aufhebung

difficult decisions

2007-08-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

"All flesh is as grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.

The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;

Surely the people are grass.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever."

--Isaiah 40:6-8

"I will give full vent to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.

I will say to God, "Do not condemn me; let me know why You contend with me!"

--Job 10:1-2

Karla & I met with Dr. Iqbal 2 weeks ago to decide upon our future course of action. It appears that I am no longer responding to my current chemo regimen. Plan B would involve numerous horrendous side effects in exchange for, according to medical data, 2 or 3 extra months. We have decided, for the time being, to stop chemo altogether and remain in the loop for promising clinical trials. We can always change our minds and go back onto chemotherapy.

The most difficult aspect of this is not that, from a scientific perspective, the 4-5 years I had hoped for now looks like something much shorter. Science does not always account for the possibilities of divine power through the prayers of one's faith community, not to mention the unique capabilities of each human body. Moreover, new breakthroughs in cancer research appear all the time, so who knows what could happen? The diificult part, rather, is that I have now begun to feel the physical effects of the tumors growing in my body.

In particular, I have developed ascites, a condition in which the liver produces and retains excess fluids. This makes it difficult to breath and places tremendous strain on my back muscles. (More than one mother has told me that I look and sound as if I were pregnant.) Every 4 or 5 days, I go to the hospital for a paracentesis, a procedure that usually draws 2-4 liters of fluid off my gut. I suppose one major consideration that would cause me to go back onto chemotherapy would be to learn that it could probably reverse this condition. We'll meet with Dr. Iqbal again next week to discuss this further.

I've also begun to come to terms with something that I've managed to hide from myself for a while: that I am struggling with some degee of depression. It's not that I sit around feeling depressed, but I do experience many of the symptoms normally associated with depression. I don't sleep well at night. The dark humor that I used to enjoy so much in the past now bothers me on a deep level. It's more difficult than before to read reports on Iraq, global warming, or political and economic oppression. Even in fiction, depictions of physical or emotional harm to human beings have become very painful to read or watch.

Here again, I find Job, the Psalms, and the Prophets so comforting. In addition to their cries for justice, words of praise and thanksgiving, theological reflections, and visions of a better future, the authors often express their fears and even despondency over the fates of their own bodies. God honors their most intimate emotions and embraces them into the divine breast.

What can I say? The question "how are you doing" is simply more complex than it sounds.

The Madman of West Covina

2007-08-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

The more we learn to allow others to speak the Word to us, to accept humbly and gratefully even severe reproaches and admonitions, the more free and objective we will be in speaking ourselves.

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Father, into Your hands I commit my spirit.

--Luke 23:46

Prologue—The Star Patient

Over the last month, I have undergone the strangest, darkest journey of my entire life. I plan to describe it in all its darkest detail, so I recommend that if there are kids under about 15 or 16 years of age, parents check it out first to decide whether they consider it appropriate reading.

The story begins on Tuesday, July 17. Having experienced critically low blood pressure levels for the previous 2 weeks, I finally collapsed in the elevator on my way up to our condo. At that point, I was taken to Huntington Memorial Hospital, which, unfortunately, our HMO does not cover. The next night, I was transferred to Queen of the Valley in West Covina. Let me say from the beginning that QV has perhaps the best ICU unit I have ever been to—something I attribute especially to the overwhelming care and attention I received from the nurses: RZ, Paula, Sharon, and Leslie.

The doctors, on the other hand, dragged me through hell during my first several days. To begin with, at least half of them were named Dr. Patel, an Indian name, suggesting a way of doing things that I would not understand. Nephrologist Dr. Shah kept telling me to sprinkle salt on my meals (a flavor I’ve honestly come to loathe), since he wanted to elevate my sodium levels. The wonderful oncologist Dr. Klein, whose Bronx roots I immediately identified, took time to explain to me in detail what was happening inside my body, as my abdomen began to fill up with fluids, and my groin swelled to at least 10 times its normal size.

The nurses called me their Star Patient, since it is such a rare treat to receive a patient who can actually communicate with them. I soaked it up. I find that during my first days in ICU I am an abnormally pleasant person, since it really does feel a bit like a retreat from everyday life.

The First Cracks

Within only 2 days, the utter absurdity of my situation began to set in. That morning, I felt equally certain that the ICU had helped me as much as it possibly could and that nobody intended to release me in the near future. Mom & Lynne had flown in for the day, and they & Karla had gone to grab some supper. In their absence, it occurred to me that the story would come full circle when the doctors determined that, although I was now in perfect health, I had become a menace to society and could not be released to the public. I sat for over an hour tuned in to a classical music station cracking up with laughter, like Inspector Dreyfuss at the end of The Pink Panther Strikes Again.

The next day, Dr. Shah came by for his 45 seconds to ask how I was feeling and repeat his daily admonition to sprinkle salt on my food. To describe my current condition, I used a couple of 4-letter words, and blamed it on him for giving me medical advice that utterly ignored my history and keeping me in the hospital after he and the others should have sent me home. (Karla later assured me that this was a terrible strategy for anyone hoping to go home in the near future.) I felt certain that staying in the hospital at this point could only make me worse, restraining my body from the kind of free-range exercise needed if it were to continue healing itself.

That night, I slipped into an infantile state into which I would pull out only sporadically for the next couple of days. Sharon, the nurse, came to check on me, and I was bawling, saying that I couldn’t let Karla see me like this, and asking whether I would go to hell for what I said to Dr. Shah. Later in the night, well past midnight, the same older man smelling of alcohol as every night came to empty my garbage. I asked him as well, “Do you think I’ll go to hell for using dirty words?”

“Uh, no sir,” he said, “I don’t think so.”

I continued, “Every night you come in here to clean out my garbage. You’ve been such a good friend to me.”

“Just doin’ my job, sir.”

Descent into Hell

Monday night, I was at last transferred out from ICU and into a hospital unit. On the way over, I inexplicably blacked out. When I came to early Tuesday morning, I found myself in a primitive looking room with a Catholic Crucifix hanging on the wall and 2 young Latino women bringing me ice water, one of them praising me for reading the Bible and reminding me that God always answers when we pray. I had been transported back into a 19th-century convent, into a Graham Greene novel. The myth was destroyed moments later, when the door swung open to the hallway and yanked me back into a 21st century facility.

Later that morning, the transporters took me into the lab where Dr. Molinet was to administer the paracentesis. The nurse soon informed me that there would be no such procedure that day, since the meds I had received made me an unsafe candidate. She walked away, and I sat, trapped in the dark, for the next 45 minutes. They stuck me right under the Patient’s Bill of Rights document, so that I could read their guarantees for patient participation making decisions, respectful treatment, and speedy recovery, all violated. They made me their victim.

The next morning, I woke up and went into the restroom, as I did every morning. That was the last thing I remember. When I came to at 11:30, I only knew that I had no memory whatsoever of what had transpired.

Apparently, the darkest corner of my id had broken off and taken over the rest of my person. (I knew this only because, somewhere in the course of those 4 hours, I had pulled the surgically implanted PICC-line out from my arm.) I remained lucid, if a bit confused, for half an hour or so, and then slipped back again for the afternoon.

I retain dreamlike images of what I said and did during that time. I remember thinking of myself as a philosopher, condemned to find out “why” when there is no “why,” and repeating incessantly “I don’t mean cause anyone any trouble, but I do.” I remember a string of people rotating past my bed—my nurse, my CPN, the Blond Person Whom I Want to Make Happy—and each time she entered the room I said, “I don’t mean to make you sad, but I do.”

By this time, Deb Flagg had shown up, so the 3 of us went outside to eat supper. Karla tells me that I didn’t eat much, but spent the entire time repeating in a loud Borat imitation, “I don’t mean to cause any trouble, but I do!” Soon Murray came, more amused than frightened by my display of insanity. As the 4 of us visited outside, Karla commented on the swelling in my legs. I reportedly responded, in the same Borat voice, “But one leg…,” as I reached toward my grotesquely swollen groin and began to pull off my sheet. The Blond Person Whom I Want to Make Happy persuaded me not to do this.

By nightfall, I had returned to my normal self enough to listen to the horrid stories of what had transpired during the day.

I think I remained fairly stable throughout most of the next day, Thursday, until Eric, Todd and his son Nick showed up late in the afternoon. At about that time, I descended again, this time without the Borat routine, into someone whose hope lay in the promise that one day we would all be taken to Yosemite. I lay in my bed asking to walk down the hallway whose walls were covered with pictures of Yosemite, but barred because the nurses were pumping medications into my arm. When at last they released me, I walked slowly, tracing the outline of the mountain depicted in each picture, and proceeded toward a stairwell from which one could look out a window toward the mountain range.

“Do you know the names of those mountains?” asked Todd, as he stood behind me, holding me steady. I didn’t—some foretaste of Yosemite, I guessed, but not the real thing. Not yet.

In my imagination, family members had been dubbed “in-laws.” I had around me my mother-in-law, my Todd-in-law, my Nick-in-law, and my Eric-in-law. In-laws were the people you could touch, hug, and kiss. You could even remove their caps and touch the tops of their heads. To lose one’s mother-in-law meant to begin to die, so when Todd, Nick, Eric & I went to the elevator to see Eric off, and Mom stayed back at the door to my room as it receded into the distance, I knew that I would die soon and go to Yosemite. I would have liked Eric to join me there someday, but he didn’t believe in Yosemite.

As Eric stepped onto the elevator, someone mentioned the name of our niece Kelly. It occurred to me that Kelly should have been with us. The fact that she wasn’t suggested that she was already waiting for us at Yosemite.

I don’t think Eric believes in Kelly, either.

Once we had returned to my room, family members all left, but I had more to do. At some point, I got up from my bed, walked out of my room, and wandered down the hall toward the stairs and elevators. The nurses caught up with me in time to prevent me from entering, but, as it turns out, the madman has about 10 times the strength of my normal self. It required 3 nurses and 2 security guards to pull me back from the stairs and force me into my bed, where the awesome sense of liberation I experienced as I wandered the halls and lingered around the elevator and stairway gave way to the realization that I was a crippled oddity, bound to medications by people I neither knew nor trusted.

Once in bed, the madman understood the whole system. The nurses had, at some point in history, gained domination over the rest of us. Now they sat in the halls in their privileged seats behind their computer screens, as people in suits walked freely about and entered the elevator whenever they wished, and we patients in our beds lay hooked up to their medications, powerless against their experiments. Atop the whole sinister system sat the unseen evil force whose name appeared on the dry erase board facing my bed: Dr. Patel.

Home at Last

I remained sane all day Friday, my birthday, and was sent home on Saturday. I had assumed that, having left the hospital, I would experience no more madman episodes. All the visual cues that sent me over the edge were there at the hospital—the dry erase board with the names of my captors, the hallway with exit signs that led to nowhere. But I was mistaken. For several days after my release, the madman continued to resurface. The elevated ammonia level on my brain appears to be the main culprit, and I think we’re getting on top of that. I haven’t had an episode now for about 10 days.

I’ve learned a lot through all this—2 things in particular. One concerns both the importance and the difficulty of Bonhoeffer’s admonition to receive the words that God gives to others. I’ve become quite dependent upon (and resistant to) the instructions and boundaries set up for me by Karla and my mother. I don’t have to tell you how passionately my pride fights back against these invasions of my independence, but this is what it means to say that my life does not belong to myself.

The other concerns the people who keep us tied to the real world. I encountered the madman during a visit to my oncologist, and all the way home I could not convince myself that a real world existed outside the dreamscape of my car. Karla & Mom both assured me that it did, but how good are the assurances of characters within one’s own fantasy? What finally pulled me back were names and faces of people outside the car, people whom I could not now see—Lynne, Todd & Eric, Dad & Carol, Don, Aunt Doris; the Eckardts, the Roes, the Needs & the Lanes from up north; Glenn & Shanti, Deb & Murray from here in LA, and so many others. These are the people, the communities God has allowed me to participate in, who pulled me out from insanity and drew me back into the land of the living.

a quick note

2007-08-14T20:16:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the month-long silence. It's been a bizarre and difficult several weeks, and I am currently working on a rather lengthy post describing my recent stay in the hospital. My energy level is quite low, so I've been unable to spend more than 15-20 minutes at a time writing. For now, I just want to leave a brief message saying, yes, I'm still here, and I'll return with more shortly.

Thank you are for your prayers and words of encouragement.

a burden lifted

2007-07-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain.

In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat--

for he grants sleep to those he loves.

--Psalm 127:1-2

As many of you know, I've been preparing a sermon to preach in German this Sunday at Christuskirche, a small German church in Glendale; and as most of you suspect, mein Deutsch ist nict so gut. Over the last two weeks especially, this has been an all-consuming project and a huge weight on my mind.

Yesterday I spoke with Doris, the church secretary. As it turns out, most of the members speak English more fluently than German, but attend in order to regain and nurture their cultural heritage. On a typical Sunday, the pastor preaches in German while an English translation of the message appears on the overhead. The person who operates the visual equipment told Doris recently that he would be gone this Sunday, so she suggested to me that if I would simply preach in English I would have better luck communicating with the group as a whole and make her job a lot easier. I have gladly complied.

Whatever embarrassment or disappointment this change in direction might bring me is more than atoned for by a sense of utter relief. I really don't see this as a failure. My main goal was to stretch my German skills, and that have I certainly done. By now I have well surpassed any abilities I had a couple of months ago. To prepare and preach an entire sermon in German, however, is still a little further beyond the boundaries that I would be able to cross within the next several days. By now what I want most is to bring the community something instructive and encouraging from the Scriptures and to communicate it clearly, speaking from a place of grace and calm, and not from a place of anxiety. I will do that much better in English. I slept well last night.

Otherwise, I'm having a bit more difficulty than I often communicate. When people ask how I'm doing, I automatically give a response that focuses on the positive and avoid saying too much about the more troubling things that afflict my mind and body. This is not entirely evasive, since being with other people tends to build me up and take my mind off my own problems. The truth, however, is that I badly want to be prayed with and prayed for, to confess my struggles, fears and sins to another human being who will listen, bear them with me, and point me back to Christ. It's not that God hasn't given me an abundance of such friends. I simply tend to hold back from them.

My blood pressure still gets low enough that when I say I'm out of energy I don't simply mean that I feel like taking a nap in the afternoon; I mean that often I can't stand up long enough to do the dishes or vacuum the floor. Moreover, it appears that I may need to change to an entirely different set of drugs, whose known side effects could include an inability to eat or drink anything cold, a particularly formidable scenario in the middle of a Pasadena summer. I'll find out in early August. These things by no means constitute my whole reality. There are times when I feel energetic enough for a brisk morning walk, when I can relax my mind and heart, when any sense of fear or victimization are far away from me. But I do ask for people's prayers. I just don't ask often or candidly enough.

I should clarify. What I absolutely do not need right now are suggestions or words of advice. There is a time to evaluate and fix someone's problems and a time to walk at someone's side in patient and compassionate silence. A time to cure and a time to care. Nor, really, do I need expressions of grief over my situation. The tragedy is not that I am facing a terminal illness. The tragedy is that I exacerbate my situation by becoming so isolated in my work and fighting so hard against my limitations that my daily tasks turn into a ongoing war against my own self. This is my besetting sin, and I've learned from Scripture and experience that the way forward begins with confession to a brother or sister who will listen, pray, and mediate God's grace to me. What I hunger for right now--and what I am so strangely reluctant to ask for--is that kind of human fellowship. And this is what the body of Christ is for.

con patienti

2007-06-23T21:05:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

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.

dissertaphobia

2007-05-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

The moment is here. For the time being, I’m past the low blood pressures and chemo reactions, I’ve wrapped up my responsibilities at Claremont, and my workload facilitating Fuller’s online ethics course is both light and shared with a coworker—the perfect time to be reminded that the idea of actually sitting down and writing a chapter of my dissertation intimidates the daylights out me.

If anyone asks, yes, I’m working on my dissertation. Specifically, I’m writing the chapter on Chris Marshall, author of Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment and a leader in the effort to gain civil rights for the Maoris in New Zealand—but only if you’ll allow me to use the word “writing” figuratively. In reality, I’m looking up resources online, reading & taking notes on articles that Chris emailed to me from New Zealand journals after I had met with him in Dallas four months ago to pick his brain, and checking out books related to the topic of restorative justice. But when I start to write, I suddenly notice that dishes are waiting to be washed, my desk to be organized, and several emails to be answered.

Years ago, in Seattle, a woman who made most of her living writing poetry and short stories gave me this piece of advice: “Step one: apply ass to chair.” In fact, I’ve gotten that far several times. Once seated, however, I’ve found that I am capable of staring at blank screen for well over an hour. Somehow I’ve pulled it together enough times in the last few years to put out several other drafts and papers, and I’m sure it will come back to me. For now, I have to settle for hyperventilating, quaking in my seat and waking up screaming in the middle of the night.

However, on a related topic, I’ve been getting some invaluable assistance on my Trocmé chapter, which will claim the center of my attention in about 3 months. My friend GM Roe, from Seattle, contacted me a couple of weeks ago with an idea that he had been mulling over for a while. He wants to pull together a team of Francophiles, mostly from Bethany Community Church, to help with the translation Trocmé’s unpublished papers and sermons. In addition, he has contracted with a student in Philadelphia to spend a day next week at the Swarthmore Peace Collection locating and photocopying the specific materials I have in mind. Both GM and Glen Stassen had offered to make detours from upcoming trips to the east coast to do the same thing, but now neither of them will need to do that, and we’ll be able to start translating right away.

I suppose with this many people investing themselves this deeply in my dissertation I’d better start writing, panic-stricken or not.

At Semester's End

2007-05-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

Last week, aside from a few incompletes that will straggle in over the summer, my TA & I completed the grading for the ethics course at Claremont. For all practical purposes, my semester there is finished.

It was a wonderful, albeit taxing, experience. The most challenging part for me was to come to terms with my own parochialism. For the last ten years I’ve become so accustomed to standing at the far left fringe of the group that represents the far right fringe of American society that I’ve never thought to ask how I would fare in a more pluralistic setting.

My first inkling that I was no longer in Kansas probably occurred the week we discussed the contemporary relevance of the Sermon on the Mount. I fully expected some debate as to whether or not Jesus’ commands were to be taken at face value, put into practice, applied to secular social concerns. What I did not anticipate was the handful of students who were put off by the notion that Jesus would command us to do anything in the first place. This in turn led to a larger discussion as to whether authoritarian words like Lord, kingdom, obedience or submission held any currency at all for modern day Christians, in light of the ways that such language has been used throughout the church’s history to legitimize patriarchy, colonialism, slavery, and various other forms of domination and social stratification.

I left class a bit discouraged that morning. If in a Methodist school of theology we could not assume a priori that we shared a basic belief in Christ as Lord (and not simply as friend), what was our starting point for further inquiry? Fortunately, our mid-semester break fell on the following week, so I had some extra time to reflect and regain my bearings. I want to be—have to be—attentive to the struggles of those whose subjugation has been justified or ignored by my faith tradition. At the same time, I can’t simply relinquish what I consider a central feature of the Christian confession: that my life is not my own, that I am accountable to Someone who is not in turn accountable to me, that God’s thoughts are higher than mine, that to flourish as a human being requires a subordinate relation to our Creator. To hold to this conviction does not require that I dismiss the criticisms of those who consider it an oppressive worldview. It requires, rather, that I remain attentive to other ways of thinking about Christianity, that I listen to those who might be able to see my ideological blind spots, and that I still speak confidently on the basis of the faith as I’ve known it thus far.

A few of the ministerial students live openly in long-term relationships with partners of the same sex—again, a phenomenon that doesn’t come into play much at Fuller. For the last decade or so, I’ve been moving toward a more embracing posture vis-à-vis homosexuality, a shift inspired in part through research and in part by watching the cruel treatment that the gay pastor of the Old Stone Church in Carnation received from the hands of his local colleagues in the early-mid 1990s. I would still not consider myself “welcoming and affirming”—a position I fear might too quickly excuse us from asking difficult questions about sexual ethics in general. But I am becoming convinced that whatever stand a local church takes on homosexuality must be hammered out in dialogue with the gay and lesbian people within its own sphere of ministry. If we heterosexuals haven’t enough acquaintance with specific homosexuals to listen to them, know their stories, and understand their interpretations of Scripture & theology, I don’t see how we can contribute anything insightful to the discussion.

About two months ago, I stepped out of my teacher role at the beginning of class to tell the students that I would be looking at CT-scan results the next day and to ask for their prayers, since I was unusually nervous at to what I might learn. After class, Marguerite, an older student who had participated in the Civil Rights marches in the 60s, approached me to ask whether I had time after chapel to meet with a few others who wanted to pray with me. About twenty in all, nearly half the class—gay people, liberationists, Unitarians, process theologians, as well as a few who hold to the confessional Biblicism that informs my faith—gathered to lay hands on me, calling on God on my behalf, uttering words of hope and encouragement and specific biblical promises, hugging me afterward, and telling me they loved me and were journeying with me.

Together they embodied an assurance that I’ve held abstractly for several years now: that my faith community is much larger and stronger than I sometimes imagine.

general update

2007-05-14T20:37:00.000-07:00

I can run on depleted energy or I can maintain the workload that I managed to juggle a year ago, but if I try to do both it crushes my spirit as well as my body. In recent weeks, completely contrary to the resolve I brought home from the hospital, I have become increasingly self-absorbed and superficial in my relationships as I have fought to come through with responsibilities at Fuller and Claremont. I've avoided long conversations with friends and family members, and have shared little that would invite others to reciprocate with warmth and openness. No, I haven't turned into a shell or a phony, but I have felt myself turning in upon myself, and that is the very thing I cannot do if I am to live with cancer spiritually and emotionally intact. Se incurvatus in se.

The weekend was good for me in this sense. I had promised Karla that I would do no grading on Saturday so that we could have the entire day together, and I decided to keep my computer off until evening on Sunday. Of course, that doesn't decrease my workload for this week--I still have to turn in the grades for Claremont. But it does help to clear away the stench of slavery that hangs in the air when one struggles under overdue assignment after overdue assignment week after week. Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. This is not simply a religious observance. It's part of the rhythm that keeps us human.

Speaking of the weekend, Karla and I thoroughly enjoyed our dinner cruise off Santa Barbara on Saturday. Of course, anyone who has ever been on a boat with me could have reminded me why a dinner cruise might not have been our best option, but for some reason the taste of supper going two directions within a short space of time did not keep us from having a good time together. An inexpensive chewable before the trip helped me to postpone the inevitable a little longer than I would have otherwise, so we were nearly an hour and a half into the cruise before I felt that grumbling in my gut, which, like a gun brandished in a play, had to go off sooner or later. (Karla, incidentally, has more or less conquered motion sickness altogether, a feat that she attributes mostly to her daily commute on the light rail.)

We decided this morning to postpone chemotherapy until next Monday. It was a smart move. The fatigue and congestion I described over a week ago had grown steadily worse until about Wednesday, and by last night, although it had receded, I still was not over it. The whole point of my two weeks on/one week off routine is to give me enough time to regain strength so that the next round doesn't just kick me while I'm down. That's pretty much what would have happened had we gone ahead with treatments yesterday. Tonight, after stepping out of the shower, it suddenly occurred to me that I finally felt like myself again for the first time in a couple of weeks. I'm not dreading next Monday the way I dreaded going in today.

round 6

2007-05-06T18:29:00.000-07:00

I took my last Xeloda for the most recent round a couple of days ago, and I'm pleased to say that I suffered no significant side effects this time through. I'm now taking about a fifth the amount originally prescribed in December, and it appears, even at that low dosage, to be working. My next round begins a week from tomorrow, so I have a little time off.

I've been awfully fatigued the last couple of days, though, and have been fighting off some congestion, but that, I think is more heart than cancer related. Plus, I taught my last class for the semester at Claremont on Thursday, and I usually have a short crash time at the end of a long high-stress project. By next weekend, I should have most of the bounce back in my step.

At least I hope so. Next Saturday, I'm taking Karla out on dinner cruise off Santa Barbara for our 19th wedding anniversary. She doesn't know that yet, she only knows that I've made some kind of plan for the afternoon and evening. She dislikes day-of-the-event surprises, so I'll probably fill her in on the details in a few days. My secret should be safe for now, since she never reads my blog, as long no one tells her anything before, say, Thursday.

follow-up on collins

2007-05-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to those of you who took the time and trouble to read and respond to my recent post on Francis Collins’ The Language of God. In one response, my friend Greg Crowther (sorry about tacking an “s” to the end of your name earlier) called my attention to Sam Harris and his review of Collins’ book. In light of Harris’ growing popularity and influence, and my own bewilderment as to why he has become such a force in popular thinking, I thought I’d offer a few additional thoughts.

First, I readily concur with Greg that in his recent Newsweek debate Harris comes out much better than his foil, Rick Warren. I’ve developed an appreciation for the social issues Warren has chosen to tackle over the last year, but he is a doer and not a thinker. As a result, instead of challenging Harris’ depiction of religion, and of Evangelical Christianity in particular, he fed right into his stereotypes. Harris got to shoot at mice in a bucket and come off looking adroit. He would not have had as easy a time against a more prepared theologian.

I also think that much of Harris’ critique of Collins is on target (Harris, “The Language of Ignorance,” www.truthdig.com). I agree that Collins embraces C.S. Lewis’ approach to philosophy and theology way too uncritically, and I don’t get his choice of moral law as the phenomenon that begs us to move beyond science into faith. (Recent evidence that the earliest humans flourished and survived not by their ability to kill predators but by their capacity to form communities offers a non-religious scientific basis for attributing moral codes to evolution.) However, throughout most of the article, Harris so grossly misrepresents Collins and builds his case on so many logical fallacies that I have to call him on it. “The Language of Ignorance” relies heavily on the kinds of synecdoches, equivocations and straw men that I’ve frequently come across in his other writings. I generally appreciate someone who can put a solid challenge up against faith, or specifically faith in Christ, but I find Harris’ work disappointing on this front for several reasons.

First, in his review of Collins, Harris neglects to differentiate between scientific conclusions and descriptions of a personal faith journey. Yes, Collins allows his theological imagination to turn to the Trinity when he sees a waterfall divided into three streams, but by no means does he put this forward as a reasoned defense of the faith, as per Harris’ accusation. I’ll grant that Collins goes too far when he contends that belief is more rational than unbelief—there is simply no standpoint sufficiently neutral to allow one to make a claim one way or the other—but the intent of The Language of God seems not to be to prove the faith scientifically, but to invite dialogue between believers and non-believers.

Second, ignoring the manifold interpretations of and responses to the gospel, Harris lumps all expressions of Christian faith into a single easily debunked caricature. He defines it as strict adherence to a flat, literal reading of Scripture, young-earth creationism, intolerance toward other faiths, a dispensational view of the end times, and adherence to apologetic arguments that most theologians have long relinquished. Then he decries those who deviate from this description for inconsistency. Returning to “The Language of Ignorance,” Harris implies that Collins rejects evolution, opposes stem cell research, and appeals to Einstein and Hawking as defenders of the Christian faith. In fact, on all three points, Collins specifically states otherwise. The faith that Harris rejects probably should be rejected; but it is not what I and myriad others embrace as the Christian gospel.

Finally, his appeal to religion’s failures and the evils it has spawned could just as easily (and just as wrongly) be turned against the history of Western science. Yes, we are the people who brought you the Crusades, the Inquisition, and Focus on the Family; and no one can ignore the role that religion has played in justifying genocide, ethnic hatreds, colonialism and terrorism. But before we reject the entire category of religion, we need to acknowledge the role that science has played in many of these same developments. The Tuskegee experiments and the biological tests conducted on Jewish captives during the Holocaust were purportedly carried out in the interests of science; scientific advances have put as at the brink of nuclear annihilation and global environmental devastation; and numerous scientific discoveries have been arrived at in ways that exacerbate the economic disparities between the rich and poor (the tremendous wealth and power centralized in the hands of a few pharmaceutical companies and the use of that influence to protect profits rather than to make their products available the world’s neediest citizens are just one example). Of course, such an argument against science would not hold up. In the first place, like good religion & theology, science is committed to the kind of dialogue and self-criticism that allows it to learn from its failures, to examine the ill effects to which it has been used, and to envision models that contribute more adequately to humankind’s wellbeing. And second, again like religion & theology, the human benefits yielded by science, while they in no way justify its failings, still give us reason to believe that it is a worthwhile endeavor.

As I’ve already said, I appreciate a well thought out argument against the faith. Furthermore, I think that the Christian church has benefited from the criticisms of such thinkers as Hume, Marx, Stanton, Nietzsche, and more recently Gould and Sagan, who have been able to point out its hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, and ignorance of the natural world. I just have trouble placing Sam Harris anywhere near this august company. He hasn’t given me anything to chew on.

back to normal (whatever that means)

2007-04-26T20:48:00.000-07:00

Let me take just a moment to offer a brief update. Three weeks out of the hospital, I have most of my strength back from before. Fluid retention is still an issue, but it is down quite bit from the weeks before I went in. Last Friday, after a 6-week hiatus, I got back onto my chemo regimen, and I've not had any difficulties with side effects thus far. Tomorrow morning, I go in for the second half of this cycle.

With the semester closing at Claremont and the new quarter having started at Fuller, I'm staying plenty busy. This week, I finally finished the revision of Fuller's online ethics course--the one I've been moaning about for the last month or so. Since the quarter has already begun, I've felt a bit like a man running in front of a moving train to lay its rails.

augustine, bonhoeffer and collins

2007-04-16T20:09:00.000-07:00

One of the side benefits of spending ten days in the hospital is that once I had gained a certain level of lucidity I had all day to read. This allowed me to finish an interesting book that Deb & Murray Flagg brought me. The title is The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, and it’s by Francis Collins, who heads the Human Genome Project. I might not have picked this book up for myself, since the title gives the impression of one more attempt to prove the validity of the Christian faith on the basis of scientific evidence, a task that I find highly questionable on theological grounds. However, Deb & Murray had heard the author on a radio interview and rightly surmised that this was not at all what Collins was trying to do. Rather, his book reads more like a confession of faith, a narration of his own journey as the wonders revealed by led him to questions that science could not address, and an invitation to further dialogue between practitioners of science and faith.

In this sense, Collins follows a line of reasoning somewhat like that laid out 16 centuries ago by St. Augustine. In his Confessions, Augustine credits Neoplatonist philosophers for leading him to the threshold of faith, but concludes that ultimate truth can only be found by subjecting himself to God’s self-revelation in Christ and in Scripture and not through human reason. For Augustine, human reason is structured in such a way as to point past itself to what it cannot grasp. When taken to its limit, reason is finally humbled before the realization that the meaning of human existence lies beyond our powers to discern it; it can only be told to us through divine revelation. Specifically, for Augustine, this means that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ reveal to us what we cannot figure out on our own. It seems to me that Collins takes a similar tack: stopping short of suggesting that natural phenomena somehow prove or require God’s existence, he nevertheless finds himself, having mastered his field of scientific study, filled with a sense of awe that compels him to believe in what he cannot prove and to find in the Scriptures knowledge that transcends scientific inquiry.

In the 1940s, German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer approached the subject from a different angle. His approach will help to highlight my main criticism of Collins’ book. Writing from a Nazi prison cell as he faced his imminent execution, he postulated that the world had “come of age,” that is, reached a stage of development in which religion was no longer necessary to explain the workings of nature and human community, and in which we could no longer assume that God would powerfully intervene to make all things well. Moreover, for Bonhoeffer, this was a good thing in terms of Christian theology: “Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world’s coming of age outlined above, which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness” (Letter and Papers, 361).

It’s not that Bonhoeffer is particularly enthused about the “world come of age”—it is, after all, the developed world that produces the Holocaust and the war that is destroying Europe—rather, by virtue of its sheer godlessness, the world that has outgrown religion makes visible God’s true character. God is not the divine fixer who occasionally pops out of paradise to solve our personal problems, but the humbled and rejected Lord who enters fully into the social affairs of a secular world and suffers under its evils. The path of Christian discipleship, in this model, is to engage patiently and painfully in the life of the world, to side with the victims of oppression and exclusion, and to embody the hope of true human community in an often dehumanizing world.

Like Augustine, Bonhoeffer takes humanity’s highest achievements and possibilities as the point of departure from which we enter into faith. But he adds the dimension that this faith specifically takes the form of following Jesus in his weakness and suffering with Jesus the evils that humans are capable of inflicting upon one another.

This takes me to one of my two main hesitations concerning Collins’ book. The God he describes is the God depicted in mainstream European theology from the fourth century to the middle of the twentieth: a majestic, powerful God who reigns sovereign over all things, makes them well and maintains them in their right order. This portrayal works well among relatively wealthy and comfortable societies, and suggests that developments beneficial to the members of such societies are expressions of divine benevolence—not necessarily an unbiblical view, but an incomplete one. It lacks another important characteristic of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, that ours is a God who suffers, who willingly and patiently endures the chaos of a not yet fully redeemed creation.

As theologians have attempted to make sense of the enormous destruction and violence that humans have inflicted upon one another at various times and places over the last hundred years, and as the voices of faith communities comprised of the victims of economic deprivation, political persecution, and ethnic scourging have come to the fore, this side of God’s character has gained more attention. That it could go missing from Collins’ picture of God is, to me, a serious weakness in his book. It may also correspond to a frequently heard criticism of the Human Genome Project in general: that for the sake of genetic diseases, which constitute the main health concerns in developed countries, it siphons resources away from such matters as malnutrition and infectious disease, which are of more immediate concern to the members of underdeveloped countries.

My second hesitation has less to do with the book itself than with its reception among Evangelicals, with whom Collins seems to identify. He rightly foresees that many will reject his book outright for his acceptance of evolution, but this doesn’t matter to me. My concern has to do with those who will embrace his book. Specifically, I fear that they might make the same mistake that we have made with C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity for the last fifty years: that we will confuse a defense of the faith with the content of the faith.

In the 1950s, Lewis demonstrated the rationality of the Christian faith, and many appreciative readers let it end at that. Christian faith and practice consisted of little more than any well bred post-War Englishman would have come up with on his own: love for God and county, love for one’s fellow human being, chaste moral behavior, obedience to existing laws, circumspection, patience, modesty—not too different from the picture of Christianity one now gains from Collins. But our faith is more than that. It looks specifically to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, to his roots in the Hebrew prophets, and to the practices of the early church. From these sources it draws a subversive force, one that resists existing political and economic structures, and names the ways that they rob humans of their dignity, destroy community, deface creation, and limit our capacity to love one another. In Jesus it discovers an ethic that overcomes evil not with force but with truthfulness and forgiveness, and that loves enemies even at the risk of death. It would be difficult to derive this kind of ethic from The Language of God.

For all that, I consider it well worth reading. Collins wisely distances himself from such past apologetics missteps as appealing to God fill in the gaps that science can’t explain (a strategy that consistently breaks down when natural explanations are discovered for previously unexplained phenomena), and he rejects the “Intelligent Design” argument, a variation on that strategy which argues that evolution can’t account for nature’s “irreducible complexity,” and that therefore the world must have come into being through deliberate divine intentions. Instead, he offers the simple testimony that, for him, the awesome beauty and intricacy of the natural world led him to faith in the Christian God, and that this faith need not be seen as enemy or hindrance to serious inquiry into the nature and mechanics of the created world.

(P.S. Greg Crowthers, Ben McFarland, and Daniel Phillips, I would especially welcome your responses, since I’ve no doubt that you’re all familiar with Collins’ book and have probably put some thoughts into its scientific and/or theological merits.)

home, and almost out of the woods

2007-04-07T08:54:00.000-07:00

"Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine!
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
And through the rivers, they will not overflow you.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, nor will the flame burn you.
For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior."
--Isaiah 43:1-3

I do not know how to express adequately the tremendous gratitude I owe to so many of you who prayed, visited, sent notes and flowers, helped to disseminate information and in countless other ways gathered around Karla and me over the last two weeks to carry us through this very unusual experience. Mom & Don, who came down from San Jose to offer whatever services they could, and to be a calming presence in the hospital room; Glenn & Shanti for sending out daily updates; Deb & Murray for coming by daily with an instinctive sense for what to say and how long to stay; our church community at Altadena Baptist, who so thoroughly surrounded us with prayers, visits, and acts of kindness that I could feel myself being lifted up and carried through the most difficult times; our brothers and sisters at Bethany for their frequent notes and calls, the peace plant they sent us, and the scrapbook filled with thoughts of friendship and encouragement; friends from all over the country who reached out to express their love and prayers; Kirsten & Scott and their church community for putting together a quilt to remind me that I was also in their prayers; the outstanding nursing staff in ICU; and so many others who took the time to come by once or twice and remind me that I was not alone. And of course Karla. How can I describe what it's like to share a life with someone so utterly and gratuitously committed to my well-being, who seems to love me more even as I get weaker, who willingly sacrifices so much? What has come home to me over the last two weeks--more than the precariousness of my health or any sense of dread of having to go through something like this again--has been an overwhelming realization of the large number of truly wonderful people whom God has allowed me to know and to connect with, and the humbling knowledge that I could never reciprocate a fraction of the love and support that they have lavished upon me.

So here's what happened. On Friday, March 23, I received the encouraging report from Dr. Iqbal that my tumors had shrunk considerably. However, cancer is not the only health problem I'm facing at this point. I also have congestive heart failure (likely a result of previous cancer treatments), and an array of cardiovascular problems that stem from that. On Saturday afternoon I was suddenly taken out by a respiratory infection that brought by blood pressure down to the 70s and made it almost impossible to stand up without feeling like I was going to faint.

On Monday morning, we were able to arrange an emergency meeting with my cardiologist's partner, who immediately assessed that I needed to be in the hospital, where I could receive medications to bring my blood pressure back up while still getting rid of excess fluid in the legs and around the lungs. On Tuesday, I was moved from a regular room to the Intensive Care Unit, and by Tuesday night it was clear that I was facing a more serious situation than either Karla or I had imagined. I was diagnosed with acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is a bit like pneumonia, only worse. The respiratory specialist who saw me that night suggested to Karla that it might be appropriate to start contacting family members and preparing for the worst.

It's hard to describe the hodgepodge of sensations that went through my mind and body those first two or three nights in ICU: calm, agony, fear, gratitude, delirium, resignation, desire, contentment. Physically, the first few days were pretty miserable. I had so much fluid in and around my lungs that I had to struggle to breath. The doctor had placed me on a 1200cc/day fluid restriction, so I was always thirsty. Late at night, my mind brought up images of children around the world who do not have access to potable water--the children to whom the Kingdom belongs. For a brief moment I felt a kind of solidarity with them, but I quickly awakened to the hypocrisy of that claim, in light of the fact that I was hooked up to thousands of dollars worth of medical equipment and surrounded by trained specialists working to restore me to health. No matter how you look at it, I've lived a rather cushy life.

By the weekend I had clearly made it through the worst, and on Monday I was released from ICU into a regular room. A part of me thinks that if I had been sent home the next day, it would have been for the better. But the doctors wanted to make sure that my blood pressure, sodium, and potassium were up to their normal levels, so they held onto me until Thursday. Unfortunately, the surest way to raise those numbers was to cut back on my diuretic and bring my fluids back up. As a result, much of the fluid that had been squeezed out of me in ICU came back, so that soon after returning home I was again having difficulty breathing and moving around.

Friday morning there was talk of my being readmitted to the hospital. Fortunately, I was able to work out a plan with my cardiologist for bringing my fluids back down, keeping my blood pressure up and warding off further infection. My breathing and energy level have improved noticably each day since. I'm still a bit fatigued, but am definitely on the road to recovery.

The cancer diagnosis back in November profoundly changed my thoughts about the future and my current priorities, but the change was relatively abstract. I think this experience has had a more concrete impact on me in terms of daily dietary changes, taking advantage of the gifts presented with each day, and focusing more specifically on how I want to spend my life. Somehow, I had developed the notion that I would see a six month warning signal, which would gradually tick down like the battery level indicator on my cell phone. But it's just as likely that at some point, after feeling fine, there will a sudden systemic breakdown from which I will not recover. I have little time to waste on unimportant things. Karla & I need to ask ourselves, if I have only 6 or 7 months left, what specific things I hope to do in that time. A few months down the road, God willing, we can ask ourselves that question again. I hope to be able to return to that question many, many times.

mercy

2007-03-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

Bless the Lord, O my soul, And forget none of God's benefits;
Who pardons all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases;
Who redeems your life from the pit,
Who crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion;
Who satisfies your years with good thing,
So that your youth in renewed like the eagle.
......
For God, yes God, knows our frame;
God is mindful that we are but dust

--Psalm 103:2-5, 14

Yesterday at Dr. Iqbal's office Karla & I received better news than we had dared to hope for. Monday's CT-scan, which I had undertaken to see whether the tumors had grown as drastically as suggested by the cancer markers in recent bloodtests, revealed to the contrary that my tumors have shrunk significantly. In addition, the cancer markers in this week's test have dropped to less than a third of what they were two weeks ago.

This by no means indicates a total cure, but it is tremendously good news. Two days ago, I was fully braced for the possibility that our treatment efforts to this point had failed, that we would shift to what could be a much more invasive Plan B, and that I may have to begin thinking in terms of how I plan to spend the final six to eight months of my life. Today, I feel once again as if I have a future. I am reminded that to receive surprisingly good news is no less possible than to receive surprisingly bad news.

My Gemcitabene & Xeloda regimen will continue with little change, except that my Xeloda dosage will be reduced to a fifth of the original. I'll take one a day for five days, then take a two-day break, then one a day for another five days. I should be able to handle that with little or no difficulty.

I've always had a skeptical chip in my brain that prevents me from using words like "miracle" too quickly--a Becker characteristic, I think. But I don't know what else to call this.

xeloda's final revenge

2007-03-18T16:31:00.000-07:00

This morning I preached sermon #3 of a 3-part series at Altadena Baptist. It's been a great opportunity, but I have to admit that having completed it I feel much more relaxed than I have in a while.

It's been a rough week. Hand & foot syndrome came back last Saturday, not quite as badly as it did the first week in January, but the worst it's been since then. On top of that, I developed some kind of swellling in my tongue that nearly resulted in my being taken to the hospital Monday evening. We were able to bring it down, first with steroids and benedryl, and finally with an antiobiotic mouthrinse called "Daniel's Solution," which sounds like something concocted in a still off a dirt road in Arkansas, but whose healing effects I swear I could feel within five minutes of my first dose. My throat remains a little sore, but yesterday I was able to enjoy the first meal other than yogurt in nearly a week (homemade boorenkoel, in case you're interested, an irresistible Dutch mash of potatoes and kale served with Polish sausage), so I feel pretty content.

I'm pretty sure that when I see Dr. Iqbal on Friday she'll take me off Xeloda for good. It seems to have been the culprit behind most of my worst experiences over the last three months. By now, the dosage has been reduced to a sub-therapeutic level anyway, so the only point in taking it is to see how much I can pester my bloodstream until it kicks me back. The idea of switching is both relieving and frightening, though. I've heard from more than one oncologist that Gemcetabine plus Xeloda is the treatment of choice for advanced bile duct cancer, so I don't know what the next step looks like.

I'll go in for another CT-scan tomorrow. By Friday I should know more.

kelly & jenn

2007-03-09T03:59:00.000-08:00

Aiee!! Another breathlessly hurried week--company both weekends, oral midterms at Claremont, preaching this Sunday, obliged to have all materials for the revision of Fuller's online ethics course submitted by next Friday. I keep promising that the next week things will slow down and I'll get back into the regular habit of blogging, but each week I discover that I've underestimated the work I have to do. Next week, however, I promise that things will slow down and I'll get back into the regular habit of blogging....

But hey, right now I'm up at an unexpected hour, and I want to take advantage of this to say a word of thanks to Kelly and Jennifer, from the youth group I shepherded in Carnation some twelve years ago, who came down last week to spend a few days with Karla and me. One of the great and unexpected longterm joys of youth ministry has been the cultivation of friendships with teenagers who move on to become adults who no longer simply look to me as pastor and teacher, but enter into that relationship mutually, such that they, in many ways, become my pastors and teachers. From Wenatchee, Corey, Jim, Rita, Heather, Dan and Holly; from Carnation, Kelly, Jenn, Kenny, Jared, Sarah, Amariah, Ryan, Steffan, Julie, Megan, Karly (and of course I at least have to mention Jackie here)--to greater or lesser degrees, people who have maintained contact, dropped in unforeseen with words of encouragement, or crossed paths with mine at important moments. People through whom God blesses and strengthens me in ways that may well go beyond whatever contributions I made to their lives in the first place.

Jennifer is now married and has a daughter who has brought to the surface her deep capacity to nurture and to bear in herself the needs and concerns. Kelly, who is single, has developed a quiet reflectiveness that often goes undetected under the daily demands of her job, but that slowly comes out when tapped. They came over the weekend not to be entertained, but only to be present in whatever way could be helpful to Karla and me. To see the two of you was a gift.

bookends: jack & lexy

2007-02-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

Again, my apologies for the long silence. February has been an overwhelmingly busy month. With Friday’s meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics behind me, however, I have a moment to step back from pressing deadlines and catch my bearings again.

I returned yesterday from a wonderful weekend in San Jose. I’d flown up Thursday to attend the SCE conference in Santa Clara and to spend a couple of days with Mom & Don and Todd & Dianne.

I felt very good about Friday’s conference. The papers were arranged thematically; under the heading “Liberalism, Pluralism, and Christian Theological Ethics,” my presentation on Karl Barth’s use of religious language in public political discussions was paired with Jack Crossley’s on the affinity between liberal theology and liberal politics. Jack, who will retire this year from teaching theology and ethics at USC, wrote his dissertation on Barth 45 years ago and is recognized as one of our regional experts on Barth studies. Our papers were so closely related, and so opposite in their arguments, that it almost sounded as if I had written mine as a rebuttal to his. Jack argued that liberal Christian theology, by virtue of its recognition that descriptions of the transcendent are projections of human subjectivity, has both contributed to and benefited from the humanist ideals of democracy. I, on the other hand, argued that Christian communities contribute best to public discourse by laying out a distinct social vision in terms of orthodox theology, not as a projection of human subjectivity, but as a divine promise of reconciliation and economic justice. Of course, Jack & I both recognize that the political ramifications of liberal and orthodox theology alike have been distorted by welfare policies that understand common good in terms of distributed endowments, libertarian economics that remove personal freedom from social responsibility, and socially conservative agendas that reduce Christian morality to questions of abortion and gay rights.

It was a privilege to interact with Jack during the Q&A time after my presentation and over the course of conversations throughout the day. He mentioned to me in private that, in his younger years, he had been profoundly swept up in the logic and beauty of Barth’s theology, but that as he became more acquainted with Schleiermacher, he became less sympathetic toward Barth. He hopes that I’ll step out of my loyalty to Barth enough to look at him more critically, and I think he has a point. I have been very much under Barth’s spell over the last couple of years, as I was for a time in my late 20s, and it wouldn’t harm me to spread out a bit.

But enough about the conference. Todd put together a terrific plan for Saturday: viewing the M.C. Escher exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art, dining at a nearby brewery, and taking Mom to see Pan’s Labyrinth in the evening. I was especially delighted that my stepbrother Steve and his wife, Deanna, were able to join us for the day. I and everyone else in the family have been enamored with Deanna since the wedding nearly five years ago. Saturday, however, was perhaps my first real opportunity to visit one-on-one with Steve in our entire adult lives, and I have to say I was struck by what a gentle and thoughtful person he is behind the sarcastic all-guy persona he puts forward. He occasionally comes down this way on business trips, so we’re going to try and get together on one of them in the near future.

The weekend wrapped up with an unexpected gift. Mom, Don and I went out for breakfast before heading to the airport. We had about a fifteen minute wait for a table at Mimi’s, during which time we sat across the entryway from what appeared to be a grandmother, a young couple of parents and a three-to-four-year-old girl. She seemed to be watching me intently as she held up three pages from a dot-to-dot coloring book, presumably torn out for her to work on over breakfast. After a minute or two of waving and winking back and forth, I said to her, “You have a beautiful smile.”

With that, she left the space in front of her mother and walked across to about two feet from where I sat and asked, “How come you don’t have any hair?”

I gasped in jest, put my hands on the top of my head, and exclaimed, “Where’d it all go?” Then I said, “Well, I have a question for you. How come you have such a beautiful smile?”

She shrugged, walked the next two feet and put her hands on my knees. I’m sure that had I extended my arms she would have crawled right onto my lap, but I considered that a line not to cross. Instead, I put out a hand, which she quickly grabbed in hers. I asked her name. It was Lexy. “Lexy!” I responded, “Why, your name is almost as beautiful as your smile. My name’s Scott.” (Just a word of wisdom to other guys, based on past painful experience: these lines never work on girls past the age of six.)

She told me about her pictures, and how she liked to connect the dots and to try and stay within the lines when she colored. Soon, understandably, her father soon came to bring his daughter back within his own immediate circle of contact, telling her that when she colored in one of her pictures maybe she could show it to me. As he led her away, she turned back to me for a moment and held out her hand. We shook, and she said, “It was nice to meet you.”

I answered, “It was nice to meet you, too, Lexy.”

skinny legs and a good heart

2007-02-07T01:14:00.000-08:00

My apologies for the long silence. I've been unusually busy over the last two weeks, finishing an overdue chapter for a collection of essays on Christians and voting, preparing weekly lectures for my course at Claremont, and working on a revision of Fuller's online ethics course. Oh, yeah, and writing a dissertation, too.

The same stretch of time has also been pretty eventful on the health front, giving me a couple of pieces of good news to report related to the water retension problems I mentioned in my previous post. The more significant item, in the big picture, is that last week's electrocardiogram showed that the excess fluid had not caused damage to my heart.

More immediately pressing on my mind (and legs and chest), however, was the question of the retension itself. The day I went in for the test, my cardiologist changed my medications in an effort to bring my weight down. It backfired at first. By Friday, I'd gained five more pounds, making it difficult to breath and nearly impossible to bend my legs more than about 60 degrees. He made a further change, and advised that if there was still no turn around I would need to check into the hospital. The second change worked. I've rid myself of 13 pounds of water in the last five days. I still have a few pounds to go, but I can see my ankles, walk without gasping, and pull my feet up under my chair. Tomorrow I plan to ride my bike out to a lunch meeting. I feel fairly normal again.

a new complication

2007-01-29T20:39:00.000-08:00

My weight has gone up by seven pounds in the last ten days, all due to excess water in the legs and chest. Water retension has been a problem since my heart attack eleven years ago, but now we're investigating to see whether chemotherapy has exacerbated it. I plan to have an echocardiogram on Wednesday and to go over the results with my cardiologist on Friday. If I have more information after that, I'll post it.

the stranger and the fool revisited

2007-01-27T15:17:00.000-08:00

“Treat others the same way you want them to treat you….If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to? Even sinners lend to sinners in order to receive back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”—Luke 6:33-36

My recent post on the story of Nabal stimulated enough discussion in our Sunday school class this week that it thought it might be worthwhile to follow up on it. At the heart of our discussion lay the perceived tension between a biblical obligation to welcome strangers and treat them with honor and the reality that, at some point, an influx of aliens will tax limited resources to a point of breaking. As Mom wrote in her response to my journal entry, “On the one hand, I so want to share the good that America has to offer with anyone courageous enough to seek it, or fortunate enough to have been born to it. On the other hand, it is possible that critical mass will be surpassed, and we will sink, and won't be able to offer any good to anyone. Where is the balance? Where/when is it right to say, ‘no more.’?”

I’d like to suggest, however, that the question itself overlooks the most important point of Nabal’s encounter with David. The central issue at stake is not Nabal’s lack of hospitality, but his misperception of David and the situation his presence created. Nabal did not see David as a potential partner but as a drain. His question was not that different from the one that plagues many of us as we think about incoming immigrants: how (and why) are we supposed to stretch our resources to cover the cost? Even our desire to see ourselves as charitable or altruistic often exacerbates the tendency to perceive the people who enter our space as a burden rather than a gift. And as long as that is our perception, no matter how much good will we may try put forward, we will eventually be forced into courses of action that are inhumane, driven by fear, and ultimately contrary to our own best interests. In other words, we can’t simply treat hospitality as a moral mandate; we need to recognize that in attending to the needs of strangers we contribute to our own good as well.

This, of courses, raises the legitimate question as to whether we can truthfully look at millions of immigrants as a boon more than a drain, or whether this is simply wishful thinking. There are a few ways to answer this. One is to point to the many ways that our lives are visibly enriched by their presence: the cultural and linguistic experiences that they offer to those who are open to them, the services they already provide in the work sector. America is, after all, a society made up largely of immigrants and their descendants. To suggest that we who now live here constitute a native national identity that can be threatened by new immigrants is to discard our own cultural history.

One could also approach it from the opposite direction and look at the cost of inhospitality. To offer just one example, by the most recent estimates, the proposed wall to protect and maintain 700 miles of the US-Mexico border will cost 49 billion dollars to construct (http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/107179.html). That’s almost half of the combined total of the amounts budgeted for education, health and social services in the four Border States. I recognize that statistics are easy to manipulate and that this single comparison does not definitively prove anything, but it should at least prompt us to ask whether keeping people out isn’t more expensive than letting them in.

To me, however, the most compelling reason for recognizing the intruder as a gift and not a burden is that his or her presence has the power to make us one kind of people or another, and the kind of people we become largely determines whether we flourish as human beings or perish. In Dependent Rational Animals (pages 119-128), Alasdair MacIntyre develops this idea by considering the relation of mercy to what he calls “just generosity.” He argues that, because we come into the world in need of nurturing and training from people whom we can never repay, and because over the course of our lives we find ourselves sometimes called upon to give to those who cannot repay us (young children, elderly parents, strangers whom we come upon in times of emergency, etc.), and sometimes in need of similar help from others, the cohesion of a social group requires that we learn to acknowledge our mutual dependence.

Those communities that learn to accept and value this dimension to their lives also generally learn that to sustain it they need to develop the virtue of just generosity, “a generosity I owe to all those others who also owe it to me.” Just generosity describes the habit of acting out of uncalculated friendship toward another, “from attentive and affectionate regard toward that other,” and trusting that other to act in the same way. But if we are to expect this kind of virtue from one another, we have to promote it actively in our communities, to teach one another to embrace and develop it, and to discourage actions that violate it.

Outsiders play an important role in teaching us how to exercise this virtue. They present us with the possibility of extending just generosity beyond the borders of our immediate circles purely on the basis of our shared humanity. Specifically, they created the opportunity to exercise what Thomas Aquinas called misericordia, or as we might call it, mercy, the capacity to “understand the other’s distress as one’s own” and to respond accordingly. Says MacIntyre, “Misericordia has regard to urgent and extreme need without respect of persons. It is the kind and scale of the need that dictates what has to be done, not whose need it is. And what each of us needs to know in our communal relationships is that the attention given to our urgent and extreme needs, the needs characteristic of disablement, will be proportional to the need and not to the relationship. But we can rely on this only from those for whom misericordia is one of the virtues. So communal life itself needs this virtue that goes beyond the boundaries of communal life” (Dependent Rational Animals, 124).

To put this another way, if we suppress the fact of our own dependence upon people whom we cannot repay, if as a society we learn to encourage pretensions to independence and self-ownership and to despise neediness, we condemn ourselves to fighting desperately against our own inevitable moments of need. Illness, old age, disability, weakness, poverty and calamity become marks of shame. Moreover, where strength and independence are deemed more virtuous than weakness and dependence, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why those who have developed the means to dominate owe any deference to those who have not—to articulate why people in power shouldn’t, say, enslave Africans, persecute Jews, massacre Native Americans, or shut the elderly and disabled out from our social interactions. By contrast, if we learn to consider our dependence upon one another a good thing, to act with mutual just generosity, and to value opportunities to extend that generosity to those who come into our midst from the outside, we create a social environment in which we can enter into our own times of need confidently, without shame or fear. In a word, we recapture our humanity.

Of course, we cannot expect the state to adopt such an attitude toward outsiders if its citizens don’t first. That’s why it is so important that churches and other groups in which social and moral formation takes place to take the lead. Before we can begin to address the logistical questions, we first have to establish in our minds and hearts the kinds of people we hope to become and the kinds of actions that will shape us into such people. The primary question cannot be what we can afford to give, what the other person has legal right to demand of us, or whether this person has come into our midst legitimately in the first place. The first question has to be: will we affirm our own humanity by doing good to this person or despise it by doing harm?

some good news

2007-01-21T16:52:00.000-08:00

This week's CT-scan revealed that the tumors in my abdomen have shrunk since the end of November. The nasty side effects of the Gemzar-Xeloda combination I've been taking have not been in vain.

Speaking of which, we will be reducing my Xeloda intake to 3/4 of what I've been on for the first two cycles. Dr. Iqbal is fairly certain that the Xeloda has been responsible for the pain and swelling in my hands and feet, so we'll see how I do on this new regimen.

It's been beautiful in the mornings here at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, so yesterday I rode my bike to the Saturday market at Pasadena High School. It's only a two-mile ride each way, but I don't want to downplay what a wonderful experience it was. Because of the swelling in my legs, I had, with tremendous regret, written off biking as one of those activities that I would no longer be able to enjoy. When I returned and realized what I had done and what I still may be able to do, I almost began to cry.

So much to be thankful for.

The Stranger and the Fool

2007-01-17T05:56:00.000-08:00

My devotional reading the other day led me to the story of David’s encounter with Nabal and Abigail in 1 Samuel 25. The story revolves around a wealthy landowner whose name, literally, means “fool.” (To the modern reader this raises serious questions about Nabal’s parents, but these are irrelevant to the story, so I’ll let them go.) David, on the lam from King Saul, has gathered about himself a band of several hundred bankrupt and marginalized desperados, with whom he travels the countryside in an effort to survive. Without Nabal’s knowledge, they find room in his fields to set up a temporary encampment, repaying the unintentional favor by protecting his property and workers from bandits and other threats. David eventually sends word to Nabal, informing him of their presence and services and asking for enough food to celebrate a feast day together. Nabal, incensed to learn of the company’s presence, denies the request, insults David, and ignores the testimonies of his own servants to the help that David’s men have been to them. David explodes with fury, commands his followers to take up their swords, and sets out on a raid.

Nabal’s wife Abigail emerges as the story’s hero. She learns of David’s plan and rushes out to meet him with a peace offering of food and wine. She acknowledges not only the rightness of David’s complaint against her husband, but also her own complicity in the wrong that David has suffered. Most important, she affirms that God is on David’s side, in spite of his criminal appearance, and urges him not to resort to violence to accomplish what he considers God’s purposes. David receives her blessing and warning, and relents of the vengeance he had intended to bring about. In her role as peacemaker, Abigail both guarantees justice for David and keeps him from perpetuating the injustice that he himself had experienced. (In the epilogue to the story, Nabal suffers a heart attack upon learning what his wife has done, and the widowed Abigail marries David.)

In Karl Barth’s discussion of the Atonement, Nabal stands as the personification of human stupidity before God. The deepest roots of his sin lie not in his rudeness, his wealth, or his mistreatment of David, but in his willful inability to recognize God’s gift when it stands in front of him. God had sent David to bless Nabal, but Nabal could recognize him only as a threat and a nuisance. In Nabal we see that our blindness—our sheer stupidity—before God not only robs us of our exalted status as God’s covenant partners, but causes us in turn to treat one another inhumanely, to become divided against ourselves, and to resent our human limitations. By refusing hospitality to David, Nabal doesn’t simply incur guilt; he turns away the one sent to bring him God’s Shalom.

On the other hand, Abigail here represents the path of wisdom. If I can add to Barth’s description, I might suggest that Abigail’s moral vision can be seen on three levels. Most fundamentally, unlike her husband, she recognizes David for who he is, God’s anointed one, sent to her and her people for their good. Second, she recognizes that, in spite of David’s status as an outlaw and a trespasser, he still has a claim to her hospitality. She remembers the ancient divine command to treat aliens with special honor, since her own ancestors were once aliens in the same land, and since she herself inhabits the land only as God’s guest. Finally, she acknowledges her own complicity in an economic arrangement by which David has been victimized. Although she herself has apparently never wished ill to David or to any other stranger, she has enjoyed the comforts of wealth secured through the mean-spirited policies of her husband. Therefore, she takes the first step toward reconciliation with the trespasser, coming to him in a spirit of humility, sharing with him basic provisions for living in her midst, and urging him to join her in the creation of a more just and peaceable living arrangement.

Here in Southern California, where the presence of millions of undocumented aliens has become such an unavoidable and explosive fact of our social life, this story seems remarkably relevant.

a brief reprieve

2007-01-15T07:40:00.000-08:00

I went in Friday to meet with Dr. Iqbal and begin my third round. She decided to hold off for another week in order to reevaluate my treatment plan. Turns out the severe side effects I've experienced over the last month--the itching, the swelling, the pain in the hands and feet, the balding--go well beyond the expected reactions to these particular medications. I'll have a blood test on Tuesday and a CT-scan on Wednesday and return next Friday to figure out where to go from here. The likeliest scenario is that she will continue to treat me with Gemzar and Xeloda, but reduce the doses.

This, of course, is mixed news. On the one hand, it would be comforting to have a single plan from the start and stick with it. But for me, that consideration pales beside the discovery that my experiences during the recent round of treatments are not considered the normal price for extending my life. If we can adjust the dosages so that, in the course of a 21-day cycle, I'm incapacitated for one or two days instead of seven or eight, this is very good news to me.

It also means that as of today I've gone more than two weeks without ingesting any cancer medications. And any day I'm not on chemotherapy is a good day.

admit it--it's sexy

2007-01-10T20:09:00.000-08:00

Megan Neill, you know what this means.

illness, friendship, and moral agency

2007-01-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

"For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. But if I am to live on in the flesh, this will mean fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which to choose. But I am hard-pressed from both directions, having the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is very much better; yet to remain on in the flesh is more necessary for your sake. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith."--Philippians 1:21-25

I’ve just returned from the annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics in Dallas, where, among other things, I heard a very edifying paper by Sarah Moses titled “Why Survive?: Discipleship, Friendship and the Elderly.” She puts forward “an understanding of Christian friendship as the mutual relationship in which Christians enable one another to live out discipleship” as a better model for engaging with the elderly than prevailing models of caregiving, in which the elderly are viewed primarily as passive recipients in need of services.

At one point, she references Barth’s discussion of friendship and aging in Church Dogmatics III. Barth’s point there is that when we stop calling upon people to participate socially as responsible moral agents we dehumanize them. It belongs to the human vocation to have something to give to one’s community and to live in a manner that serves the larger common good. Whatever acts of assistance we give to those in need of help, if they are truly acts of friendship, are given not as unilateral gifts of charity, but as steps toward enabling the other person to live out his or her calling for the sake of us all. When we stop expecting and calling forth the best in each other, we cease to be true friends.

Of course, this applies not only to our relationships with the elderly, but also with the seriously ill. As grateful as I am for many words and acts of indulgent kindness and encouragements to go out and do whatever will make me happy, the times I feel most fully human—fully alive—are when I remember that I still have work to. This is why I’m glad I dragged myself out to Dallas in the first place, even though I’d been virtually bed-ridden for several days leading up to it. I had something to present to the group of Baptists ethicists who met on Thursday, feedback to receive, people to interact with. I come home reminded that the long hours of research and writing are pointed in a direction, and that my work is of real benefit to others.

On the other hand, the utter disregard for my responsibility as a moral agent is part of what makes the weekly experience of receiving chemotherapy so horrible. For two hours I sit comfortably in a chair as a patient among patients, none of us with any other duty than to relax, think happy thoughts, and receive medicine from the professionals who take care of us. More than the pain in my hands and feet, more than the itching or trouble swallowing my food, I dread those two hours. And I think it is because, for that time, I am not a responsible member of a community that benefits from my life and work, but a patient in need of unilateral care. Perhaps if I can think of my treatment in more mutual terms, as an act of friendship maximizing my ability to give back, I will be able to do something better with the time than squirm and wish it would end.

The reason I attended Sarah’s reading in the first place is that the title question was one that I had been pondering over the last week. This recent round of treatments gave my body a pretty serious beating. The question arises: what exactly am I fighting for, and at what point do I stop? How many trips to Yosemite or the San Juans, how many visits with old friends, how many movies or card games, how many evenings alone with Karla, before I can finally say “enough” and go peacefully? But this is the wrong question. The better question is, what has God given me to do? What am I to contribute in the time I have? How does my life relate to God’s intention to bless the nations?

But this way of relating to one another is difficult for many of us to grasp. Culturally, we’ve more or less agreed to place no expectations upon each other, to give each other absolute freedom to do whatever one pleases. But such freedom has a dehumanizing, alienating effect. It sends the message that we are not connected to each other, that one person’s actions have little or no meaning to another, that we do not belong to something larger than our own selves. Absent some kind of moral and communal connection, especially as people grow old, sick or needy, we become at best objects of charity with nothing to give in return, and at worst a nuisance. If instead we can talk more seriously about common good and the responsibilities we have to one another as members of communities, perhaps we can move into disease, old age and death with the confidence that, as long as we draw breath, we have something worth giving.

a family christmas

2007-01-02T10:02:00.000-08:00

I’ve taken a longer hiatus from my blog than I had intended. Karla & I were gone several days for Christmas. Then, shortly after we returned, the neuropathy in my hands flared up so badly that I was unable to type. (Heck, I couldn’t even brush my own teeth for a day or two.) My hands still hurt, but the burning and swelling have begun to subside, and frankly, I’m sick of being able to do nothing but lie on the couch in front of the TV, so let me give it a shot.

For Christmas, we all converged at my mom’s place in San Jose: my mom and step-dad, my dad and step-mom from Tennessee, my sister and her two college-aged kids from Alabama, my brother with his wife and son, my two step-brothers and their families, my youngest brother, my aunt and cousin from Florida, and Karla and me. It was a large gathering in more ways than one, and one that tells a pretty rich story.

Lynne was ten, Todd five, and I seven when Mom and Dad divorced. As children, we found it easy enough to cast Carol as the woman who split up our home, but in reality all she did was show up at the right time. Either way, she and Dad were married a year later, and within the following two years Mom met and married Don. By that time I was in the fifth grade, and living apart from my father had becoming increasingly difficult. All four parents agreed to the new arrangement: I would live with Dad, Carol and her two boys, Brad and Steve; and Lynne and Todd would stay with Mom and Don. Several months later, Carol gave birth to Eric, and the six of us left San Jose for the small lumber town of Janesville, high in the northern Sierras.

Years later, as a youth pastor, I worked with enough broken homes and witnessed enough hostility between divorced parents to gain a profound appreciation for my own. I had never heard them disparage each other, never felt called upon to choose between them, never felt as if my stepparents thought of me as someone else’s child. It’s not enough to say that my parents remained civil to each other, for at some point the civility became genuine friendship. My dad’s sister has remained my mom’s confidant and traveling companion for over thirty years. My stepmother’s three sons always know that they have a place to hang out at my mom’s house. And if one set of parents is ever in the vicinity of the other, they invariably get together.

And there we were, every one of us piled into Mom’s living room on Christmas Eve to exchange gifts.

I can’t idealize my family. No need to groan about past wounds at this point, but we had our share of dysfunction, and several of us have required some form of therapy or another. But when I see Mom and Carol reminiscing on the front porch, or Dad taking a grandfather-grandson walk with Brad’s son Mitch, I’m reminded that God has been very good to our family. Our failings simply bring that goodness into sharper relief.

William Willimon once suggested that the most ontologically instructive part of the human anatomy is the belly button. A dot in the center of our bodies, whose function ceases moments after we’re born, it remains there to the day we die as a reminder that we did not create ourselves, that we came from other people, flawed people to whom we owe an unpayable debt of gratitude and whose biological and psychological fingerprints form a huge part of our own identity. I would suggest that this extends not only to our forebears by blood, but also to the communities and traditions that shaped us before we ever knew enough to consent to their influence. We have been largely formed by others, and to despise our roots is to despise our very selves. So God commands, “Honor your father and mother.” Love the streams that contributed to your becoming who you are. This is not a command to idolize your roots, to accept their every influence uncritically, to imitate them in every way, to refuse outside voices that might challenge the values and loyalties instilled in you when you were younger. It’s certainly not a command to pretend that the people who shaped you never hurt you. But honor them, forgive their failings and acknowledge their gifts, thank God for them. In so doing you learn to honor yourself.

the other voice

2006-12-21T20:22:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-20T17:01:00.000-08:00

“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

2006-12-17T20:28:00.000-08:00

"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

2006-12-13T19:42:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-11T17:36:00.000-08:00

"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

2006-12-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

"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)

2006-12-08T18:38:00.000-08:00

"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

2006-12-06T20:41:00.000-08:00

"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

2006-12-02T09:11:00.000-08:00

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.

getting down to business

2006-11-29T17:26:00.000-08:00

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?"

2006-11-24T14:08:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-22T11:48:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-18T16:49:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-17T23:09:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-15T21:37:00.000-08:00

"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

2006-11-14T15:40:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-12T18:14:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-08T19:46:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-07T20:54:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-05T20:41:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-03T09:41:00.000-08:00

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.