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...

June 25, 2009 - Farrah, Jane and "Let It Be"

News has just come through, today, of the death of actor and model Farrah Fawcett. I wrote about her cancer struggle in my May 16th blog entry. Her television documentary, Farrah’s Story, was a graphic account of the last months of her life.

While the film attracted some negative comments from critics, who branded it as reality-show exploitation, I saw it differently. It seemed to me a courageous (although rough-around-the-edges) statement from a dying woman whose deepest desire was to “not go gentle into that good night.”

Sure, Farrah’s story was hardly typical. She was an enormously wealthy woman with the means to jet all over the world seeking alternative cancer treatments. She was also more vocal than some about the problem of how cancer was affecting her physical beauty (hardly surprising in a woman who, in her prime, was a fashion icon). Yet, whose cancer story is ever typical, anyway? We’re all individuals, and in our respective responses to this disease we each display our own interior beauty.

This morning I walked across the street to St. Mary’s By-the-Sea Episcopal Church to attend the funeral of a neighbor, Jane, who died at mid-life after having been diagnosed about a year ago with a pretty-much untreatable form of cancer. She left behind two teenage daughters and a whole churchful of friends.

Jane designed the funeral service herself, down to every last detail. While it wove in and out of the Book of Common Prayer liturgy, the musical selections and personal testimonies were hardly typical funeral fare. We sang along with the choir to Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn” and listened to a talented guitarist sing the jaunty medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (as styled by the by the late Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole) and “What a Wonderful World” that’s been making the rounds of indie singers.



We finished by singing the Beatles’ “Let It Be” – a baby boomer anthem if ever there was one. I’ve always heard the song’s mention of “mother Mary” was inspired by a dream Paul McCartney had of his own mother, whose name was Mary. After checking it out on Wikipedia, I learned his mother died when he was 14, of cancer. As she came to Paul in the dream, he was blessed with an overwhelming feeling of comfort and peace. According to Wikipedia, he later told an interviewer: “It was great to visit with her again. I felt very blessed to have that dream. So that got me writing ‘Let It Be’.” Speaking to another interviewer, he shared how in the dream his mother had comforted him: “It will be all right, just let it be.”

Some have assumed, I know, that “mother Mary” in the song must surely be Mary, the mother of Jesus, but of course that’s not the case. So, it doesn’t make sense, as some have done, to sing it in church as a celebration of that Mary. It turns out, though, in this context, “Let It Be” has a compelling personal (if not exactly liturgical) rightness.

From what I know of Jane – a deep-thinking, highly organized person – it’s likely she knew this story, and included it in the service for that reason. It’s the message she would have wanted her own daughters to take away from the experience of losing their mother:

“And when the night is cloudy,
there is still a light, that shines on me,
shine until tomorrow, let it be.
I wake up to the sound of music, mother Mary comes to me,
speaking words of wisdom, let it be.”

May 9, 2009 - A Most Useless Place?

Dr. Wendy Harpham sent me a link to the blog of Rabbi David Wolpe, who also has non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Several years before that, he had surgery for a brain tumor. Here, he writes about receiving his last Rituxan infusion, ending a two-year follow-up regime after chemotherapy for NHL:

“Recently I had the final infusion. But I was not at all sure that pulling away the safety net was a cause for celebration. My doctor poked his head into the curtained chamber to assure me that he expected a long remission. Kind of him, but what could he say?

Remission is cancer's suspended animation. The renegade cells are poised to return but no one knows when. It could be a month or a decade; for my type of lymphoma (one of the more than thirty varieties of Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma) there is no cure. So I am stuck in what Dr. Seuss – in a book I used to read to my daughter – calls “a most useless place. The Waiting place....’”

A most useless place. That phrase does sum up how it feels, sometimes. Unlike David, I’m out of remission – have been for a couple of years – but there are days when I, too, feel like I’m in suspended animation.

David’s experience is similar to mine, too, in that he is a member of the clergy, serving a congregation:

“I had the strange, surreal experience of hearing my congregants' shock that this could happen to the family of the Rabbi – as though professional piety was a shield against disease. As though God played favorites.

Right before my brain surgery I appeared in front of the congregation and asked them for their patience and their prayers. Three year later I was standing before them, bald. I witnessed the realization in their eyes that there are no guarantees, no protected people. No one is safe.”

No, no one is safe. Yet, that observation ought to be surprising only to those who believe God is some cosmic puppeteer, manipulating the lives and loves and illnesses of us poor, benighted souls who dwell below. Is cancer a thunderbolt, cast down in righteous anger from Olympian heights? I’ve never seen it that way – although I’ve met plenty of people, both inside and outside my church, who fear it may be.

Granted, there are strains within the biblical tradition that portray God that way. God punishes the ten spies who brought back an unfavorable report of the promised land by killing them with plague (Numbers 14:37). God gives the adulterous David and Bathsheba’s infant love-child a fatal illness (2 Samuel 12:15-17). Even worse, God famously afflicts Job with boils, not because he’s an unjust man but simply because God wants to win a debate with the devil.

Yet, before everything is said and done in the Hebrew scriptures, the Lord is portrayed as “merciful and gracious, abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 103:8). That’s the majority witness. When it comes to the New Testament, of course, God not only sympathizes with human suffering, but personally undergoes it, becoming incarnate as Jesus Christ.

Yet, the ancient images of a capriciously angry God, that dread smiter of sinners, are maddeningly persistent. “What did I do to deserve this?" is the anguished cry we pastors hear again and again, whether spoken or unspoken, standing at the foot of many a hospital bed.

No one is safe. We’re all going to die. Some of us sooner than others. If we’re spared from some fatal catastrophe on the highways, we’re all going to hear some doctor admit to us, someday, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing more medical science can do for you.” Is this God’s judgment?

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden suggests it is. Death is, that story suggests, God’s judgment on the entire human race. That may be so, but, unless we toss out all the biblical witnesses to God as patient and merciful, it’s hard to make a case for God micro-managing the entries in our individual medical files. We belong to a race for whom that dark, old lullaby is all too true:

“Hush, little baby, don’t you cry,
for you know your mama is born to die...”

The divine decree of death is meted out to the human race en masse, not on a case-by-case basis.

The fact of death is perhaps the deepest mystery we children of Adam and Eve seek to plumb – as Rabbi David has himself come to realize:

“For now I am just waiting. I am trying to find my own way through this because, inevitably, I will be asked how I did it. Rabbis are supposed to be figures of authority and calm. It was hard enough to reassure my congregation that a fickle universe does not mean that God is absent. That belief does not indemnify me against adversity. That my faith through all this is unshaken. How does one live, Rabbi, is the question my congregants ask, of not so directly. Tell me, Rabbi – it is your job to know.

My answer, I now realize, is: Live as if you are fine, knowing that you are not. Death is the overriding truth of life but it need not be its constant companion. My safety net is gone. I feel, as all people in remission do, that each time I fly my hand may slip from the trapeze. But to live earthbound is to give the cancer more than it deserves.”

The place David and I find ourselves in may feel, at times, like “a most useless place.” On deeper examination – and, viewed through the eye of faith – it turns out to be anything but.

March 21, 2008 - For Whom the Bell Tolls

Today is Good Friday. The tradition in our community is for several of the churches to come together for an ecumenical worship service. The service, which lasts from noon till 3 p.m., includes sermons and musical contributions by a number of different people. Worshipers come and go within that time period, as they are able. This year, our church is playing host.

Some years I’m one of the preachers, but this time around, the only thing I have to do is offer some words of welcome at the beginning and generally hang around the fringes, giving a nod to each of my colleagues when it’s time for them to step up to the chancel and deliver their message.

The service ends with “The Tolling of the Bell” – a note of solemnity that has a distinctly old-fashioned quality to it. Because I haven’t arranged ahead of time for anyone else to do this, I decide to pull on the rope myself.

OK, I’ll admit it. I could have delegated this small task, but didn’t. For some odd reason, I like to ring the bell. There’s something earthy and satisfying about grasping hold of the rope, placing each of my hands just above the strategically-placed knots, and giving it just the right sort of sharp tug, evoking a resounding “bong” from high overhead.

Thirty-three times I pull on that rope: one tug for each year of Jesus’ life on earth. In between each sounding of the bell, I pause for a second or two. During those intervals, I can hear, through a nearby stained-glass window, traffic noise coming from the street outside.

Here in the church, we’ve just finished three hours of scripture readings, sermons and achingly beautiful music, that together tell the story of Jesus’ passion and death on the cross. The pace is slow: it reminds me of the sort of suspension of time that takes place in a hospital room, with a family gathered around their loved one, waiting for death to bring blessed release. Outside, there are people going about their daily lives, oblivious to the drama taking place within these walls.

I find myself wondering what those people in the street outside are thinking, as they hear the tolling of the bell. Thirty-three slow and steady soundings of a church bell takes a rather long time. It goes on for two or three minutes, at least. In an earlier era of our history, when church bells were used to signal fires, national emergencies and the like, not to mention ecclesiastical observances, the whole town would have stopped whatever they were doing to ponder the import of that echoing sound. Then again, in that earlier era – when the church played a bigger role in civic life – most people wouldn’t have wondered what all the bell-ringing was all about. Good Friday, three o’clock – they would have just known, without having to ask.

Today, though – who can say? Why, there are even some stores that offer Good Friday Sales – as though any day off work and school is a prime opportunity to pull out the plastic and bring home the bacon.

The cancer community’s like that, too, in a way. We whose lives have been touched by this disease hear the distant tolling of a bell, resounding through our consciousness. Outside, life goes on, oblivious. Inside, we look at one another, and know.

January 20, 2008 - The Song Goes On

During the worship service this morning, I pick up the hymnal that’s been set out for me on my chair, and I realize it’s got a name gold-stamped onto the front cover. It’s not my name. The name belongs to Carol, a former member of our church’s Chancel Choir, who died several years ago.

There aren’t too many personalized hymnals in our church, but the Chancel Choir does have a nice tradition of offering one to choir members who are celebrating significant anniversaries of singing with the choir. In Carol’s case, she qualified for that award a very long time ago, indeed: at the time she died, she had been a choir member for more than 50 years. I believe someone asked her sister, Ginny, if she’d like to have Carol’s personalized hymnal as a keepsake, and she declined – so, it made its way into the general supply of hymnals that we use in the sanctuary. From there, it made its way somehow onto the pulpit platform, and ultimately to my chair.

As I sing the first hymn, I find myself thinking about Carol. How many Sundays, I wonder, did she hold this hymnal? Now, it’s found its way into my hands. In a certain sense, I’m carrying on her song today.

That’s the way it always is with worship. Week after week the congregation gathers, but each Sunday it’s a slightly different group. As we lift our voices in song, a first-time visitor may be sharing a hymnal with someone who’s been a regular worshiper for dozens of years. When church members die, and – in the old euphemism – “join the choir celestial,” they’re no longer a part of our community here. But, we remember them fondly, and like to think of them as joining their voices with that company of which the book of Revelation speaks:

“Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, singing with full voice, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!’ Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, ‘To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!’” (Revelation 5:11-13)

Ever since I unwillingly accepted the label of “cancer survivor,” I’ve become acquainted with certain other survivors who, well, didn’t survive. I remember them, though: their courage, their perseverance, their grit, their humor. One of the things you have to get used to, in cancerworld, is that there are a certain number of goodbyes. They go with the territory.

There are people I’ve become acquainted with through their cancer blogs, who are no longer with us. Some of these blogs I’ve monitored on nearly a daily basis, but then there comes a day when the entries abruptly stop. Usually, a family member posts a kind message, thanking all those who have followed the loved one’s progress, but informing them that the journey is ended. I’ve felt some sadness on such occasions – even though my acquaintance with the blogger was limited to cyberspace exchanges of mutual support.

Claire just learned, the other day, of the death of a man who had been part of our little band of cancer survivors who addressed the Genentech national sales meeting in Las Vegas a year ago (see my January 27, 2007 blog entry). I remember feeling impressed at this man’s positive attitude, despite the heavy odds he was facing (odds that were greater than mine, since he had a relatively rare cancer, and had already undergone a number of different rounds of treatment). He spoke to Claire and me about his church community that meant a great deal to him, and also about the joy he’d found in his relatively new marriage. The man was fairly bursting with life. Yet, now, death has claimed him.

Do such vibrant voices simply die away, like a forlorn echo? Or do they go on, in the providence of God?

As I look down at Carol's name, gold-stamped onto the hymnal's cover, I feel certain that they do. I can muster no evidence that would convince a determined skeptic. Yet, I feel that I know it to be true. "Blessed assurance," as they say.

We come round to the final verse:

"For Thy church that evermore
Lifteth holy hands above,
Offering up on every shore
Her pure sacrifice of love,
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise."