getting down to business

I returned to Pasadena late last night, so today marks the official beginning of my "living with cancer" experience. I kicked it off rather stupidly. Given a brief opportunity between the fast that ended after this morning's PET-scan and the one that began at noon in anticipation of tomorrow's colonoscopy, stuffing myself with all the eggs and pancakes I could force down my asophagus seemed like a good idea. I didn't know that at 3:00 I would be expected to guzzle an entire gallon of an awful concoction named--not without a bit of giggling, I'm sure--"Go-Lytely," whose function I won't describe, other than to say that I am composing today's journal entry roughly four minutes at a time. The battle against which you steel yourself in advance is seldom the one you actually have to fight.

What a gift to have been able to prepare myself with a week in Seattle and Lynden! The depth and breadth of friendships centered around Bethany Community Church--the ways these relationships interlock, the sacrifices we would make for one another, and the utter security of belonging to such a community--became much clearer to us in 2003, after we had moved away, than at any time during the seven years when we were right there in the middle of it. Our times with friends over the last week reminded us that we are still very much a part of this circle, however many miles may separate us.

Sunday, I explained my situation to the congregation at Bethany's morning services, and several members came forward to pray over me. I shared a few specific requests, which I think bear repeating:

For time and physical strength to do whatever work lies ahead of me. I'm quite committed to completing my dissertation, continuing in teaching responsibilities, and taking advantage of ministry opportunities as they arise. I feel relatively optimistic concerning stamina, motor skills and bodily capability over the next couple of years. I ask that God may grant me whatever I need to complete my tasks well.

For mental and emotional centeredness. The worst part of my previous experience with chemotherapy was the effect of the drugs on my mind and moods. Some afternoons, I felt utterly immobilized by a despondency, horror and repugnance toward everything around me that went beyond any rational response to my having cancer. After nineteen years, I still can't adequately describe the experience, but I'm convinced it was at least partly a chemical reaction to the medications I was receiving. I understand that chemotherapy has changed radically over the years, and I know, too, that I was receiving an unusually powerful dosage back in 1987-88, so I don't expect to experience quite the same thing this time around. But if my time is limited, I want to spend as little of it as possible lost inside myself.

For Karla. She's facing an entirely different battle than mine. I've been amazed at the personal resources that she has demonstrated over the last couple of weeks. I pray that God would daily renew her spirit and body, that he would give her joy to match her pain, and that he would continue to draw us together in this experience and to fill our home with laughter.

For wisdom and clarity as we think about our future. For the time being, our place seems to be here in Pasadena. I'm finishing school, Karla's a coach for Team in Training, the medical services I need are right here. But a year from now, who knows what path we'll take? If teaching opportunities arise in other parts of the country, we should probably look at them, but we will also have to examine carefully the advisability of moving far away from our current networks of support at such a critical time. We ask for wisdom and clarity as we seek to integrate responsible hope for the future with a realistic assessment of our limitations and needs.

"Why do you ask My name?"

I’ve been asked a couple of times recently whether I feel some sense of anger or unfairness over my current situation. This is an interesting question. For some reason, of all the mental states that I have experience over the last week or two—including disappointment, sadness, peace, hope, resignation, ironic detachment and even guilt—anger hasn’t been among them.

It’s not that I won’t allow myself to be angry. Nineteen years ago, having undergone several months of chemotherapy, I found not only that I lacked the resilience to avoid feeling angry, but also that allowing myself to be angry—more to the point, to be angry at God—was an important step toward inner healing. Even Job had said, “I will give free rein to my complaint and speak out in the bitterness of my soul.” Various Psalmists complained that God had abandoned them, rejected them for no good reason, and swept them away in divine wrath. To the author of Lamentations, God seemed “like a bear lying in wait,” who “dragged me from the path and mangled me and left me without help.” In each case (with the exception of one of the Psalms citations), their unabashed anger eventuated in renewed friendship with God. It has been my experience in the past to come the profoundest sense of God’s love and compassion at the far side of an angry, open confrontation. As with Jacob at the end of Genesis 32, the limp and the blessing arise from the same encounter.

This time, however, the confrontation hasn’t yet occurred, and that suits me fine. I’ve wondered why not, though, and I suppose it involves a number of factors.

The first, to be honest, is denial. My mental state tends to be fairly primal—if my body feels good I’m happy, and if it doesn’t I’m angry—and right now I feel fine. I’ve gone from DC to Seattle to Lynden this week, and have spent most of my time doing fun things with good friends. The sheer enjoyment of this past week has somewhat mitigated my fears of what lies ahead.

Second, my life thus far has been extraordinarily rich, a fact that has been impressed upon me especially in the last couple of weeks, as people from all different moments of my past have surfaced to express their love and support. Yes, I am aware of a certain Job-like quality to my life: three bouts with cancer, heart failure, a number of related physical difficulties and a couple of major career setbacks. But there is something truly wonderful about this life that I of all people have been given. At almost every point along the way, I’ve been allowed to connect with others in such a way that my current circle of good friends includes people I knew in college in the early 80s, kids from my first youth group twenty years ago and hundreds of people who became a part of my life during my years in Carnation, Seattle, and now Pasadena, dozens of whom I would feel quite confident turning to in a moment of crisis. I think, too, that I inherited from both of my parents an ability to find tremendous pleasure in relatively insignificant things: a well-made omelet or bowl of oatmeal, catching a tiny bit of air beneath my skis, a 10-mile bike ride, or a clever turn of a phrase. My siblings are a lot of fun to be with, and I’m insanely happy in my marriage. This has been very good, and if my threescore and ten comes up a score short, I can’t really say that I’ve been cheated.

The practice of keeping an online journal has been another important factor. Blogging, I’ve found, is a different endeavor from either the public act of teaching or the private act of journaling. On the one hand, for this to be at all meaningful, I have to do it entirely for myself, without feeling constrained by the approval or disapproval of the people who read it, or by any response that I hope to evoke on their end. At the same time, however, I am aware of a large number of potential readers, and that awareness infuses the task with a healthy dose of accountability. I feel compelled to produce something more coherent and directional than the circular, introspective meanderings one might find upon thumbing through my thirty years worth of spiral notebooks. I want to say something, and that motivation guards me against getting lost in individualized sentimentality.

There’s a theological factor as well. At the center of my understanding of reality lies the narrative of God becoming a particular Jewish rebel, living among the marginalized and victimized, suffering and dying at the hands of religious and governmental powers, and rising from the dead as the firstborn of a new creation. It seems to me that this story radically calls into question any correlation between faith in a loving, sovereign God and the expectation that terrible things won’t happen.

Finally, I have to attribute some of my current mental state, albeit cautiously, to what Paul called “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding.” I feel a bit trepid here, partly because I understand “peace” in Paul’s writings to refer not to an individual’s subjectivity but to a social characteristic of the faith community, and partly because any expectation that I, unlike Jesus, should be miraculously delivered from painful, existential confrontation with whatever lies ahead smacks of the kind of hubris and hyper-spirituality which I am bound to regret. Nevertheless, mingled with the natural coping mechanisms and dispositional habits at work in me right now, I also recognize and give thanks for this sheer gift from God, a centeredness that I can’t explain or take for granted, but that has kept me on my feet for the last several days.

Tuesday I fly back to California. Wednesday I go in for a PET-scan. Thursday is the endoscopy and colonoscopy. Friday I receive my first treatment. It’s likely that a new wrestling match will begin shortly thereafter, but I can't predict it one way or another, nor would it change anything if I allowed another day's troubles to dominate my thinking today. Right now I’m well, and that’s all I can ask.

Live Man Walking

New Testament Professor David Scholer has been living with terminal cancer since, I think, about 2002. He appears to have decided not spend his remaining time and energy in the role of a dying man, but to turn himself outward, continuing to invest himself in students, colleagues, church gatherings and whoever else God brings into his life. After four years, he is recognized throughout the Fuller community as a source of liberation, wisdom and joy. He emceed the seminary breakfast Monday morning at the convention, addressing the crowd with humor, warmth and energy. Not until the end, when two men appeared at his sides to escort him down the stairs were we reminded that his body is weak and in pain. This is what I want for myself: to affirm and celebrate God’s kindness in whatever time I have left at least as passionately as I have sought to do over the course of my life thus far.

Charlie Scalise, who, with his wife Pam, has played a critical role in my spiritual formation since I took their Church History and Old Testament courses a decade ago, drew my attention to Dr. Scholer over a meal on Sunday. We were discussing the work done by medieval theologians on the art of dying well and the ramifications of that work in our day, when medical science and modern opportunities for personal advancement afford us the luxury of thinking of one’s personal earthly existence as an end in itself and death as tragedy to be postponed as long as possible. Mortality, for our forebears, was much harder to ignore, so living well and dying well were closely associated in their minds.

I’ve read books and seen movies whose closing paragraphs or scenes had the power to elevate a good story into a great one; I have to think that the manner in which one lives one’s final years, months or moments can have a similar force. As Charlie put it, it is a matter of affirming at the end of one’s life what one has affirmed throughout. In my case, this will call for continued attention to certain practices and disciplines by which I have sought to abide, if not always successfully, since my teen years: the daily habit of Scripture reading and meditation; the habit of choosing, when the choice is given to me, to express gratitude, to make space in myself for someone who is different from me, to forbear rather than to find fault; the mental discipline of referring life experiences and questions back to the central narrative of God’s self-revelation in Christ.

It will especially require a decisive shift in the way I view my current situation. Understandably, I spent most of Friday and Saturday reckoning with the fact that I had suddenly become a dying man, but I see now that this estimation is inadequate. Death was guaranteed long before I received any test results, and having now heard the reports, I’m still alive. For the time being, I am not simply dying of cancer, I am living with cancer. This, to me, is not optimism, which I usually find naïve. I’m not grasping at the unlikely chance that some miracle is going to put this whole misfortune behind me. But right now I’m here. By conservative estimates, I could realistically expect to live like this for another two years; by more generous estimates, perhaps four. Who knows whether I’ll surprise us all with an extra month or year beyond that? I’ll feel a bit silly if five or six years from now I’ve done nothing with the unexpected extra time than wait for it to expire. For now I need to behave like a man who has a future, because, for now, that is exactly what I have.

showing up

I was at the airport yesterday morning, waiting to catch a flight to DC for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, when Dr. Iqbal called. She had seen the CT-scan, and it confirmed that cancerous cells were scattered throughout my abdomen and chest. With chemotherapy and good living, I could possibly survive this for up to four years, but, barring something utterly unusual, there are no longer two possible outcomes.

Originally, my trip was to include four weeks in Philadelphia leading up to the convention. The day before I was to leave, I decided to stick around long enough for a biopsy. Then, three days before my second departure date, I got the biopsy results back and decided to cut out the Philadelphia segment altogether. Now I was on the phone with Karla, telling her the news and deciding whether to miss the convention as well.

Hard to categorize what goes into a decision like this: Of course I'm not going to Washington, I just found out I'm dying. I'm scheduled to meet with the man who wants to publish my dissertation, and I'd be a fool to back out of that. I just want to be with Karla right now. My trip has been funded by the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, and if I don't show up I'll feel obliged to reimburse them for the travel stipend. I need to think about what life could look like over the next couple of years, and the connections I make at this convention play a role in that. Karla needs me to be with her tonight. She says she wants me to go. I've always been able to trust Karla to tell me whether she needs me or not, and right now she says she'll be okay. If the tables were turned, and Karla canceled a trip because she thought I needed her to, that would bother me a lot. What kind of jackass drops news like this on his wife and then abandons her for four nights? We just bought 2 new shirts and ties for the convention; it would be a shame not to wear them.

A book I'm reading quotes a one-hundred-year-old grocery clerk in San Francisco: "You stop showing up for stuff, things begin to fall apart."

So here I am in Washington, having a mostly good weekend, interspersed with sad phonecalls and the recurrent challenge of determining whether to sidestep questions about what's happening in my life or just answer them directly.

It's about 45 degrees and the cold air on my face is exhilerating. Cirque du soleil is in town, and its music seeps out of its tent and creates an energetic background hum. At this moment, it feels good to be alive.

He came with Grandma

Yesterday the weight shifted. Since June, and especially since last month, the possibility that I might undergo surgery or treatment and then get on with my life and the possibility that I might not survive this third bout have both stood in my line of vision, but the former was clearly the likelier of the two. Today, both possibilities remain viable, but the relation between them has reversed.

Poor Dr. Iqbal. She thought we already knew more than we did, so when she began telling us about patients who survive four years or more with chemotherapy, she thought she was giving us good news. The upshot is this: I have cancer in the bile duct. We’ll begin treatments in two weeks. In the meantime, we’ll continue with tests over the next few months. If we can convince ourselves that the malignancy is limited to a single location, we might be able to remove it surgically, follow up with more chemo, and actually cure it. If not, I will receive shots and pills on a regular basis for as long as my body holds up. Even given that scenario, there is a chance that in a year or two we fight the cancer back sufficiently to make me a candidate for a liver transplant, but Dr. Iqbal has warned us that it would be very unusual for that to happen.

The initial response among family members was to glom onto the most optimistic interpretation possible and play down any information that militated against it. As Todd reminds me, this is how our family does things: no matter what life throws at us, we look at the bright side and try not to get down. There’s something admirable in that, and frankly, I think that right now I need to respect whatever response works for Mom and Dad. I'm only facing what every person has to confront sooner or later; what they’re going through no one should ever have to experience.

For my part, though, I need truthfulness a lot more than I need optimism. Last night Mom said that my dying was the elephant in the room that she couldn’t bear to look at just yet. But now I am the elephant, and I want people to see me for who I am. If the only Scott Becker people can bear to think about, laugh with, or have over for the holidays is the one that’s likely to be around for another forty years, then I’ve already been turned away in favor of someone who doesn’t exist.

A single-panel comic in this morning’s LA Times shows a family gathered around the Thanksgiving table, and the angel of death carving the turkey with his scythe. A young woman leans over and tells the man next to her, “He came with Grandma.” I’m going to cut that one out and keep it.

with the grain of the universe

"To love others well we must first love the truth....One who really loves another is not merely moved by the desire to see him contented and healthy and prosperous in this world. Love cannot be satisfied with anything so incomplete. If I am to love my brother, I must somehow enter into the deep mystery of God's love for him." --Thomas Merton

"Do not make any oaths at all....not even by your own head, for you have no power to make a single hair white or black. But let your word be yes for yes and no for no, for anything beyond this comes from evil." --Jesus

Someone told me recently that if anything bad ever happened to me, all her positive memories of me would turn into negative memories. I certainly hope that's not the case. One shouldn't have to become invincible to give something good to one's friends.

To be like God--or better, to attain to a distorted picture of God: to be free of limitation, in control of one's surroundings, unaccountable and invulnerable to suffering--was the first temptation to present itself to humankind, and it's been a bad idea ever since. It lies at the heart of the mentality that reduces persons to consumers and human community to a network of market exchanges: your life--like your car, your iPod, your television, and your beer--is only as good as the ad campaign that sells it and the warranty that backs it up. But this belief forces us to lie to each other. It tells us that we have nothing to give unless we can be something that we are not.

This is one reason I think the message of Christ's cross and resurrection has something important to tell us. For one thing, it corrects the notion of God as the sovereign string-puller and reveals instead a covenant partner who willingly enters into human experience with all its contradictions: "He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." Divine power here is not construed as the controlling of human events so that they all conform to a perfect plan, but as the freedom to suffer patiently and lovingly for the sake of the world, in order to summon creation to its true identity. This is not a God who conquers opposition with a flash of irresistible force, but who befriends creation, even though it means receiving in human flesh the violence and hatred of a race that has overthrown its creaturely status, and refusing to hate it in return.

In this light, the resurrection signifies much more than an invitation to go to heaven and be with Jesus when we die (an image that I've never found very compelling). What it signifies is that God's final word to humankind is Yes and not No--that the fear that dominates us by virtue of our limitations and proneness to suffer and die is not ultimate, that history belongs not those who pretend by force or manipulation to rescue us from chaos, but that, to quote John Howard Yoder, "those who bear crosses are walking with the grain of the universe." The resurrection means that we no longer have to be afraid of the truth--even if the truth detroys all our images of what life ought to be like--because the truth finally belongs to God, who is for us and not against us.

death by bureaucracy

Today marks three weeks since the biopsy and I have yet to undergo any of the needed tests to determine the malignancy's extent, origin, or treatment plan. I have an appointment to meet my new oncologist on Thursday, but without any new test results I'm not sure that we can do more than exchange casserole recipes and compare Oscar predictions.

Last Friday I was told that the radiology lab had received authorization for a CT-scan and that I should call right away to schedule an appointment. I attempted to do so, and got as far as leaving a voice mail, which went unreturned through the weekend. Yesterday morning I called again and reached a member of the office staff, who affirmed that they had, in fact received the authorization, but that it had been filled out improperly and that I could not make an appointment until it was corrected.

It's been like this since June. We learn that a referral to a specialist has sat on a receptionist's desk for a week because her fax machine was broken, a message left for a doctor sits untransmitted, my HMO turns down a request because someone misread a doctor's handwriting, a doctor in a hurry puts us on hold and the person who picks up the phone fifteen minutes later doesn't know why we called in the first place. We've only made it this far because Karla knows the system well enough to cut through the various obfuscations and is persistent enough to call people back when they don't call us and to refuse to hang up until someone has answered her questions. I don't know how most people make it through the health care labyrinth at all.

On the deepest level, this matters to me because over the summer I began working through the possibility that if I did have cancer I might not come out of it alive. It became clear to me that one important factor that would allow me to go peacefully would be the reasonable confidence that, after a time of grief, Karla would still have several decades to build a good life for herself, to remarry if she so chose, to think about her career and future in terms that weren't defined by my medical needs and limitations, to move to a place where she ccould be grateful for the second half as well as the first half of her time on earth. I'm afraid, however, that if other people's indifference or incompetence plays any role in determining whether I live or die, the bitterness from that may affect her for years to come.

My Austrian friend Maria, whose family's medical issues involved her in her native country's socialized health care system, expresses surprise that the American system is such a jungle. I seriously wonder whether the union of free market and medicine hasn't outlived its usefulness.

karla

Karla and I spent most of yesterday in Santa Monica, taking the footpath down into Venice Beach. We had planned to walk about five miles each way, but I had pulled a muscle while biking earlier in the morning, so after about a mile or so I began stopping frequently to work the cramps out of my thigh. Karla stayed patient with me, but after about my fourth break I decided there wasn't much point in trying to go further.

I don't know how I'd make it through my current ordeal without Karla. I don't mean that sentimentally, at least not in this instance. But the health care industry no longer seems to be designed with maneuverability in mind, and Karla--a nurse by training, a case manager by profession, and one particular patient's ferocious advocate by a twist of fate--is one of the few people in the country who actually knows her way around the system.

A recent example: Four weeks ago, when the spots on my liver were still considered an anomaly attributable to past health problems, we met with my hepatologist. I was to fly out to Philadelphia the next day for a month-long research trip, so when Dr. Kahn encouraged me to stick around long enough for a biopsy, I held out for further evidence that this step was really necessary.

"If we could at least do an ultrasound," he said, "I'd feel more confident telling you whether you're safe to leave. But we can't schedule it until we get approval, which we can't get in less than 48 hours."

Karla replied, "Let me see what I can do." She pulled out her cell phone, spoke to someone for a couple of minutes, hung up and reported, "Marie says she can get the approval to us in half an hour."

Two hours later, the test was complete and we were all convinced that I needed to postpone my trip.

Elections 2006

Just a few remarks on how I voted yesterday and why:

No on 85. I place a pretty high premium on embryonic life and strong family communication, so you'd think I'd throw my support behind a law that would have required parental consent in order to terminate a teen pregnancy. But in the absence of solid evidence of any correlation between anti-abortion laws and an actual decrease in the number of abortions, this proposition had little to commend it. (For the record, in 2004, Glen Stassen published an article in www.sojo.net showing that the number of abortions performed annually had gone down during the years of the pro-choice Clinton administration and risen since pro-life Bush came into office. Further data forced him to modify his argument: abortions had not actually risen since 2001, but the decline seen through the 1990s had nevertheless leveled off.) On the other hand, I do believe that if we address some of the economic and social factors that motivate many women to seek abortions in the first place--for instance, lack of adequate health care, childcare, community services, or employment opportunities for single mothers--we may find fewer women making that painful decision. I have to conclude that a large number of ostensibly pro-life activists who continue to push for punitive abortion laws while ignoring root causes are more interested in suppressing opposition to their ideology than in defending the unborn.

But this goes further. It's been my privilege to know a lot of healthy, loving families where parents and children really do seem to like and trust each other, where there's enough communication to make it hard to keep secrets for too long, and where, bluntly, adolescent girls do not appear to be getting molested by their fathers. I may be naive, but I'm willing to bet that it would be the exception rather than the rule for the parents of one of these families to have no clue that their daughter was pregnant or on her way out the door to get an abortion. Proposition 85 would not affect these families one way or another. On the other hand, it would greatly affect the girl who dares not reveal an unwanted pregnancy to her parents for fear of her own safety. If now we require counselors and medical professionals to refer her back to her parents, we make it that much harder for her to approach caring adults who might actually be able to point her toward a healthier future. Nor can we congratulate ourselves for at least saving the life of the unborn child, for if she's desperate enough she will end her pregnancy, whether legally and healthily or not.

Camejo for Governor. Imagine my surprise when my candidate didn't win. Seriously, I almost voted for Schwarzenegger, just to show my appreciation for a politician who could apologize for his executorial mistakes and reach across party lines. But there are few issues I care about more than justice for immigrants, and Schwarzenegger's tough talk on border control made it impossible for me to support him. Angelides fared no better, and his relentless personal attacks, first against Steve Wesley, and then against Schwarzenegger, coupled with his seeming indifference toward committing himself to a clear course of action, left me with serious doubts about his character.

So I voted for Camejo of the Green Party. You might say that I threw my vote away, but frankly this election wasn't up for grabs in the first place. Nothing short of a photograph of the governor getting intimate with a shi-tzu would have prevented his reelection. On the other hand, if a sizeable number of supporters show up for marginal parties, they raise the possibility that alternatives to our current Republican-Democratic choices might receive greater attention and funding in the future.

Democrats for Congress. My number one reason for heading to the ballot box this year was to cast my vote for Diane Feinstein and Adam Schiff. Heck, I'd have voted for Anna Nicole Smith if she were running for Congress as a Democrat. Not that I'm a particularly loyal Democrat myself. But I believe that one of the primary social responsibilities of the Christian Church is to resist political domination, and that meant breaking the Republican hegemony over the three branches of government.

Medicine and Justice

I had lunch with Deb today. Deb & I first met three years ago as new doctoral students in Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. We now co-facilitate Fuller's online ethics course, and Karla & I frequently get together with her and her husband Murray for dinner, cards, or movies.

We have two other things in common: Deb underwent several months of chemotherapy two years ago, and she shares my ambivalence toward the purported comradery of "cancer survivors."

I sometimes joke as if surviving cancer were a heroic feat on my part--"I stared at death and death blinked"--but in reality, it was a long, unpleasant process of self-discovery that left me permanently suspicious of the notion of heroism itself. I can't say whether I'm a better person because of it. I can say that I really like life as I've known it, and that I have no idea whether this life would be as rich if my experiences with cancer were written out of it. But to use "cancer survivor" as a ticket into some elite club runs counter to everything I experienced in the first place. Of course, I would want to be available to come alongside anyone facing cancer, but one's bout with cancer is personal enough to make it impossible for me to imagine that we automatically have a connection or that I have some bit of wisdom to pass along.

For her part, Deb's identity has more to do with her involvement in activities related to social and economic justice than with her medical history. Having had breast cancer, she knows that she would make an easy poster child for medical research, but she's aware that the beneficiaries of such research would be people who, like herself and like me, can afford decent medical care. The needs of forty million uninsured Americans, eleven million undocumented aliens, and some three billion undernourished citizens of the world receive less attention and funding than the ailments of the affluent. Everyone cares about breast cancer, she says, because it predominantly affects wealthy white women; but nobody holds a fund-raising parade to broaden the scope of our humanitarian concerns.

It's not that either of us looks lightly on the sacrifices others have made to keep people like us alive. That we are still here is a gift from God and from a large network of committed professionals and volunteers, and we owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude. But I do have to agree that in our commitment to medical research and improved treatments we often overlook potentially embarrassing questions concerning who gets to enjoy the fruits of that research, who gets left out, and why race, national citizenship and economic privilege continue to play such vital roles in dividing the spoils.

Do Not Call Me Naomi

I remember from my previous bouts that people act strangely around cancer patients. Some keep their distance, nervous that whatever they say will be the wrong thing, that if they shake my hand they might break it, that a hug might choke the last ounce of life out of me. Others go to great lengths to figure out a bon mot, a piece of advice, or an affirmation of belief that will somehow fit my predicament back into a manageable worldview. I can't say this from any high ground, because I've done the same thing to other patients when I'm well, or to people going through struggles that exceed my ability to empathize. Why do we shun those who remind us of the inadequacy of our words and deeds? Maybe it's part our secret pact with death: as long as death agrees not to embarrass me with its presence, I'll agree to avoid the painful step of self-relinquishing that might actually lead to life. "Whoever wishes to find his life must lose it."

In the Old Testament story of Ruth, when Naomi returns to Bethlehem with her daughter-in-law, her first public act is to change her name from Naomi ("sweetness") to Mara ("bitterness"). She's lost her husband, her two sons, and her place in the community, and she can no longer be the person who reminds everyone how pleasant life is. But her request is ignored. The people of Bethlehem--and even the narrator--continue to call her Naomi through to the end of the story. There are at least two ways to interpret this. Maybe the villagers didn't get it. Maybe they couldn't accept the truth of Naomi's tragedy, couldn't bear the cracks that she was making against the softly shaded lenses through which they viewed the world. Or maybe Naomi was the one who didn't get it. Maybe the people around her could see what she could not, that for all its contradictions and ambiguities hers was a truly blessed life and a cause of celebration that everyone could join into. I suppose both interpretations might be correct, and neither one complete without the other.

Survivor...So Far

Last Friday I learned that I have cancer.

The possibility has hung over our heads since May, when the elevated liver enzymes first showed up on a routine blood test, so the news itself was surprisingly un-devastating. Moreover, this is my third bout--I fought Hodgkins Disease when I was in college, and again when it came back six years later--so the wire in my brain that programs me to think that everything in life should go smoothly and make sense has been disconnected for a long time. We don't know yet whether the tumors are restricted to the liver or more systemic, whether I will require surgery, radiation, chemotherapy or some combination thereof. What I can say with a fair amount of confidence is that Karla & I will face some pretty awful days over the next few months.

Today is not one of them, and for that I'm grateful.

So I'm doing what humans have done since the dawn of time when confronted by their mortality: I'm starting a blog. I've meant to do this for some time--to post various comments on the role of faith in public life, the revolutionary character of church practices, the peril of confusing Christian values with prevailing nationalist ideologies, the lost art of truthtelling in our current political climate. But the trigger is suddenly embarking on a journey that deserves to be described day after day as it proceeds. We'll see what happens from here.