Dreadiness

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.