the other voice

My second cycle began this morning.

It's hard to say why the actual experience of going in for the treatment is so difficult. My nurse, Rachelle, was cheerful and easy to talk to. She went out of her way to make me comfortable, seating me in a reclining chair, wrapping me in warm blankets. I had packed several snacks, brought a book, I had a television available. The treatment itself was relatively painless. But there's something about sitting in the chair for two hours, receiving the injection, seeing other patients in their chairs receiving their injections. It's too much time to think.

For a few hours after coming home, I had this strange feeling of being divided against myself, going about tasks around the condo, looking and moving as I normally would, and feeling as if something inside me was screaming to be heard. I guess that's exactly it. Being in the chair for two hours calls forth someone inside me that I haven't listened to much over the last month, the person who badly, badly does not want to die. Along with the side of me who really is at peace and finding unexpected joy in the midst of this situation is another side wounded by the knowledge that there is no someday after I'm all done with treatments, no more hikes up Nevada Falls, no more bike rides up Whidbey Island, no more European vacations with Karla.

I can't allow this to be the voice that determines how I live out the time God gives me, but if I ignore it, it might at some point explode with a force that tears me apart. I have to listen to it, to hurt with it. Perhaps there's a way to make peace between the two sides; I can't really say that I've done so yet.

The student is no greater than his Teacher. Right up to the moment of his arrest, Jesus had not made peace between his obedience to the path ahead of him and his resistance to it. To some extent, he resolved the tension with the words, "Not my will, but yours," but even on the cross he expresses his sense of abandonment. It may not have been until he died saying "Into your hands I commend my spirit" that the struggle finally subsided. To imagine that I would come to some point of enduring peace that would carry me through to the end may itself be the kind of evasion that would eat away at my soul in a way that honest grief would not.

dying to live

“We fret at the inevitable realization that our existence is limited….We look frantically around for assurances on this side of the moment when they will all be stripped away, anxiously busying ourselves to snatch at life before we die….All evil begins with the fact that we will not thankfully accept the limitation of our existence where we should hope in the light of it, and be certain, joyously certain, of the fulfillment of our life in the expectation of its end”—Karl Barth

“Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”—Mark 8:35-36

At 45 I’ve already outlived Jesus by a good twelve years, so all in all I’ve done pretty well.

I say this with my tongue only halfway in my cheek, for over the last few weeks I’ve been given numerous hints that faith in Christ ought to be my ticket out from under death’s shadow, rather than the light that guides me through it. I’ve received more than one set of instructions on meditation techniques for forcing cancer cells out of my body. And sitting on my desk until recently was a three-page list of Bible verses promising that God would keep me from dying. I take this to mean either that the nine billion or so people who have lived and died up to this point just didn’t get it, or that they had passed some arbitrary number of years after which these verses no longer apply.

But these biblical promises of victory over death draw their meaning from someone who was willingly crucified at an age when most of us are still wondering what we want to be when we grow up. In Christ we see that overcoming death consists not in postponing it as long as possible, but in staring straight at it and denying its power to destroy our souls.

I need to word this carefully, because I am certainly not suggesting that there is any moral or spiritual value in rushing into death. To be alive is such a gift, and to prolong and make the most of one’s lifespan merits every responsible action. But I’m convinced that the real beauty of an individual life derives from its being interwoven into a larger narrative, a narrative that belongs to God and ends in the redemption and reconciliation of the world. To know oneself as a part of that story is to recognize the splendor of one’s temporal limitations, for it is our mortality that teaches us to relinquish the rights to our own private histories and to see the larger story for which God has claimed us. Longevity, prosperity and freedom from pain are certainly goods worth pursuing, but when we elevate them to the status of ultimate goods they distort our vision of what is truly good and rob us of our humanity.

In her book Healing a Broken World (a wonderful book, by the way, which I’m assigning to students in my upcoming ethics course), Cynthia Moe-Lobeda calls attention to a shift in Western anthropology that has made it more difficult for us to recognize ourselves as part of God’s larger story. The classical Christian view of the human individual was as “man-in-communion.” To be human meant to be in fellowship with other humans, with the rest of creation, and with the Creator. To the extent that we removed ourselves from this larger community, we alienated ourselves from our own true personhood. However, new anthropologies, arising from the Enlightenment, focused more on the autonomous individual than the communities to which he or she belonged. “Man-in-communion” came to be replaced by homo economicus, the individual who acts rationally to maximize self-interest. Individual self-fulfillment and the augmentation of one’s own happiness came to be seen as the purpose of human existence.

But this has proven to be a violent and despairing view of human nature—violent because it pits us against each other, each in defense of his or her own interests; despairing because there is no reason to hope for anything larger than self-interest. To understand our lives in terms of personal self-fulfillment gives death tremendous power over us, for we have so much to lose and nothing beyond our own lives to rejoice in. So we do whatever we must to protect ourselves and our families. We hoard in fear of someday going without. We use violence to eliminate those whom we consider threats. We compete against others to establish our place in the social order. We busy ourselves in activities centered on self-interest and self-aggrandizement with little thought for whether our activities serve either to bless or to curse other members of the community of creation, whether we have been tools for good or evil, whether we have created greater peace or hostility, justice or injustice.

So Jesus presents us with a decision, either to hold onto one’s life as one’s own private possession or to release it into the service to the Reign of God for which it was created in the first place. Whichever we choose, we are bound to come across an immeasurable variety of joys and regrets during our time on earth. But there really will come a moment when we realize that to the extent that we have privatized ourselves—cherished, protected, nurtured and indulged our personal existence as an end in itself—we have eliminated ourselves from the community of the living; and that to the extent that we have released ourselves, our brief lives have been folded into the living movement of God’s Spirit, who continues to heal and to bless and to redeem from one generation to the next.

Bearing with one another

"Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep."--Romans 12:15

"Bear one another's burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ."--Galatians 6:2

"What is an unspeakable gift of God for the lonely individual is easily disregarded and trodden under by those who have the gift every day....Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God's grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren."--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A tremendous outpouring of love and friendship last night and this morning, first at the party at Glenn & Shanti's, and then at church during and after the service--moments of personal contact, gifts that overwhelmed us in their thoughtfulness and generosity, fun times and meaningful times with people who, inadvertently, over the course of the last three years, have become our friends.

What lifts me up most is how utterly unpretension and unintimidated our church family is in the face of the news that I shared with them only two weeks ago. If I were to try to explain how to treat someone facing a terminal disease, I would point to this group of people. They make no effort to come up with the right thing to say, or to steel themselves against what could be a painful or awkward encounter. They just treat me like the person I've always been, sharing in both the sorrow and the joy that is a part of every day that I walk this path, and taking whatever risks are involved in being a friend to another person and expecting that person to continue being a friend in return.

Let me offer two examples. After the party last night, I spoke for a while with Glenn Molina, our worship director, about the future of my involvement in the worship band. A week ago, unable to get out of bed, I had to bow out at the last minute from playing guitar for the service, and I can't promise that the same thing won't happen again in the future. As we spoke, it was clear that this was a sad thing to have to discuss at all, but also that was surmountable. Most of all, it was clear that Glenn felt no need to tiptoe around frank and practical discussion of my health and future, no fear that our conversation would go off a cliff if everything weren't worded with utmost delicacy. This to me is a mark of friendship.

Then after church today, Robert DeVaugn came over to ask how I was, and we wound up visiting for about half an hour. As always, Robert emitted the kind of innocent goodness of a man with no need to change reality into something other than what it is. He asked a couple of questions related to how all the news of the last month has sat with me, how Karla & I are working through things, what kinds of mental and emotional processes I'm going through--questions that most people would be afraid to ask, and whose answers they might not take the time to hear. Again, a mark of friendship.

What most of the people around me have not done--and for this I am grateful--is evade the truth. They have not tried to stuff my story into precut picture of a world in which everything works together and makes sense. They haven't offered cheesy suggestions as to how to turn this into a good situation. They haven't avoided me for fear of saying the wrong thing. If you start crying in front of me, if you try to say something encouraging and it comes out wrong, if you ask me a question that is personal enough that I'd rather not answer it, I will still know that this is an expression of friendship. But evasion is just wrong.

My friends, I'm finding, are those whose hearts and imaginations are large enough to make room for tremendous sorrow and tremendous joy both at the same time. The coexistence of these two has very much become a part of my own experience. They are so closely interwoven that if you try to exclude the one you exclude the other. Friendship, therefore, entails a willingness to bear sorrow with another, not despairingly, but in the confidence that in so doing you tap into the joy that is still very much a part of this person's life. For me, this is grounded in the knowledge that the Prince of Peace and the Man of Sorrows are one and the same.

grace and discipline

Saying yes to God's grace at the front end of an ordeal and doing so in the midst of the ordeal are two entirely different matters.

This first cycle of chemotherapy has already unleashed a whole arsenal of unexpected side effects: itching, pain and swelling in the feet and legs, inability to sleep, cracked lips, cakey flavor in the mouth, bleeding gums, puffy hands. Most of Sunday I spent in bed because nerve damage in my feet made it impossible for me to get up without feeling like I was walking on hot broken glass. I usually anticipate suffering with a fair amount of bravado, but the truth is I don't suffer well. By Monday I was fairly certain that if this was what it would mean to continue on chemotherapy, I would rather quit treatments and take my chances.

Se incurvatus in se. The self turned inward upon the self. It is one of the clearest descriptions of how we live our lives and how we turn ourselves into slaves. The temptation is to look at suffering as a free pass to become as self-focused as one chooses, permission to see nothing beyond one's own hardship. But this misses the point. Self-pity, self-absorption, envy, resentment--these are not just harmless peccadillos, they are mortal enemies. They empower death before its time and blind us to the freedom that we've been given in this very moment. To repent of the inward turn upon oneself--to turn outward with the Spirit of Christ into the world--is not a moral obligation. It is the key to survival.

I don't know whether future cycles will be harder or not. My body might be responding to the sudden shock of medications which it will accept more easily next time around, or the effects might accumulate from one cycle to the next. But I am becoming aware that at every step I will face anew the decision between two opposite directions, either to shut myself in to avoid more pain or to go out and participate in life.

I can't make that decision once for all. It's one that must be renewed daily. But I do think that a few key disciplines will help to shape my character in such a way that I will be better prepared to choose life as the choice presents itself to me:

Going out and exercising. Physical space and spiritual space are closely intertwined. If I willingly keep my body inside, my spirit will suffocate. Realizing that the pain in my feet was not a signal of any real danger but only a trick played by damaged nerve endings, I've decided to continue with my routine of going out and walking in the morning. Today, after about the first half mile, my feet adjusted, and I had a very pleasant time, even if I didn't set any records for pace. Getting out early like that gives me a chance to see the day that God has made, to join the world to whom God gave it, and to give thanks for it.

Devotional reading. The Scriptures invite us to locate ourselves in a story larger than our own. The regular discipline of reading and reflecting on God's acts in the history of Israel, Jesus and the early church continues to play a critical role in orienting me toward the day that lies ahead. I also find myself drawn again to the works of brothers and sisters who have gone before us, including Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Karl Barth, Thomas Merton. In their writings I am introduced to an ancient faith that challenges the modern idolatry of self-fulfillment and individual prosperity. To enjoy fellowship with these members of the Christian community through their written words is a gift not to be taken lightly.

Keeping up with my work. Counter to what one might expect, I am embarking on one of the most fruitful moments in my academic career. In addition to finishing my dissertation, I'm preparing to teach a course at Claremont next semester, working with Deb Flagg on a revision of Fuller's online ethics course, and presenting papers at two meetings over the next three months. The simple act of working on a syllabus, outlining a chapter, or studying for a lecture sends a message to myself that I still have something to give. It reminds me that I still belong to the community of the living. The energy expended on these tasks is an investment that reproduces itself and generates energy for further tasks.

I have no idea what the months or years ahead will look like, and it would be brash to imagine that I've unlocked some secret for handling another day's troubles. But the grace that first invited me to think of myself not as a man dying of cancer but as a man living with cancer has appeared to me again. And this leads me to hope that it will continue to appear to me in the future.

aufhebung

"Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces much fruit."--John 12:24

I’ve been deflecting questions about my choice of the name “Aufhebung” for my blog. Mainly, I’m just embarrassed to admit that I chose it because it sounds cool and cryptic and gives the impression that I know German. Really, though, the word works well to describe my personal life journey, my understanding of theology and of God’s ways in the world, and the moment in life at which I find myself at this moment, so let me offer a few thoughts on it.

The word Aufhebung itself is open to a variety of translations. It can signify an act of lifting something up, removing it, moving it forward, destroying it, transforming it. This ambiguity makes it a handy word for certain philosophical and theological models to describe a process in which something is abolished and then taken up into something greater.

Georg Friedrich-Wilhelm Hegel used the term in the early 1800s to describe a unifying principle at work in history, the dynamic by which an entity—say, a political institution, a scientific theory, an ideology or a shared worldview—comes undone by its own contradictions and inadequacies, and is then reconstructed in a more perfect form (which in turn comes to be negated and reconstructed again, and so forth until history reaches its conclusion). So, for instance, a monarchy is brought down by a revolution and a constitutional republic arises in its place, Ptolemaic astronomy is abolished and reconstituted with the advent of the Copernican model, etc. The word Aufhebung, used in this way, suggests that all historical processes move as they must, advancing steadily toward their consummation.

My own thinking, however, is less Hegelian than Barthian. For one thing, I know virtually nothing about Hegel (which is why I hope that some Hegel scholar out there will jump in to straighten out the previous paragraph—Mike Bonn, are you reading this?). Moreover, what little secondhand knowledge I do have leaves me to wonder whether he gave too much credit to the notion of progress and underemphasized both the reality of societal evil and the distinction between God and human history. If history is progressing, stage by stage, toward its inevitable completion, one might interpret this to mean that existing economic or social inequities reflect not the consequences of choices and actions deliberately carried out to benefit some at the expense of others, but simply the conditions appropriate to a given moment in human progress. Whatever changes need to occur will arise from the processes at work within history. Thus the members of the world’s wealthier groups can justify their status in the name of progress. (It is no coincidence that Hegel himself envisioned the world proceeding steadily toward a climax that looked a lot like his own 19th-century Prussia, or that modern-day Hegelian Francis Fukuyama calls the globalized free market “the end of history.”)

Like Hegel, Karl Barth recognized a pattern of abolishment and reconsistution at work in history. Barth, however, did not consider this pattern an innate law of human progress but the struggle of a gracious God against—and for the sake of—a rebellious race: a struggle in which God enters into human history so as to destroy from the inside every basis of self-justification, every dehumanizing practice and every self-deception, and to elevate humankind into communion with its Creator. Barth saw the reality of evil and the ultimate triumph of grace revealed throughout scripture in a pattern of creation-abolishment-new creation. God creates an innocent world, the world falls into condemnation because of sin, God recreates the world as a place of justice and reconciliation. God gathers Israel as a chosen people, the nation is scattered into exile because of its idolatry, God regathers the nation into a new human community. The Word becomes flesh, is crucified, and is raised from the dead.

To carry this further, Aufhebung describes the impossible task of theology itself, the dynamic created by the fact that to speak about God is at once the thing believers must do and the thing that they must not do. God’s revelation, Barth said, was the “Aufhebung of religion,” the shocking act of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, which overthrows all human conceptions about God. To understand, respond to, and express the meaning of this act is to be confronted repeatedly with the both the importance of Christian doctrine as the repository of truthful interpretations of God’s act in Christ and the inadequacy of doctrine to utter any final word about God. Theology, therefore, is always in dynamic tension, neither able to rest in dogmatic assertions on the one hand, nor in relativistic agnosticism on the other. Rather, we are called to speak faithfully into the demands of the moment on the basis of what we have understood thus far, to trust God to use our expressions in service to the truth, but not to hold onto them as if repetition of these words and actions guaranteed our possession of the truth.

It may not be too much of a jump to suggest that Aufhebung describes a pattern of growth in the lives of individuals or communities. The simple truisms that give order to our lives—that every event fits into a perfect plan, that right is always right and wrong is always wrong, that good things happen to good people, that ours is the greatest country in the world, that every word in the Bible is inspired by God and without error, that if you work hard you will succeed—eventually prove unsupportable and collapse. But to remain in skepticism and relativism is no more acceptable than to hold onto expired absolutes, so we reconsider the affirmations we thought we had left behind and bring them into conversation with new insights, rejecting some of them forever and reclaiming others, but understanding them differently than before.

At least this has been my experience. The small, Bible-believing Baptist churches I attended in high school, college, and young adulthood instilled in me the belief that Christ alone was the way of salvation, and the Bible the Word of God. But, for the most part, they defined faith in a way that made Christ’s trustworthiness contingent on my ability to believe, and they read the Bible with a hermeneutic and a set of foregone conclusion that I felt limited Scripture’s capacity to speak in its fullness. One after another, I began to suspect that the doctrines that we took for granted in the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches—the inerrancy of Scripture, the rapture, the Four Spiritual Laws, the “Roman’s Road” to salvation—actually restricted or even contradicted the hope that they were intended to express. One could say that the separatist fundamentalist tradition into which I was trained and ordained led me away from itself.

But that’s a far cry from saying that I rejected it. I managed for a short time to sustain a picture of myself as clever critic of the dogmas I had grown up believing, but that conceit proved more false than anything that I had left behind. In truth, I am still bound to my former faith communities by the love for Jesus and the Scriptures that they instilled in me in the first place. Nor do I have any desire to uproot the seeds planted in me by people like Tony Loubet, Geraldine Clift, or myriad others whose Christlike spirit could not be reduced to doctrinal affirmations, and who still stand before me as models to follow. So even as I acknowledge a number of major shifts in my thinking over the years, I am also aware of a basic continuity running all the way through. I’m still, at heart, a Bible-thumping Baptist preacher who wants to follow Jesus. Only now I am also shaped by commitments to the ecumenicity of the Body of Christ, the prophetic indictment against socio-economic inequity, and the centrality of nonviolence to Jesus’ mission—commitments that were not emphasized in the churches of my past. Time and again, my understanding of God and the world around me has been abolished only to be lifted up into something greater.

This brings me to the uncomfortable relevance that the word Aufhebung has to my current situation, as I face the knowledge that, sooner than I wish, I myself will be abolished and lifted up. I don’t even know what this means—I don’t think anyone on one side of an Aufhebung can see what lies on the other. But, Barthian that I am, I have to understand it as an event permeated with grace, and therefore not something to be afraid of. This is, after all, the event that Jesus calls us to enact day after day as we lay down our lives for the sake of the gospel—that is, as we turn outward from ourselves, relinquish private ownership of our own personal existence, and participate in the life of God for the sake of the world. I won’t say that I’m not afraid—I certainly am—but on some level I know that I need not be. This is perhaps the consummation of every truthful and liberating turn I’ve been granted throughout my life up to this point.

Healthcare as a Moral Issue

"Them thats got shall get
Them thats not shall lose
So the Bible said and still is news"
--Billie Holliday, "God Bless the Child"

The question of healthcare in America—who receives its benefits and on what basis, how one maneuvers one’s way through the system to receive the help one needs—has occupied a great deal of my thinking lately. I’ve been unusually fortunate in this regard, having a wife who knows how health insurance companies operate and a highly responsive referral coordinator with whom Karla has established first-name rapport. Now, on top of everything else, I’ve made it into USC’s medical network, where there is a high degree of communication and coordination between specialists in various fields, and where help really is only a phone call away. Once the system begins to work for you, you just take it for granted and quit asking critical questions about the system itself.

The reality, however, is that in America 21% of all adults, and 12% of all children, have no health coverage whatsoever. Among those living in poverty 45% have no insurance. (This doesn’t count the 31% who are on Medicaid or who receive some other form of public assistance.) In other words, the people who in their healthiest moments struggle to feed themselves and their families are the same ones who have no place to go when they are sick. Furthermore, the data on ethnicity and healthcare belie whatever notion we might have that racism is a thing of the past: blacks are 50% percent more likely than whites—and Hispanics 150% more likely—to be without insurance; the infant mortality rate among blacks is more than double that among whites, and the AIDS rate 9 times higher.

To concede that this is just the way things are, I think, shows a lack of moral imagination. Even more, if we who are the beneficiaries of this imbalance see no point in addressing it, then we are culpable of perpetrating an injustice. If, on the other hand, we will recognize our fundamental solidarity with men and women who, by reason of ethnicity or economic standing, do not have access to decent healthcare, it might awaken our imagination to conceive of a system that isn’t as dominated as ours is by market forces.

Michael Walzer provides a way of looking at this in his book Spheres of Justice. He points out that in any society there will be a complex array of social goods, each distributed according to its own criteria. So for instance, a society might recognize the value of luxuries, which are available to anyone who can afford them financially; education, which is available to whoever shows a basic capacity to learn; appointment to office, available on the basis of personal ability to carry out its duties; participation in the political process, available to whoever meets basic criteria of citizenship; and so forth. Of course, in such a system, all things aren’t distributed equally to all people. Everyone isn’t automatically entitled to the same amount of material wealth; everyone won’t attend the same number of years in school, or hold the exact same job, or attain to the same status of leadership. Inequality itself is not the problem.

The problem comes when inequality in one sphere becomes the basis for inequality in another sphere. To put it another way, when the criterion for distribution in one sphere becomes the criterion for distribution in multiple spheres, we wind up with a pattern in which one group of people can systematically dominate the others. I believe that a laissez-faire approach to the free market produces precisely such a system. Money, which is a perfectly logical criterion for determining who gets to enjoy luxury, becomes also the thing that empowers people politically, guarantees them a better education, opens doors to career opportunities, secures the means of producing more wealth, and gains access to adequate healthcare. Thus, the people who enjoy an abundance of that one social good are thereby in a position to monopolize all the social goods. It’s not enough to stoop to the cliché that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Rather, the rich live longer, gain more political power, attend better schools, receive greater honor in society, and pass their privileges onto their descendant, so that the poor find themselves increasingly hindered from obtaining the most basic goods necessary to live as dignified members of the community.

I’m not an economist, so I’m not qualified to lay out some alternative plan. But as an ethicist and a pastor, I do see it as my task to address people’s moral imaginations at least enough for us to say collectively, “This is not the best we can do.” Perhaps we can begin by debunking the notion that market forces are best left alone, without any kind of political intervention or any underlying commitment to the basic well-being of the community’s least advantaged members. If we have the moral and political will to honor our brothers and sisters who have been excluded from basic human goods, such as adequate health care, and to see to it that they have access to those goods that will enable them to participate fully and healthily in the community, then I believe that we will begin to develop ways to make that happen.

"Why do you ask My name" (redux)

"Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak."--Genesis 32:24

Had my second treatment this morning and my first serious cry this afternoon. Nothing delicate. It was more like a violent fit of vomitting--everything inside forces itself out in convulsions that you can't control, purges itself until nothing is left. And then, for a moment everything's fine, but only for a moment. An undetected holdout lets go from your gut and it begins all over again.

A Christmas letter from friends overseas triggered it: the two of them in London, in Paris. So many things I hoped we'd do together someday....

It seemed like a simple enough request: Just tell me your name. Tell me what--or who--is happening to me. Give back to me some tiny amount of leverage over this situation that you've forced upon me, some handle on it, some easy-to-repeat life lesson that will make this worthwhile (or at least less absurd), something simple to tell people who don't like being shaken too badly.

But the night visitor would grant no such thing. All that's given you to know is this: that you, Jacob--shoulders cracked against the bedrock, leg pulled out of joint--that you are Isra-El, "Prince of God," for you have wrestled with God and humanity and have prevailed.

Hell of a posture for a prince.

the good, the bad and the extremely irritating

"There is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one's lifetime; moreover, that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor--it is the gift of God"--Ecclesiastes 3:12-13

"If a man should live many years, let him rejoice in them all, and let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many."--Ecclesiastes 11:8

I came into this expecting that there would be good days and bad, but that's not quite the case. It's more like good and bad half hours.

I woke up today to a bad one. Over the last two days, an itchy rash has broken out all over my abdomen and shoulders. At around 4:30 this morning it suddenly overpowered the Caladryl I had rubbed on it four hours earlier, producing a sensation similar to that produced by a thousand ants crawling over one's body and chewing at the flesh. Karla had first seen the rash the night before, and made the sensible move of calling Dr. Iqbal, so I was able to get in to see her by nine. She'll probably put me on a steroid, but she wants a dermatologist to see me first, so I'll need to go in tomorrow.

From Dr. Iqbal's office, I drove out to Claremont to meet with Roland Faber, dashing manically into a shopping center restroom in West Covina to slosh on a fresh coat of Caladryl along the way. The meeting itself was an absolute pleasure. The ethics course I'll be teaching at Claremont beginning next month is to form a unit with his theology course, so we'll be working closely together over the next semester. I went into this first meeting aware (and intimidated by the fact) that he is unusually intelligent and comprehensive in his grasp of systematic theology, but was caught off guard to discover his warmth and the utter ease of being with him. I stuck around on campus to work on my syllabus and reading list, not noticing until I got home that the itching had not broken out the entire time. Interesting thing: I'm finding that productive work on something you love and want to give to the world has a certain therapeutic power of its own.

Another slathering of Caladryl before going to bed. This time the effect wore off after just two hours. The flesh-eating bugs were back, and with them a new awareness of a couple of minor sores on my lips and fingers, and increased swelling in my legs. I'm switching to Sarna cream for the remainder of the night to see if it works any better. In a few minutes I'll take another Benedryl and go back to bed.

But first I'm here, because if I restrict my blogging to the times when I'm physically comfortable it won't be a truthful account of this part of my life. And what do you know--the effort of writing about it has helped to make to make it manageable. I've nuked a mug of warm milk for myself, something I almost never do, but which has proven to be a remarkably good idea. So even this isn't a total waste.

se incurvatus in se

I felt it Thursday evening, and again, more strongly, Friday morning--that psychosomatic turn inward toward self-pity. I realize that the term "self-pity" sounds more censorious than I intend here, but I think it is the most accurate name for what I experienced, and if I can name it I might be better equipped to roll with it when it occurs.

For me, it usually happens when physical discomfort exacerbates whatever mental stresses I might otherwise be able to deal with or at least suppress. By Thursday, I may have been able to rise above my dread of going in for my first treatment the next morning were mental angst the only issue I had to contend with. But my body tends to retain water, so the enormous amounts of fluid I had consumed the day before in preparation for the colonoscopy had upped my weight by about eight pounds, most of which I was carrying around in my swollen legs and abdomen. I became irritable and sluggish, and I couldn't hold a thought long enough to finish a sentence.

By Friday, much of the irritability had subsided, but I could concentrate on little else than the knot in my stomach. Our meeting with Dr. Iqbal was mostly upbeat. The week's tests had not turned up anything new. Yes, I'm in stage 4, but we already knew that, and within stage 4 there's still room for things to be much worse than they actually are in my case. (How about that--I'm among the healthier specimens in my demographic.) Steroids, which were probably the main culprit in the mood swings I experienced in 1987-88, will not be a part of the treatment this time. The anti-nausea medications would probably not make me drowsy, so I should be able to drive myself to and from treatments in the future. And my schedule (a three-week cycle with chemo on two consecutive Fridays and the third Friday off) should be flexible enough to allow for travelling once they've seen how I respond over the next couple of months.

That this was all positive was not lost on me, but the long wait between the doctor appointment and my being called into the room where I would receive the first treatment was unbearable all the same. Allowing someone to inject an IV into my arm and begin sending gemcitabine into my bloodstream constituted a point of no return, the first irreversible admission that we actually believe what the test results are telling us. I should point out that the treatment itself was remarkably painless. I sat in a large easy chair for two hours, read the paper, enjoyed a sandwich and 7-Up brought to me by a wonderfully good-natured volunteer. Even the injection and removal of the needle were carried out skillfully enough that I hardly felt them. Karla was there with me, and I was grateful not to have faced the first treatment alone.

But the knot in my stomach stayed with me the whole time and into the evening, even after we got together with our dear friends from Seattle, Dwayne and Denise, and their newborn, Kyla. It was similar to how I've felt in the past when I've had to leave for a social event in the middle of a quarrel with Karla, or anticipated a meeting to address a conflict that I've preferred to ignore: a kicking in my stomach reminding me that, no matter how much I should be able to enjoy my current surroundings, something is not right, something that won't be resolved until I face it head-on, but which is not there for me to face at this moment.

By today it was gone. I was up making omelets for our guests as I've done hundreds of times before, enjoying breakfast out on our balcony, with its view of the San Gabriels, and heading off together for an afternoon at the Huntington.

There will be moments like this, but I think that stepping outside them and reflecting upon them is a healthy exercise. Viktor Frankl has described how his imagination liberated him from the power of his Nazi captors: by imagining himself describing to students his experiences of torture and deprivation he was able to conceive of himself as something other than a victim, and this enabled him to respond to his surroundings in a manner that reflected his deepest values, and not simply to react to the awful things being done to him.

Martin Luther used the phrase se incurvatus in se, the self turned inward upon the self, to describe the essence of sin, and I believe he was correct in this. Unfortunately, so many modern understandings of sin are shaped by moralistic preaching and scolding, by the use of the word to justify the marginalization of those whose actions fall outside the moral codes of the upper classes and to cover up the systemic injustices perpetrated by ostensibly upright people, that its theological richness is lost on us. Sin is not a label to place on the shirts of bad boys and girls before sending them off to sit in the corner. It is the alienation and brokenness common to human existence, the unconquerable self-interest that makes us at once victims and victimizers, the barrier standing between ourselves and one another, which we don't even realize that we ourselves have erected. Sin is the place where Christ meets us, the place from which, small step at a time, he liberates us, as he leads us into repentance, reconciliation with our enemies, love toward those who are not like us, solidarity with creation, and peace with a future that we cannot control.

If I can understand sin in this sense--if I can acknowledge it not only when I am intentionally behaving badly toward someone else, but even when suffering brings to the surface the degree to which I am still turned inward upon myself--then it becomes a word filled with hope. For it represents the very thing that Christ has overcome, the dimension to human existence whose power has been called into question. If I can step back and see my own self turned in upon itself, and know that that inward turn no longer represents my truest self, then I know that I am still on a journey into life.