Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12:1-2
I have always considered this passage from Hebrews to be comforting--the assurance of heavenly company during our earthly trials, the promise that faithful people who have run their races and now rest from their labors are presently being attentive and sympathetic to us as we run ours. I have thought there was no better place to read this passage than a place like Duke Chapel, where the images of many of the witnesses are visible--in stone carvings, in colored glass, in rich tapestries. The silent witnesses stared down at me and my open Bible, the Scripture writer asking me to believe that we undergo no trial alone.
The moments of deep contemplation in a space as holy and grand as Duke Chapel have been for me a touchstone in my later ministry. I’ve always assumed I’d never experience anything remotely comparable to those sublime moments in the magnificent Gothic surroundings of that place of worship.
Until now. As I've enjoyed a deep Ativan-induced slumber on the eve of my bone marrow transplant, a vibrant cloud of witnesses has been pleading, praying, promising on my behalf. After the nurse came to draw my blood at 3:30 this morning, it broke me from the spell of the Ativan and I lay awake in the darkness, suddenly wide awake and aware of the day’s significance. To keep from chasing my imagination down too many rabbit trails, I picked up my smart phone and was immediately overwhelmed. There, in the most mundane instrument of my life, used to text and call and occasionally catch up on Bible or newspaper reading, I was suddenly staring at a cloud of witnesses not named in Hebrews. These witnesses run their races in settings from corporate consulting to church leadership, from stay-at-home-parenting to sustainable farming. And here, through the seldom-used Facebook app on my phone, their smiling faces and words of encouragement, their moving prayers and even their sacred songs--all of these crashed and crescendoed into my darkened hospital room, and I knew without a doubt that the Cloud of Witnesses described in Hebrews is still alive and present and as eager as ever to help us run this leg of our race. And so, miraculously, mysteriously, my humble hospital room took on the grand dimensions of Duke Chapel, where this passage had originally taken on deeper meaning in my life. This time, however, the cloud of witnesses became visible and audible in the least likely medium--the icons and comment boxes of Facebook. And I was suddenly reminded that the Savior who became the pioneer and perfecter of our faith is the same one who first showed up in a lowly grotto, surrounded by the first witnesses that ranged from cattle to sheep-herders. And so it should not surprise me in the least that my phone is now a brimming repository of witnesses that inspire me to lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely and to run with perseverance the race that is set before me.
Even as I am finishing the last lines of this entry, a decisive leg of this race has begun, with the first of 612 cc’s of marrow cells beginning their journey into the darkened places of my body. My prayer-enlivened imagination now considers these millions of cells to be part of my internal cloud of witnesses, testifying to the extra-mile generosity of an unknown donor, the miraculous capabilities of medical science, and a grace that asks for nothing but the balance of my life in return.
I am now settled into my hospital room in the Ashley River Tower of MUSC. This morning I had what's called a central line placed into my jugular vein. Tomorrow begins the five-day chemotherapy regimen that will prepare me to receive my bone marrow transplant.
I have been thinking the last few days about the odd combination of feelings I’m experiencing as day zero (the day of my bone marrow transplant) approaches. On the one hand, over three months after my cancer relapsed, I am eager to get this show on the road. On the other hand, I am filled with unmitigated dread as I prepare to face a procedure that has a 1 in 5 chance of killing me. It’s kind of like what I imagine Evel Knievel must have felt as he hit the throttle to approach a ramp that would (hopefully) launch him over a yawning ravine.
In my conversations with friends and loved ones, I’ve begun describing these dueling impulses with one word:“dreadiness.”
I am both ready for the ordeal, and dreading its jagged edges.
Dreadiness acknowledges that an event that could bring new life takes place in the shadows of untimely death.
If dreadiness is an apt description for my feelings with my own life on the line, I have wondered in the last few days what degree of dreadiness Jesus must have felt in the Garden with the life of the entire world on the line.
For centuries theologians have staked the gospel’s truth on the conviction that Jesus was fully human. That is, Jesus fully entered into the weakness, contingency, and disorder of life as a fleshly being. Hangnails and cowlicks, charlie horses and sinus infections, birthmarks and baby’s burps--Jesus saw and knew the everyday realities of living as bodily beings. I was recently reading Christopher Hitchens’ wickedly funny and poignant book Mortality and I was struck by his profound recognition of what it means to live in the flesh, particularly with cancer:
Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut-wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose...It’s no fun to appreciate to the full of the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.
And while it would make Hitchens roll in his grave to hear it used to make a theological point, what this to-the-core atheist claims for his own experience is what Christians claim for our Savior: Jesus did not have a body, he was a body. He experienced in and through the core of his entire self the joys and agonies of life. And because he did, the wide-ranging experiences of our embodied existence are wrapped up into his saving acts. From basking in the sun’s welcome warmth to enduring the bleakest, bitterest cold of winter, the experiences we have as body-beings are known to God.
The way Gregory of Nazaianzus put it: “that which is not assumed is not healed.” In other words, unless Jesus has known the privations and temptations of the flesh, he hasn’t truly redeemed human beings in our full and complicated (and bodily) existence.
And so as I deal with my own “dreadiness” at facing the ordeal before me, I take solace from knowing that there is One who has faced the darkness without blinking, who has met every growling menace with conquering love, who has borne in his own scars the wounds of an entire universe. Set beside his Garden agony, my pain may be puny, but it is Jesus’ acceptance of suffering’s cup in that forsaken place that steels my soul to bear the pain of these days not with my own courage, grace, and love, but with his. Dready or not, here comes God--to me, to you, to any in this world who inhabit darkness and yearn for undying Light.
It’s been nearly a month since I posted on this blog--but what a month it’s been. My focus in the last 3 weeks has been spending time with family, something my blood counts and treatment schedule have (almost miraculously) allowed. Since December 19, Elise and/or I have made two trips to Lexington, two trips to Indiana (one by way of Kentucky), four trips to Charleston, and an uncalculated number of trips to Wal-Mart. In the process, we’ve managed to exchange Christmas gifts, eat multiple Christmas dinners, undergo various pre-transplant tests, and finish outfitting the home where we’ll be staying in Charleston during the transplant process.
As we have been busy with all of this travel and preparation, our journeys have been along pathways festooned with Christmas light. Like the shepherds and magi before us, we have finished our Christmas journeys with a more profound sense of the miracle--that in the darkest season of the year (and sometimes of our lives), God offers light. Light to lead us. Light to guide us. Light to save us.
This season, I have witnessed the light shining in the darkness through
meals lovingly prepared
homes and beds generously shared
the generous gifts of others
the gentle attention of mothers
the patient abiding of a congregation
the joyful rhythms of conversation
the miracle of old stories heard fresh
the mystery of God become flesh
With the holy-days of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany fading in our (well-traveled) rear-view mirror, may we receive the light we need for the ground we have yet to cover. I am now just over two weeks from the transplant that will, God willing, make another person’s strong immune system a functioning replacement of mine. I’m told there could be dark days in the journey. Since I’m no poet, I close with the words of someone who is. In fact, it is these words which are part of the most precious gift I got this Christmas. The Country of Marriage, a poem by Wendell Berry which is excerpted below, was set to music by my wonderful wife as a Christmas gift to me this year. You can listen to her musical version in the box to the right.
In it is the lesson of the holy days, which is that darkness holds blessings that await the light’s return:
Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.
To read the entire poem, click here.
