con patienti

Without mud you cannot have lotus flowers. Without suffering, you have no way to learn how to be understanding and compassionate.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

Bear one another's burden's, and in this way fulfill the law of Christ.

--Galatians 6:2

The English word compassion comes from a Latin phrase which translates literally into "suffering together." It has less to do with virtuous condescension from one's place of comfort to show kindness to someone less fortunate than with profound and existential solidarity with suffering humanity. To show compassion requires a personal, nonresistant encounter with pain.


This, of course, calls immediately for a number of clarifications. The first is that there can be no general principle explaining the meaning of suffering or prescribing how one should respond to it. All pain is not the same. More often than we know, one person's misery is the result of another person's injustice--physical and mental abuse, imbalances of social and economic power, negligence on the part of wealthier nations toward the poverty and violence that their habits of consumptions create in other parts of the world. This kind of suffering must never be glossed over with platitudes about God's mysterious ways or the power of individuals to create their own realities. It must always be exposed for the evil that it is, fought against and vehemently protested.

On the same note, I do not believe that suffering comes from God or stems directly from some divine purpose. Pain is not good, even though it is redeemed. It is an aberration, one that, like sin itself, finally bends to the liberating work of Christ in the world, but an aberration all the same.

For this reason, I am all for using of whatever truthful means are available to alleviate it. There is, of course, no wisdom in pursuing or holding onto pain for its own sake. When my body suffers, you'd better believe I intend to do something about it.

Fourth, I do not mean to suggest that those who have suffered serious personal injury, illness, loss or hardship thereby possess some special virtue that others do not. These experiences can harden us as easily as they can soften us. Besides, those who are not hit with their own individuals tragedies can and often do step willingly into the experiences of others and bear their burdens alongside them, almost as if they were their own.

Having said this, I can't escape the fact that I and virtually everyone I know live in such privilege and comfort that the ease of our existence no longer strikes us as exceptional. Such lives are breeding grounds for self-absorption. Keeping one's own good fortune undisturbed tends to become too high a priority, and this, frankly, makes us bad citizens of the world. The distance between shutting out awful experiences and shutting out the people and realities that make us vulnerable to such experiences is short.

In this morning's sermon, George mentioned that when Michelangelo produced his David, he is reported to have seen the sculpting already in a raw slab of marble, and then chiseled away whatever wasn't David. I have no idea whether there is any basis for the story, but it applies well to the question of suffering. Sometimes affliction chips away at complacency so that one's truest self can come to the surface.

I keep hitting up against this paradox, that joy and sorrow exist inside each other. They are not parallel to each other; at least according to the Christian faith we are moving toward a day when the one will finally swallow up the other. But for now, truthful engagement with the world produces both. The Man of Sorrows and the Prince of Peace--the Crucified and the Risen One--are one and the same. I know a number of people who understand this, and it is a source immeasurable comfort to be able to talk openly with them--sometimes with overwhelming fear, and sometimes with no fear at all--about the awful reality that confronts us.

No, there is no value in obsessing over the pain in the world or in one's own life, but sometimes you can't ignore it without deceiving yourself. When that's the case, the best thing may simply be to lean into it.

twists and crashes

Been a hectic and challenging several days out this direction. To begin with, on Friday evening my laptop crashed, and I was unable to reboot. After several sessions with Dell tech support over the next 24 hours, it became clear that my hard drive needed either repair or replacement. Until now, I've been one of those PC users who think to back their files onto a CD every year or so, if at all, so by bedtime Friday I found myself wondering what I might do with the rest of my life now that my dissertation was gone forever. In addition, I assumed that a new hard drive, if it came to that, would cost several hundred dollars, so whatever my future looked like, it may not include having access to my own computer for a while.

Tony Nguyen, in northern Pasadena, runs Connectionz PC Repair out of his home. On a number of online ratings pages, normally dominated by computer-savvy consumers eager to complain about the repair (dis)services they've endured, Tony has consistently received high makrs from throngs of satisfied clients throwing palm leaves in his path. I gave him a call. He was friendly, professional, and able to explain things clearly with none of the annoyed techie condecension I've encountered so many times in the past. Less than 24 hours later, he has already retrieved all my files, and is now working to see what kind of repairs need to be done to get my laptop up and running again. Very worst case scenario, the whole operation should cost less than a fourth of what I had feared.

It would be unprofessional for me to throw my arms around him and sob, "love you, man!" So I'm letting it go with a check and a handshake. But he relies entirely on word-of-mouth for business, so there. He's getting mine.

Meanwhile, rising summer temperatures have created new problems balancing out fluid retension and blood pressure. The heat causes my body to retain more fluids than usual (not to mention that it just makes me thirstier), and exacerbates the drop in blood pressure when I use diuretics to flush the excess fluids out. The problem has not reached anything like those that drove me into the hospital 3 months ago, but I have to stay on closer watch than usual to make sure it doesn't. Most days, I do alright until about 6pm, and then I tank. I suppose fixing supper has something to do with it.

The real news, however, is that on Monday my oncologist went over the results of my latest CT-scan with me. It turns out that in the last 2-3 months, all of the tumors have grown slightly. This is not as alarming as sudden massive growth, but significant enough to raise the question whether I need to change treatment plans. Within less than a year, aggressive cancers typically learn how to resist the drugs sent out to fight them, so we've known all along that I would eventually have to switch to an alternative to the gemzar-xeloda treatment I've been receiving. The next option woud entail wearing a pump for a couple of days every two weeks, going in for slightly longer injections, and receiving a medication that would cause me to react to cold drinks. (The last part actually troubles me more than the other two.) The plan for now is to keep me on Gemzar & Xeloda for a couple more rounds, then then take another scan to see whether I've reached my turning point.

The news has served as another reminder how little I can predict my future. What began as "I'll be okay as long as I have another 3 or 4 years left," and slowly evolved into "just let me make it for a while beyond graduation," and into "let me see another Christmas, another Easter, another jacaronda season," is now best expressed, "Give us this day..." In light of my propensity to obsess over things I don't know, this is not an entirely bad place to be.

personal update

I'm pleased to say that last Saturday night, through the mercies of God and Ambien, I slept like a rock for about 10 hours. Through the first part of the week, I pulled off a couple more very good nights' sleep (med-free, thank you very much, but taking advantage of an over-the-counter melatonin supplement). There have a few bad nights since then, and a general sense of fatigue throughout, but today I'm enjoying a pretty high level of energy for the first time in nearly a month--the kind of energy that, for a change, doesn't dissipate after 20 minutes of washing the dishes or folding laundry. In fact, Karla & I have put in quite a full day today, and not until late into the evening did I begin to feel noticeably drained.


But I've discovered something troubling in all this: recently I don't have the same kind of peace or courage that I had a few months ago in the face of my situation. I still maintain a fair amount of cheerfulness throughout the day, when my coping mechanisms are strong enough to keep unpleasant thoughts at a distance, but in the night I know that I am afraid, that I resent every reminder of my prognosis, that my efforts to plan the shape of any future day without regard for its unpredicted setbacks and limitations are built on an illusion. Six months ago, I found strength in looking realistically at the fact that I had an incurable disease, that I would face a difficult struggle for the rest of my life, and that I could take nothing for granted. This was the truth, and those who believe in a loving and trustworthy Being at the core of all reality need not fear the truth. Now I find strength in not thinking about it. A false strength.


There are two interpretations of this, both valid and perhaps complementary. On one level, the pressures of completing my dissertation in time to graduate next year, coupled with disturbances in my sleep patterns, have pulled me away from the kinds of mental, spiritual, physical and relational activities that renew my faith and my openness toward the world on a daily basis. If I am to carry through what I have set out to accomplish, I can't float passively from one day to the next, working when I feel good and not working when I don't. I have to exercise control over my schedule, and as the combined effects of chemotherapy and heart damage wrest that control out from my hands, I become obsessed with getting it back. This obsession, in turn, infringes upon every other dimension of my life--and certainly contributes to my insomnia.


On another level, my ability to face my situation has not really changed that much since six months ago. I'm just a few steps further down the path, and I know things experientially now that I could only envision abstractly then. I'm no longer imagining but traveling the often exhausting journey of living with cancer. The peace that sustained me over Thanksgiving and Christmas is maturing, a difficult process that calls for confrontations with new challenges, new fears, and a deeper kind of trust than I've had before.

Either way, this is a wake up call. I can't put off serious reflection on my inner disposition. This isn't about some abstract moral responsibility to maintain a positive attitude or keep a stiff upper lip (God save us from such pretensions). It is about staying physically, spiritually and relationally alive. The faux peace preserved by diverting my attention from things that don't go away will destroy me in the end. There is real, life-giving peace to be found in honest acknowlegdement, wrestling with God, and learning again to trust.

Not surprisingly, talking it through in this post has taken me a huge step in the right direction. As I've been discovering all along, keeping an online journal has played a role in my own well-being, beyond whatever benefit it may bring to others. (So yes, Greg, I will continue blogging as much as time and energy allow, dissertation be damned.)

round 7

If I say, "Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, and the light around me will be night,"

Even the darkness is not dark to You, and the night is as bright as the day.

Darkness and light are alike to You.

For you formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother's womb.

--Psalm 139:11-13

My friend, you belong to God. Let this reality color you entire life.

--St. Vincent de Paul

Yesterday, I took my last Xeloda for this round, so I'm off chemo for the next nine days.

Usually, each round begins on a Monday, with me receiving a 2-hour injection of Gemcitabene and taking my first pill. I go on to take a pill a day through Friday and get Saturday and Sunday free. The following Monday, I go back for a second injection and begin, for the next 5 days, to take my oral medication. I take week 3 off to regain my strength, and then begin the next round the Monday after that. I've generally found that the days following the second injection are my most difficult, and this past week has been no exception.

My biggest problem this week has been my utter inability to fall asleep. Since Monday, I've slept for less than 3 hours each night. I simply do not have the strength to endure this much longer. I've wandered through yesterday and today in a languorous, mentally necrotic state that I'm sure will only worsen if I don't manage to get a full 8 hours of shut-eye sometime soon.

Intertwined with sleeplessness is a lurking sense of fear, sadness and exhaustion that stays hidden from my consciousness most of the day, but has recently come to haunt me in the hours that I spend awake at night. In the last couple of days, it has metastacized, so to speak, into my mornings and evenings as well. The two seem to feed off each other: fatigue from sleeplessness making me more vulnerable to destructive powers, and the feelings of fear and sadness making it that much harder to get to sleep. This pattern, moreover, has messed up my daily routine enough to keep me from the disciplines that normally serve to turn my attention toward the Holy Spirit's gracious presence within me and all of creation, and to center my soul on that foundation--such habits as meditation, morning exercise, and diligence in my work. In the last couple of nights, I've gotten out of bed to pray and to meditate on a few Psalms, and this has proven a source of comfort to me. But I have to admit that this is more out of desperation than fixed habit. It's a bandaid, but it does little to establish a solid Godward disposition.

My life belongs to God, and in the end I have to cling to the promise that our Parent will not give us more than we can bear. But I do hope to get some serious sleep sometime soon.