dying daily

Death from the outside is the scary enemy that meets us when it will.  It is the man with the scythe, by whose strokes the flowers fall...We can do nothing to stop him...But the other death is death within us; it is our own death.  We die it daily in Jesus Christ, or we refuse him.  This death within us has something to do with our love for Christ and for other people...This death is grace and the completion of life.  That we may die this death, that it may be given to us, that the death from the outside will not find us before we are made ready for it through this death of our own: let this be our prayer.  Then our death is really only the passageway to the perfect love of God.  

                                                                       - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Getting a dismal diagnosis has a way of focusing your attention on the reality of death.  The death that gets your attention at first, of course, is what Bonhoeffer describes as the "scary enemy" that will come for us all eventually.  This is the mortality that wilts flowers and weakens flesh.  This death's proximity is never so clear as when the doctor's computer screen glows with trails of white spots, the renegade cells adorning my vertebrae like so many Christmas tree lights.  I sit with these twisted, ruinous strands of glowing cells waiting like last year's lights to be untangled and unfurled and brought out of the darkness.  And that is the plan--to unpack them--though without an eye to Christmases future, but with the deliberate and ruthless efficiency of one who defuses a bomb.  The goal is to forestall the death that these strands would portend.  For the death that comes as our enemy--while unstoppable ultimately--may need to wait until other deaths have been died.   

These other deaths have been much on my mind of late, the deaths that Bonhoeffer says are "grace and the completion of life."  Dying these deaths has meant an inversion of my life's structure and schedule and economy.  Dying these deaths has meant changing how I function and transforming how I understand myself.  Dying the small daily deaths described by Bonhoeffer (and prescribed by Jesus and Paul) has meant acknowledging that my care belongs to hands and hearts beyond my usual (small) circle of caregivers.  Dying daily has meant receiving in far greater measure than I am able to give.  Dying daily has meant radically adjusting my role in the care of my own children and locating myself again as a vulnerable child in need of care.  Dying daily has meant releasing the burdens of pastoral work to the capable hands of Christ's body, the church--which both cares for others while I can't and takes care of me and my family with little fanfare and abundant love.  

All of these ways of dying have been costly in one way or another.  Certainly I have had to relinquish control of many things I would ordinarily hold close. But the death of my grip on control has brought me a paradoxical sense of freedom, peace, and life, that I think Bonhoeffer would recognize as the "passageway to the perfect love of God."  For dying these small deaths--whether we're afflicted with lymphoma or not--is precisely the baptismal training we need to rehearse and be ready for the death that comes as our enemy, but does not finally defeat us.  As Paul says: "We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." (Romans 14:7-8)  So here I am living, as the Lord's.  And here I am dying, as the Lord's.

And however long I must wait for these two realities to be resolved in my own journey, I wait as one who has (by dying and rising daily) been taught this basic and existential truth: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." (1 Cor 15:54).

Waiting for the Promise

This is an adaptation of the article I wrote for the December 2012 Newsletter of St. James United Methodist.


As December begins, we turn to the Advent season, which is traditionally a season of waiting.  Waiting for the story of the Nativity to unfold.  Waiting with the prophets of centuries past for righteousness to arrive and redemption to appear.  Waiting with cousins, both expectant mothers--one older than usual, who bears a prophet, one younger than usual, who bears The Promise.  Waiting with shepherds and angels, scholars and innkeepers.  All of them waiting for The Promise to arrive.  
The Promise of God’s everlasting presence. The Promise of God’s never-ending love.  The Promise of God’s healing for bodies and nations.  The Promise of God’s mercy for sinners.  The Promise of God’s justice for the oppressed.  The Promise will come, our traditions tell us, if we have the patience and perseverance to wait for the Promises to come true.  
So, friends, wait with me.  Let us both set our eyes upon the same horizon, waiting for the Promise once again to be fulfilled.  For just like the first time the Promise showed up, it still happens in unlikely environs.  This year it may happen in a hospital room, maybe even the one from which I write this. Or it could happen in a nursing home, a jail cell or a mobile home, a sidewalk or a Sunday School class, or a sanctuary.  
I remember one season of waiting in particular, a season like many before and many since, in which people of goodwill gathered to sing Christmas Carols and read the Christmas story. We did so at a nursing home, and we made certain that Mrs. Edmunds, a long-time member of the church, would be present. Mrs. Edmunds being present was typically in body only, with her eyes often angled toward the ceiling and her arms and face contorted in ways that made communication in either direction nearly impossible. On this particular occasion, the church members who gathered were predominantly children. And after the strains of Jingle Bells, Joy to the World, and Away in a Manger had faded, I began to read Luke's version of the Nativity. It was just after the shepherds had returned to their fields, glorifying God for all they had heard and seen, that Mrs. Edmunds, suddenly bright-eyed and fully present in a way none of us had experienced for years, looked at the gathered Christmas throng and said in a strained but clear voice: "It is beautiful."
So look with me--wait with me--for the beautiful Promise, who will not forget us or forsake us because to do so would be to deny the very Promise he has come to fulfill.  

Waiting with you for the Promise,

Chris

hope--a few days later

1 Corinthians 13:13

And now, faith, hope, and love abide, these three...

At the end of his famous ode to love in First Corinthians 13, Paul identifies two other indispensable qualities of a life spent with God: along with love, faith and hope are the must-haves for every friend of God.

My own experience of these three is that, as a rule, we preachers break them down in the following way: we concentrate on love on wedding days, faith on Sundays, and hope on funeral days.

In fact, I'm trying to think of the last time I heard (or preached) a non-funeral sermon on hope.  I suspect that this light emphasis on hope has something to do with our fairly well-managed, comfortable, and more-or-less financially stable lives...where's the need for hope, really, when we're paying the bills, getting the children to bed on time most nights, and having some sort of vacation every year?  What's left to hope for?

And yet Paul places hope alongside faith and love as one of the three indispensable elements of the Christian life.   What do we do to cultivate hope in our lives?  How do we build ourselves up in hope?  What do we do to inspire hope in others?

In the case of me and this rotten diagnosis, I feel like Elise and I are still figuring out how to hope, what to hope for, indeed, what it would even look like if our hopes were fulfilled.  Survival, sure.  But what else dare we hope for?  That I sail through this experience without any of the dreadful side effects they've described as possibilities?  Or is it more appropriate to hope for the perseverance I need to withstand the challenges when they come?

I guess what these questions boil down to is what shape my prayers should take.  How do I pray for the future with confidence and truthfulness and boldness, and not get discouraged when the going gets rough?

When I look to Scripture for guidance, hope seems often to come as a surprise to the people involved.  Who'd have thought of ravens, really, when Elijah was thinking of letting hope go?  Who'd have thought of Abraham and Sarah when God was looking for where to get hope started again?  And who'd have thought of one convicted insurrectionist saying to the other, "Today you will be with me in Paradise!"

So I guess even as I am trying to latch onto hope in a way that keeps me going during these difficult days, I'm trying to leave the door open to being surprised by hope as it takes shape for us in the days to come...

And what if these hopes of surprising provision fade?  What if the hope that we're hoping for doesn't materialize?  What do we do with dashed hopes, if hope is so essential to the People of God?

What I think I believe is that our ultimate Hope is the Hope of life with God.  This is the Hope that along with Faith and Love will one day be perfected by the Source of all faith, hope, and love--the One whose Faith doesn't fail, the One whose Love doesn't end, and the One whose Hope in us and for us doesn't waver. It is this ultimate Hope that Julian of Norwich names in the sentence she claimed to have heard from God's own voice…"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."  This mantra, repeated with courage and conviction, is the stuff of Ultimate Hope, hope that extends beyond the needs and aspirations of daily living to the telos (goal, end) of all things.  This ending point gives us a point of reference for our ultimate Hope, as in this description at the end of John's Revelation:

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." And the one who was seated on the throne said, "See, I am making all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true." Then he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.

So this passage promises that we will receive personal parenting attention from the One who has watched our struggles, witnessed our failures, and winced at our deceptions small and large.  It also offers the renewing, re-creating, re-claiming Hope that could only come from the hand of our Savior. 

Faith, hope, and love, these three: let us not neglect hope, nor relegate it to funerals or memorial services or letters of condolence.  Let us hope fervently for the daily Providences that sustain us in our living.  And let us take hold also (or be taken hold of by) Ultimate hope: hope perfected, hope fulfilled, hope rooted firmly as a tree in a garden, once the source of our predicament, now become our deliverance.

A video that defies description

So, this video was made by some friends of mine, and I don't know how to introduce it except to say that as Elise and I watched it, we laughed harder than we have for months.  It is dedicated to my recovery and for that I am grateful.  My good friends who take a starring role have obviously been willing to make fools of themselves for my sake, but knowing them as well as I do, I know they're first and foremost fools for Christ. Hope it brings as many smiles to you as it has to us.

And don't ask about the underwear thing.

a poem from a friend

Like all good poets, my friend Scott Neely listens with exquisite care.  With gratitude for how closely he has listened to me in over a decade of friendship, I share the gift of this poem that he shared with me and my family.

‎"Fear not"

--A Cristobal y su sagrada familia

Fear not,

into the marrow

of earth

each day reaches

sun

and moon

each night.

Gold and silver light

into the dark,

friend,

from which

we rise, shine,

fight.

Now That's a Good One

Sixteen years ago, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma.  After six weeks of radiation, it was history, and I had moved on with my life.

Little did I know at the time, I'd one day face its souped-up, muscular, and brutish cousin: Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma...

So about a month after my diagnosis with this new and nastier lymphoma, my brother-in-law Thomas messages me on Facebook to ask this question:

What do you call someone who keeps getting lymphoma?

I don't know, I replied, what do you call someone who keeps getting lymphoma?

His reply: A lymphomaniac!

Now I don't know what your reaction is upon hearing a joke like that, especially proffered over the cold blue and white medium of a Facebook post, but my immediate reaction was to double over in laughter and call my wife over to the computer to laugh with me.

For my brother-in-law had just accomplished what in my family can only be described as a coup-de-grace.

He had combined word play, my personal health history, my current health crisis, my sometimes manic personality, and in the space of five well-played syllables, he had poked gentle fun at the whole lot of it.

In my family, making a good play on words, a really good one, one that weaves together various layers of meaning and history--now that's an accomplishment.  And my brother-in-law had just made a master stroke.  So I did my best to parry.

Now I can write a book, I wrote back between chortles--Living with Lymphomania: A Very Short Story.

Well, the conversation went on from there, and in your estimation, gentle reader, it may have still had yet a ways to go in order actually to arrive anywhere in the vicinity of Funny.

But there's something biblical, even theological, about a word like my brother-in-law coined that both names a reality and laughs at it.

Isaac, whose name means laughter, was the embodiment of the absurd notion that life could spring from the dead--namely an old man and old woman who were long past child-bearing (much less child rearing!) age.

Jesus, himself the Word made Flesh, remade words and reshaped vocabularies throughout his ministry:

He teased Nicodemus by saying "Be born anothen." Nicodemus heard it to mean be born "again," though it could easily mean be born "from above."

He nicknamed his star disciple "the Rock" without specifying whether it was a moniker of strength or a harbinger of his later tendency to crack under high pressure.

He even nicknamed the two rowdy brothers in his band, calling them "sons of thunder," which makes me think their fusses must have sometimes led to some grumbles, if not outright rumbles.

All of this leads me to the conviction that what my brother-in-law did for me is something God's been trying to help us do ever since Adam and Eve decided "to get serious" about gardening by trying some of the stuff God said was strictly for God.  To help us learn to laugh at ourselves: our weaknesses, our fears, our illnesses, our sins.  None of them, in the end, is strong enough to separate us from God.  God is like a parent watching a two-year-old stumble along with her father's backpack, acting the whole time like "I got this..." God laughs at our attempts to prop ourselves up, to act like we're getting along just fine. And what makes God laugh even louder and longer?  When we get the joke, too.  When we see that the joke finally is on death.  And the punch line, delivered in Person by the Word-Made-Flesh two millenia ago, reverberates through the ages like a deep and resonant laugh, inviting all who hear it to look into the darkness and chuckle: Now that's a Good One.

sola gratia--the way it is or the way it's gonna be?

sola gratia - grace alone

While my white counts are low and I'm susceptible to infection, I'm staying at my parents' house.  It removes the temptation to do too much with the children or to let down my guard and give our dog a big sloppy wet kiss.  As you can imagine, moving in with my parents after 38 years of life and 10 years of marriage presents some challenges.

Yet it's one of the amazing blessings of this journey to have both my parents working as diligently as they are in caring for me.  Add to that a wonderful mother-in-law who has been watching our 3 children for the past week-and-a-half by herself--and we've got an awful lot to be thankful for.
Now, having gratefully and lovingly acknowledged the work of others on my behalf (and I've only mentioned the top 3), I do have an additional observation: the one not doing a very good job right now is me.  I don't do well depending on others.  I have difficulty making decisions to yield instead of push, to stay instead of go, to ride instead of drive.  And yet those are the decisions I am constantly facing (and making) these days.

At this point, what I think I've learned is that while my professed theology may start from a place of God's grace alone, in reality, I'm pretty much a works-righteousness guy.  How many times have I said in inviting others to the communion table that we come as beggars all--bringing nothing to the table but our empty hands?  And yet, now that my hands have been actually emptied of most meaningful work, and my life has been drained of any responsibility beyond negotiating my next trip to the bathroom, I find myself a poor practitioner of the sola gratia life.

On the one hand, I can blame our Methodist sanctificationist tradition; God's saving acts through Jesus Christ are alone sufficient for our salvation...but for salvation to continue and permeate every part of our lives, it's like we depend on a functioning circulatory system--exercising the salvation helps it spread from our hands to our feet and can even spread it to our neighbors...

So what happens when I'm holed up in bed, unable to accomplish any of those sanctified or sanctifying activities?  I think the hard thing for me is figuring out whether the sola gratia principle makes me feel better--i.e., I'm so glad we're saved by grace alone so that no matter what I can or can't accomplish, Jesus can redeem me and my life; or whether it makes me feel worse, because I realize the extent to which my life to this point has been structured and operated under a philosophy of sola gratia (but not really). The assumptions I've made, the schedule I've structured, the model of church life I've tried to shape.  What would have been different about my life to this point if I had actually given sola gratia a try?

That may be a question I need to address later.  But for now, at this moment in my life, and at this stage of my journey toward health, the only resolution I need is this.  I'm clinging to my well-worn phrases about empty hands getting filled.  And I'm trotting out (even if a little unsteadily) the little bit of Latin I know--sola gratia says all I can or know how to say about my life right now. The grace of parents caring for a grown son.  The grace of a wife who fulfills her vows every day, honoring and keeping her husband in sickness as she has in health.  The grace of a doctor who gives me a cell phone number and tells me to call, whatever the hour.  The grace of a church who keeps being church even while their pastor is away.  These are the signs I need, the outstretched arms and glowing countenances that since Moses have communicated that God's love for us is sheer, unmitigated, uncontrollable, unbelievable grace--sola gratia--words I may one day live by, but right now, they live for me, and fill otherwise empty hands.

Balloon

We got into the lymphoma balloon without much warning.  A perfunctory visit to the hematologist, during which he admitted he was unimpressed with any of my blood numbers.  "Since you're here, though," he said, "I might as well examine you."  I winced as his tar-stained fingers prodded for a second on my left side.  "Hmm. Your spleen's a little bit big.  That might be at least worth checking out."    

A week later, with scans in hand, the news: lymphoma.

It would be weeks of surgery, bone marrow biopsies, and scans before we knew which basket of which balloon we were in.  

By that time, we were in the Medical University of South Carolina, and we were feeling as good about the journey as was possible under the circumstances.  I'd be getting an experimental drug that had shown terrific promise in the first trials at MUSC and elsewhere.  My job was to get in the basket of the lymphoma balloon and make any adjustments I was instructed to make along the way.  

So I--and my family with me--piled in.  We were both piloting the balloon and trapped inside it.  It was not the vessel we had chosen or even would have chosen (if given a choice); but once in it, we held on and acted like we knew how to steer.  Our journey took a turn two months into treatment, as I was reappointed to a church in Spartanburg, closer to extended family.  There were some unpredictable dips and even frightening moments, but everything indicated the balloon was going in the right general direction.   

The plan called for treatments to conclude in October.  We'd then land this lymphoma balloon in Mid-November, when a two-day battery of tests would confirm that the magic medicine had done its job.  Then I'd just be a notch in MUSC's research belt, and show up for scans every three months for three years.

Three weeks before my final scans: chaos.  Drenching night sweats. Pain in my hips and shoulders. Scans showing massive involvement of the vertebrae.  A drug-bleary midnight trip by ambulance to the Medical University.  

Suddenly we're no longer bringing this thing in for a landing.  We're adrift again, but this time it feels like our supplies are already low.  We've abandoned the illusion of piloting anything and are holding on for dear life.  I am, for the first time, terrified.  I am, for the first time, unsure.  I am, for perhaps the first time ever, suddenly and excruciatingly aware of my inability to do a damn thing to help myself.  

I have long relied on the words of lament in Psalms and prophets to be my words in time of grief.  I have long clung to Paul’s description of the Spirit interceding for us with "sighs too deep for words."  But right now  I am in a place of delirium and want only to beat my head against the chest of God, to claim something or to be claimed by something or somebody.  

I believe I am made for hope but in these moments I feel ill-fitted for it.  Will hope find me? Will I miss it as I hurtle along between earth and heaven, adrift in this darkness?