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.