s the ability to let go and die with dignity. Sometimes it’s reconciliation with a loved one that we never imagined could have happened.

On his knees, alone in that small room except for the corpse stretched out on the bed, Peter may have feared his hope-reservoir had run dry. But then, when he least expects it, God breaks in once again, revealing new possibilities.

Such hope differs from what usually passes for hope in our culture – at least, as the word is used in everyday speech. Eugene Peterson points out that what a lot of people call hope is in reality something different. It’s wishing, not hoping – and wishing and hoping are not the same thing:

“Wishing is something all of us do. It projects what we want or think we need into the future. Just because we wish for something good or holy we think it qualifies as hope. It does not. Wishing extends our egos into the future; hope grows out of our faith. Hope is oriented toward what God is doing; wishing is oriented toward what we are doing.”

Peterson goes on to say that we can picture wishing as though it were a line coming out from us with an arrow on the end, pointing into the future, pointing toward that thing we most want to possess.

Hope is just the opposite. It’s a line that comes from God out of the future, with its arrow pointing towards us:

“Hope means being surprised, because we don’t know what is best for us or how our lives are going to be completed. To cultivate hope is to suppress wishing – to refuse to fantasize about what we want, but live in anticipation of what God is going to do next.” [The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction (Eerdmans, 1993)]

To me, that’s a beautiful and liberating insight. Yes, we all want certain things in this life. Yet, our wishes and God’s intentions for us may not always coincide. At times, God may have an entirely different plan – which means that, for us, the way of freedom and peace lies not in somehow pulling God around to our way of thinking, but rather letting go and trusting God to be in control.

April 5, 2010 - An Idle Tale?

Preparing my Easter sermon based on Luke 24:1-12, I was struck by the reaction of the male disciples to Mary Magdalene and the other women who brought them news of the empty tomb and of the angel’s message: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”

Their first response was to consider it “an idle tale.”

“Idle tale” translates an uncommon Greek word whose meaning is “nonsense” or “delusional.” If the women’s breathless announcement is in fact the first Christian proclamation, then it means we preachers started out with a score of 0 and 1 from the get-go.

Which is no big surprise – because the resurrection isn’t exactly an easy truth to absorb. In contradicts one of the most foundational of human experiences: that dead is dead, and there’s no coming back.

I thought about that sort of thing a lot when I was feeling ill from my chemo treatments. What if the treatments were unsuccessful and I was soon going to die, I asked myself? What if, someday soon, I was going to shut my eyes not only to this world, but to everything else? What if this life, this consciousness, that is me would suddenly blink out of existence? What would have been the point of it all?

My mind danced with that bleak idea from time to time, but didn’t invite it home. I kept returning to the truths of my faith, and especially this truth that is the resurrection.

I told the folks in our church yesterday that this whole “idle tale” response is actually a sort of backhanded testimony to the truth of the resurrection. If you were to set out to make up a story about a man being raised from the dead, would you be so quick to admit that some of the people who most wanted to believe it to be true rejected it, at first?

Similarly, if you were going to go out and make up a story about a man being raised from the dead, would you include details that made you, yourself look like a clueless doubter – as was the case with Peter? If you were interested in spreading a made-up story in the intensely male-dominated Roman world, would you make women the first witnesses of the resurrection – women, who were considered, back then, to be second-class citizens, whose testimony the male-dominated society considered unreliable?

Of course not. There are an embarrassing number of loose ends connected with the Easter narrative. Four different gospels tell the story, as well as certain passages from the letters of Paul – all of them differing from the others in one detail or another. If your purpose were to make the whole thing up, you would have managed your sources a little better.

The result is that it’s impossible to put the various Gospel accounts together in a single narrative – just as it would be if there had been multiple witnesses recording their impression of a single, dramatic incident, each from a different angle.

The resurrection is jarring and unexpected. The great Reformed theologian Karl Barth says somewhere that it’s “not a natural ‘therefore’ but a miraculous ‘nevertheless.’” Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams – a distinguished theologian as well as senior leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion – likens it to the Big Bang. When we celebrate Easter, he writes, “we are really standing in the middle of a second ‘Big Bang,’ a tumultuous surge of divine energy as fiery and intense as the very beginning of the universe.” (Tokens of Trust, p. 95)

These are outrageous claims – but in their very confusion, contradiction and sheer outrageousness, they’re true to life, in an odd way. Such a mind-bending, paradigm-busting event could never be encapsulated in a tight, little spin-controlled story.

With all those lights of inquiry shining upon it from so many different angles, the resurrection is like a person moving across a room, lit up by a strobe light. You know how that looks: a person lit by a strobe seems to move in a series of jerky, disjointed snapshots, rather than the seamless, smooth motion of movie film. Under such lighting, you can get a general sense of what’s happening, what various events are taking place – but not how they flow from one to the next.

There are still significant gaps in our understanding of the resurrection – and always will be, this side of heaven. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. It means it’s a truth too big, too complex, too wonderful for us to fully comprehend.

April 3, 2010 - When All You Have Left Is Yourself

Today I’m reading an unusual article in Cure magazine online, "Keeping the Faith," by Kathy Latour. What’s unusual about it is that it deals with the topic of cancer and spirituality with attention to spiritual community.

I find that refreshing, because there’s lots of talk about a sort of generic spirituality when it comes to cancer survivorship. “If it makes you feel good, do it” is the all-purpose mantra. The problem with this sort of approach is that it ends up being a do-it-yourself activity, like trimming your nose-hairs or working out with a Thighmaster.

I think this individualism comes out of good old American separation-of-church-and-state thinking – something I’m in favor of when it comes to politics, but which is woefully inadequate in all but the most superficial discussions of religious faith. Take that line of thinking to its extreme, and you’ll end up like poor old President Eisenhower – who supposedly let himself be quoted saying: “Our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”

Some presidential scholars insist that’s an apocryphal remark, and it may well be – but, it catches the spirit of the age. (Eisenhower was a Presbyterian, by the way – though, if he really said that, I suppose he missed Sunday School the day they were teaching Calvin’s high conception of the church.)

In cancer support groups, “guided meditations” abound – those stress-relieving exercises that begin: “Close your eyes, pay attention to your breathing, and imagine yourself walking across a grassy field...”

Now, I can understand the appeal of that approach, to those who arrange chairs in a circle for their cancer-and-spirituality workshops. You can be Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew or South Sea Islands cargo cultist, and still get something out of a guided meditation exercise. Whether the glowing figure walking towards you across that grassy field is Jesus or the Bodhisattva Maitreya makes little difference, because it’s happening in your own, private mental world. No muss, no fuss, no cross-denominational misunderstandings. Everybody leaves happy.

Outside of houses of worship, spiritual support groups are often led by people without any strong (or strongly evident) religious affiliation – the “I’m spiritual but not religious” sort of person. You’d think hospitals and agencies would seek out seasoned religious professionals – nuns who work as spiritual directors, say, or Muslim teachers of Sufi prayer – as long as they’re committed to interfaith dialogue. But, no. Charitable-organization program directors aren’t known for sticking their necks out, so they smile beneficently on psychiatric social workers with no theological background who say, “I can do that,” or on generic “interfaith ministers” holding degrees from unaccredited seminaries (or, God forbid, even internet “ordinations”).

That’s why the article I’ve been reading is so refreshing. The author, Kathy Latour, interviews Harold G. Koenig, M.D., of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University – a prostate-cancer survivor himself – as he describes a discussion group he co-facilitated called “Engaging the Spirit.” It was a place “where cancer patients and survivors explored spiritual and faith questions as they traveled the cancer journey.” Knowing his group was composed of people from a variety of faith traditions, Harold began each discussion with a simple question: “How’s your spirit?”

OK, that’s a workable generic opening question, but Harold’s point is that the discussion need not remain in that level: “I learned from those who took part that no matter how someone defines his or her faith, in a group of cancer survivors there exists a common quest to understand existential questions about life and death.” When that quest is pursued through religious community, there comes an awareness that “God has a purpose for them and is in control and they don’t have to be. This is where mental health comes from.” Such a strongly-held conviction, the article continues, “frees them and reminds them that their illness can result in ‘something good.’”

From his own experience as a survivor, Harold upholds the value of “a belief system that frames your diagnosis in the context of your life and what you believe happens after life. If you have no framework to place that in, all you have left is yourself and it isn't enough. You can't carry the full load – you weren't meant to.”

A great many recent research studies of spirituality and health, Harold maintains, conclude that people who follow a particular faith tradition “need and use fewer health care services because they are healthier, more likely to have intact families to care for them, and have greater social support.”

The Rev. Isabel Docampo, associate professor of supervised ministry at Perkins School of Theology, “says her fear and depression after facing surgery for life-threatening cancer of the salivary gland came not from a crisis of faith, but from the pain and sadness that she felt from the idea she might leave her 21-year-old son, Ben, and her husband of 18 months, Scott Somers, also an ordained minister.”

“The way I have always looked at life is that it is what it is,” Isabel reflects. “Life is a struggle and God has been there for all the blessings and all the bad stuff, and God is going to be here for the cancer.”

Amen to that.

I wouldn’t want to face cancer knowing that “all I have left is myself” – nor some individualized spirituality I’d made up out of whole cloth, either. One of the great strengths of submitting oneself to the discipline of a particular religious tradition is knowing it’s not all about me, nor will it ever be so.

Now, on to my Easter sermon...

March 27, 2010 - Post-Traumatic Growth

Well, well. Here’s a new psychobabble buzz-word: post-traumatic growth.

OK, it’s more than just one word, it’s a couple. It echoes the dreaded “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD), although it ends up being a good thing, not a bad. Mostly, anyway. To get to the good, you have to slog through some pretty rough stuff.

I read about post-traumatic growth in an article, “Cancer’s Silver Lining,” by Don Vaughan, in CureToday.com. The author lists “five common growth outcomes” of being a cancer survivor:

• A deepened appreciation of life.
• Enhanced relationships with others.
• An appreciation for personal strength and endurance.
• Setting out on new pathways or pursuing new interests and opportunities.
• Spiritual growth and development.

I’d have to say – with no trace of bragging in my mind, just gratitude – that I’m 5 for 5 on that list.

I didn’t achieve any of those things myself. They’ve been gifts.

Cancer’s not an experience I’d wish on anyone. But if you have to get it, you may as well make the most of it. As I wrote in a much earlier post, try to emulate Jacob as he wrestled with that mysterious adversary of his at the fords of the Jabbok. See if you can put your scary opponent into a half-Nelson until he dispenses a blessing or two.

January 28, 2010 - When Positive Thinking Isn't Enough

One of the hardest things to do, in ministry, is to stand by people who are going through hard times: not trying to change the situation, but just being with them, accepting things as they are.

An invaluable lesson I learned, years ago, in my clinical counseling training in seminary, is that sometimes you can’t fix it. Sure, there are some counseling situations in which an easy answer – be it a scriptural citation or a word of practical advice – can make a world of difference. But, not every situation is like that. Sometimes the only thing you can do is to be there – accompanying people through their difficulties, sometimes even to the edge of the grave.

It’s one of the reasons (among many) why I have such admiration for my wife, Claire - a minister who works as bereavement coordinator for a hospice program. Accompanying people in just this sort of way is what she does all the time. When she was a hospice chaplain, she worked directly with dying patients. Now, she specializes in accompanying family members through their days of mourning.

Claire’s grown used to a certain awed response she gets from people she meets for the first time. They often say something like, “More power to you! I could never do a job like that,” or, “That must be so hard! How do you keep doing it, year after year?”

Frequently, she gets another sort of response: “I think hospice programs are wonderful. The hospice team was such a help to us when my mother was dying!” A person who says something like that has come to appreciate the value of standing by those who are suffering. It’s like the famous first line from Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

In my sermon this past Sunday, I spoke about a certain tendency toward magical thinking that can be a detriment in situations of serious difficulty, medical or otherwise. I was inspired by reading an insightful book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich.

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Ehrenreich has gotten a lot of press because of the forthright way in which she takes on the 200-pound gorilla of the self-help world: positive thinking. Her point is that our culture so unquestioningly considers positive thinking to be a good thing, that in situations – like the final stages of hospice care – in which it’s no longer appropriate, people just don’t know what to do. They feel abandoned, adrift, without the familiar life preserver of positive thinking.

Many of us think that, in a tough situation, we’ve got only two choices: think positively, or give up altogether. My point in Sunday’s sermon is that, while positive thinking is often a good thing, there are some situations in which it crosses the line into magical thinking – which is not. Some things that happen to us in life are simply bad things, and there’s no getting around it. It’s one thing to cultivate a positive outlook generally, but it’s quite another to believe we have an obligation to think positive thoughts all the time – and that, if we don’t, we’re somehow putting ourselves at risk.

Sadly, some cancer patients get precisely that message from those around them. Some feel guilty, beating themselves up because they can’t keep the sunny side up all the time. If their disease progresses, they feel irrationally responsible for failing to stoke the positive-thinking furnace.

A new illustrated article on Beliefnet.com, “In Praise of Thinking Realistically: When Positive Thinking Isn’t Working,” by Lori Hope, speaks to this same theme.

The positive-thinking movement is very often an ally of Christianity, but there’s a point at which the two part ways. Bottom-line, the Christian prescription for spiritual health is not positive thinking, but rather, repentance and the forgiveness of sins. As the Gospel-writer Mark sums up the essence of Jesus’ message:

“Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’” [Mark 1:14-15]

If we’re constantly trying to push everything but positive thoughts out of our minds, we’ll never be able to recognize sin in our lives, because we’re so afraid of the negative thoughts that go with it. Without a recognition of sin, there can be no confession. Without confession, there can be no forgiveness. And, without forgiveness, there can be no experience of grace.

I ended my sermon on Sunday by telling a familiar story from the classic Broadway show, The Music Man. It’s about the con man, “Professor” Harold Hill, who travels around selling band instruments to schools, promising he’ll stick around to teach the children how to play – but he never does. He always hops the first train out of town as soon as the money’s in his pocket. In the Midwestern town of River City, though, he falls in love with Marian the librarian, so he’s got to think of something. Harold’s problem is, he knows nothing about music. He’s not a professor of anything, except shady deals.

What he does is tell the children they can learn to play their new band instruments using what he calls “The Think Method.” All they have to do is think of the melody he tells them to play, recalling it over and over in their minds. When they pick up their instruments, he promises, they’ll be able to play it perfectly.

Well, the day of the first band concert comes, and Harold’s ready for his slippery scheme to fall apart. The children pick up their instruments and start to play. The sound that emerges is one of the most awful things you’ve ever heard – everything you’d expect from a teaching strategy so ill-conceived as “The Think Method.”

Wonder of wonders, a miracle occurs. The parents of River City are so pleased to see their children tooting away on the band instruments, they completely ignore the fact that there’s no discernible melody. Professor Hill’s reputation is saved, and he settles down in River City to marry his beloved Marian.

Positive thinking won’t teach us how to play the trombone, any more than it will guarantee we’ll beat cancer. The lesson of The Music Man, though, goes beyond the concrete task of producing the right musical notes at the proper tempo. It’s a lesson about grace and love and unconditional acceptance of children by their parents. Professor Hill’s brand of magical thinking was a complete dud, but the magic of love proved far stronger.

There is no greater magic in the world than this. It’s the love of God, that Christians believe is experienced uniquely in Jesus Christ. We believe that love was demonstrated for us on the cross of Calvary, and is given to us as an unconditional gift. It comes to us in good times and in bad, in sunshine and in storm.

“Thanks be to God for this indescribable gift!”
– 2 Corinthians 9:15

January 18, 2010 - Aisle or Window?

Here I am, again, in Bradenton Beach, Florida, attending The Homiletical Feast – a gathering of fellow preachers who meet together once a year to share sermon ideas and support one another in our work. It’s always good to get back together with this group – especially on the first day, as we share stories of what our lives and ministries have been like in the past year.

I’m thinking, now, about an experience I had on the airplane last night. Usually, when I fly, I reserve an aisle seat if I can. It’s always seemed more efficient: it’s easier to get up and walk to the rest room, if I have the need, and it also makes for a slightly quicker exit from the plane after landing. At one time in my life – when I was serving as a seminary admissions director – I used to fly frequently. I had it down to a familiar routine.

This trip, for whatever reason, I reserved a window seat. Maybe I just wanted to vary the routine. I haven’t sat beside an airplane window for years, so I thought I’d spend a little time reacquainting myself with that view, weather permitting.

Weather was permitting. It was dark for most of the flight, but I could look down on the glistening lights of the east coast, far down below me. It was lovely.

The thought occurred to me that flying is a truly marvelous thing, something the vast majority of airline patrons absolutely take for granted. The expansive view I was taking in so casually is a perspective no person on earth – no human being ever born – had viewed prior to the 20th Century. Maybe a very few people ventured up several hundred feet in hot-air balloons, but no one had ever ascended the heights a modern airliner achieves with such ease. I found myself thinking of those earthbound people of centuries past, whose feet were planted firmly on the ground and who gazed up at the skies with longing. Surely some of them spent their lives wondering what the earth looks like, from the perspective of the birds circling slowly overhead. Yesterday, I – along with every other person who’s ever boarded an airplane – had that opportunity.

So what? What do we do with that opportunity, typically? Not much. We spurn the window seat, in favor of the aisle. The view from the airplane window has become commonplace. For most of us, it has lost its wonder.

If we could somehow transport a curious person from centuries past – let’s say, for example, Ben Franklin – into our century, and offer him a ride on a jet airliner, what sort of seat would he prefer? You can bet your bottom dollar ol’ Ben would choose the window. No way would he pass up the opportunity to view the earth from the perspective of the heavens!

There are numerous experiences in life that can change our perspective. Cancer is one of them. There was a time, as I was going through the worst of my chemo side-effects, that I couldn’t walk around the block without stopping to sit down a few times. It wasn’t just that I felt tired and thought a little rest might feel good. I literally couldn’t do it. Now, of course, I can complete a short stroll like that without thinking twice about it, but do I ever stop and ponder how wonderful it is – how blessed I am – that I have regained my strength? Not often enough.

Of our short attention spans, our stunted capacity for sustaining wonder, the prophet Isaiah has this to say to a wayward people:

“You have forgotten the Lord, your Maker,
who stretched out the heavens
and laid the foundations of the earth.
You fear continually all day long
because of the fury of the oppressor,
who is bent on destruction.
But where is the fury of the oppressor?”
– Isaiah 51:13

Life is good, in so many ways. Life with cancer, life without cancer – there are still plenty of sights to see, lots of new experiences to be had (even some old ones that haven’t yet been drained of their wonder).

Aisle or window? You decide.

January 9, 2010 - Everything In Its Time

Today I run across an inspiring story on National Public Radio: the saga of one Seun Adebiyi, who has dreams of becoming – I am not making this up – Nigeria’s first contender in the Winter Olympics one-man sledding event called skeleton.

Seun (who pronounces his name “Shawn” when here in the United States) missed making the Nigerian Olympic swim team by a tenth of a second. So, he turned his attention to winter sports, setting his sights on the skeleton event. A student at Yale Law School, who was brought to this country as a child by his immigrant mother, Seun sounds very American. Yet, he does have Nigerian citizenship – which means that, as he trains 5 hours a day on the skeleton track outside Salt Lake City, he’s possibly the only Nigerian aspiring to represent his country in this event.

Seun’s circum- stances sound like those of the Jamaican bobsled team that was the subject of the 1993 Disney film, Cool Runnings – with one exception: he’s just been diagnosed with cancer.

And not just any cancer. Seun’s got two aggressive forms: stem-cell leukemia and lymphoblastic lymphoma.

The most promising treatment for him is an allogeneic stem-cell transplant, one requiring closely-matched cells from a living donor. (It’s the type of stem-cell transplant I’d need to have, should it ever come to that.)

Seun’s problem is that people of African descent aren’t well-represented in the donor registry – and for patients who are actually from Africa, the outlook is even bleaker. Still, that didn’t stop Seun and his mother from traveling to Nigeria recently to set up that country’s first bone-marrow registry.

Seun’s best chance lies in a cord-blood transplant, which he’s going to be having soon at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

The online audio of NPR’s story on him is well worth the 5 minutes of your time it will take to listen to it. As NPR correspondent Mike Pesca summarizes Seun’s description of his situation, “Living with cancer is like living an extremely concentrated, extremely potent version of life.”

And how. It’s an apt description of what it feels like to go through the cancer-treatment experience.

Then, Pesca relates another thing Seun said to him: “There is a time for all-out effort, and then there’s a time for surrender.” Seun’s approach is to pull out all the stops during the weeks leading up to his transplant, training for that ordeal with the same intense effort he’s brought to his Olympic bid. Yet, he knows there will come a time when he can do nothing but trust the expertise of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering doctors and the technological wizardry they have at their disposal.

Truly, there is a time for everything in life – as I reminded a family just yesterday, at the funeral of their 104-year-old matriarch. At the funeral home, I read these beloved words from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes:

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance...” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-4)

On an on the ancient poem goes, weaving its way in and out of all life’s adventures. Its words sound a very different note at the funeral of a centenarian than they do on the eve of a twentysomething’s risky stem-cell transplant. Yet, the best any of us can do, regardless of our circumstances, is to trust that, in God’s providence, there is indeed a time for everything.

I’m beginning to learn, myself, that this has much less to do with the duration of life than with its quality. A long, serene run of 104 years is a beautiful thing. But then, so is a young man’s 80-mile-an-hour dash down an icy hillside in search of Olympic gold.

Either way, I believe the Lord is standing by, to guide and to bless.

December 17, 2009 - I Wonder As I Wander

On of the beloved songs of the upcoming Christmas season is “I Wonder As I Wander.” The song was written by a musicologist named John Jacob Niles, based on a fragment of folk music he discovered.

According to the Wikipedia article on the carol, in 1933 Niles was traveling through the Appalachian region of North Carolina, looking for traditional tunes. He was attending a fund-raising meeting held by an evangelistic group who’d been run out of town by the police (I’m sure there must be an interesting back-story behind that!). In his unpublished autobiography, Niles tells of how he first heard the song:

“A girl had stepped out to the edge of the little platform attached to the automobile. She began to sing. Her clothes were unbelievable dirty and ragged, and she, too, was unwashed. Her ash-blond hair hung down in long skeins.... But, best of all, she was beautiful, and in her untutored way, she could sing. She smiled as she sang, smiled rather sadly, and sang only a single line of a song.”

Niles was enchanted, and asked the girl to sing the line again. He offered her a quarter to do so, and she gladly complied (this was 1933, the midst of the Great Depression: folks earned money any way they could). Seven times he asked the girl to sing it, giving her a quarter each time. Seven quarters later – a dollar seventy-five, not a bad price in the 1930s – he had enough of a sense of where he was going with his composition. What he had was, in his own words, “three lines of verse, a garbled fragment of melodic material – and a magnificent idea.”

I think you’ll agree: a dollar seventy-five (in 1933 dollars) was not a bad price to pay for a hauntingly beautiful melody that’s become a Christmas standard.

“I Wonder As I Wander” is in a minor key. More often than not, hymns are written in a major key. Those hymns are bright, joyful, triumphant. The minor-key hymns, by contrast, are quieter, more introspective, more reflective. Some are even somber.

We need them both. One of life’s great lessons, for cancer survivors or for anyone else, is that not all of life is lived in a major key. “Into each life some rain must fall,” goes the hoary old cliché. When we discover joy amidst even the rain, when we can learn to sing praise even in a minor key, we’ve got it made.

“I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die
For poor orn'ry people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.”

December 15, 2009 - Expectancy

This time of year, we Christians find ourselves – if we can stop our frenetic holiday preparations for a moment and be still – in the season of expectant waiting known as Advent.

It’s a tough season for most folks to wrap their minds around. Anyone who pays attention to the liturgical year feels oddly suspended between the now and the not-yet. This isn’t helped by the fact that the recommended biblical texts for Advent are of two distinct kinds. On the one hand, there are apocalyptic passages that warn of the final judgment and the return of Christ to judge the earth. On the other, we’re handed kinder, gentler stories like the Annunciation: the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary, announcing Jesus’ impending birth.

It can be tough, during Advent, to figure out what, exactly, we’re meant to be waiting for. Are we waiting for Christ to come crashing in and judge this mad, mixed-up world for what it is? Or, are we imaginatively placing ourselves into the Christmas story, waiting for him to be born in Bethlehem again in our hearts and minds?

I have a new appreciation for the ambiguities of waiting, ever since entering my extended, watch-and-wait treatment mode. Of course, unlike the waiting associated with Advent, the thing I’m waiting for is not good. I’d just as soon have my lymphoma remain in couch-potato mode as long as possible. Yet, I do also live my life attuned to subtle signs that could develop.

Every three months or so, I go for another scan: a moistened finger held up to test the wind. Today’s the day: another CT scan at Ocean Medical Center.

Unlike the classic prayer of Christians, “Even so, Lord Jesus, quickly come,” I’m very happy to keep on waiting.

December 1, 2009 - The Glad Game

Many people have heard the name “Pollyanna.” Her full name is Pollyanna Whittier, and she’s the title character in a classic series of children’s novels. The first one was published in 1913 by Eleanor H. Porter.

In the grim little New England town where the orphan Pollyanna goes to live with her aunt, she teaches others to play a little game her late father taught her. She calls it “The Glad Game.” It has one simple rule: find something to be happy about in every situation, no matter how dark or desperate.

The game’s origins go back to one particular Christmas. Digging deep in the charity barrel, hoping to find a doll for her present, Pollyanna finds only a pair of crutches. A poor kid without a toy at Christmas? What could be more pathetic than that? Pollyanna’s father teaches her, then, how The Glad Game works: be happy you found the crutches, he tells her, because “we don’t need ‘em!”



The Wikipedia article on Pollyanna gives a few examples of how adept the little waif becomes at playing The Glad Game:

“When Aunt Polly puts her in a stuffy attic room without carpets or pictures, she exults at the beautiful view from the high window; when she tries to ‘punish’ her niece for being late to dinner by sentencing her to a meal of bread and milk in the kitchen with the servant, Nancy, Pollyanna thanks her rapturously because she likes bread and milk, and she likes Nancy.”

Pollyanna becomes an evangelist for The Glad Game, bringing a treacly sweetness to her little town, until further misfortune in her own life forces her to practice what she preaches:

“Eventually, however, even Pollyanna’s robust optimism is put to the test when she is struck down by a motorcar while crossing a street and loses the use of her legs. At first she doesn’t realize the seriousness of her situation, but her spirits plummet when she accidentally overhears an eminent specialist say that she’ll never walk again. After that, she lies in bed, unable to find anything to be glad about. Then the townspeople begin calling at Aunt Polly’s house, eager to let Pollyanna know how much her encouragement has improved their lives; and Pollyanna decides she can still be glad that she has legs. The novel ends with Aunt Polly marrying her former lover Dr. Chilton and Pollyanna being sent to a hospital where she learns to walk again and is able to appreciate the use of her legs far more as a result of being temporarily disabled.”

We cancer survivors hear a lot about the importance of maintaining a positive attitude. In many ways, that advice is but a warmed-over version of Pollyanna’s Glad Game. The problem is, no real person can be as relentless in playing the game as the fictional Pollyanna. Feelings of sadness and dejection sometimes present themselves, and that’s OK. They come with the territory.

If we take the “think positive” advice too seriously, we can end up denying the existence of those negative thoughts – which are only natural, after all. Sure, maintaining a positive attitude is important, but that doesn’t mean we can never give ourselves permission to feel anger, or sadness, or frustration or any of the other negative emotions that come from this kind of protracted struggle.

There’s a lot of emphasis, in some cancer-treatment circles, on mental exercises like meditation and visualization as practical ways of calming the spirit. These practices are of proven usefulness and have their place, but it’s possible to take them too far. Some of the more enthusiastic promoters of these techniques claim they stimulate the immune system, actually unleashing the body’s healing energies – as though they were a treatment modality in themselves. It’s easy to see where such exaggerated claims can lead: to the belief that, unless we devote enough time each day to pulling ourselves up by our own endorphins, we’re giving up altogether.

Dr. Jimmie C. Holland, a psychologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, touches on this in her book, The Human Side of Cancer. She tells of a patient of hers named Jane, who had been successfully treated for breast cancer, but who felt troubled by the fact that she sometimes worried about a relapse. Could her worries in fact be a self-fulfilling prophecy, Jane wondered? This caused her to worry even more. The doctor comments:

“Jane was echoing a refrain I often hear from people with cancer: the notion that feeling sad, scared, upset, or angry is unacceptable and that emotions can somehow make your tumor grow. And the sense that if the person is not in control on the emotional plane all the time, the battle against the disease will be lost. Of course, patients like Jane didn’t come up with this notion on their own. It's everywhere in our culture: in popular books and tabloids on every newsstand, on talk shows, in TV movies.

For most patients, cancer is the most difficult and frightening experience they have ever encountered. All this hype claiming that if you don’t have a positive attitude and that if you get depressed you are making your tumor grow faster invalidates people’s natural and understandable reactions to a threat to their lives. That’s what I mean by the tyranny of positive thinking.”

Sometimes we just don’t feel like playing The Glad Game. Sometimes, we shouldn’t have to.

September 8, 2009 - Turned Toward Blessing

Today I come across a blog entry from last April by Dana Jennings, a New York Times reporter being treated for aggressive prostate cancer. Dana is Jewish, and writes eloquently on the intersection of faith and cancer. Here’s an excerpt:

“One of our cultural verities about serious illness is that it often challenges our faith. But for me, if anything, having cancer has only deepened it, heightened it.

I have spent the past year in the dark ark of cancer, and there is no question that I have become a new man. I’ve been granted a wisdom that only arrives at the rugged confluence of middle age and mortality. And I know, soul deep, that I have not been cut open, radiated, and tried physically and spiritually so that I can merely survive, become a cancer wraith. Since my diagnosis – after shaking off the initial shock – I have kept asking myself, in the context of my belief: What can this cancer teach me?

The most surprising thing I’ve learned is that cancer can be turned toward blessing. Through the simple fact of me telling my cancer stories on this blog, many of you readers, in turn, have told your own stories. And that mutual sharing of our tales has changed my life for the good. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, 'Life is not meaningful, unless it is serving an end beyond itself, unless it is of value to someone else.'”

I like Dana's concept of cancer being “turned toward blessing.” I won’t ever be able to consider cancer a good thing, but our miraculous God can wring blessings out of even the darkest episodes of life.

In a remarkable way we, too, can be turned toward blessing. When we are able at last to make the move from cursing our fate to blessing others by our actions, we know the seeds of healing are taking root in our lives.