Emerging from Fog

They came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to Jesus and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village; and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, "Can you see anything?"  And the man looked up and said, "I can see people, but they look like trees, walking." Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.

-Mark 8:22-26

The past few weeks I’ve felt like the blind man after Jesus’ first laying-on-of-hands.  I’ve seen what the blind man saw: a blurry, confusing, facsimile of life.  For the blind man, that meant seeing people who, in his words “looked like trees.”  

For me, the first stage of holy healing has been equally blurry.  In the nearly three weeks since my bone marrow transplant, I, like the blind man before me, have been led away from the crowds, including the friends and family who have hoped most fervently for my healing. Like the blind man, I have strained and squinted and stared, trying to see the world as the Son of God intends for me to see it.  

In this blurry time, I’ve blinked through tears to see masked people wearing plastic blue aprons, taking their turns at helping me along the hard road of healing.  I have fuzzy memories of doctors prodding my chest and belly, listening to my lungs and my bowel sounds, flooding me with questions about how I’m feeling and what my bowel movements are like and what number (1-10) I would assign to the pain.  I have foggy recollections of nurses giving way to new nurses, shift after shift, hooking up more IV bags than I can count.  

I remember with blessed indistinctness the moments the pneumonia had me groaning and writhing in the bed, begging for someone to take away the pain.  The pain was a 9+ for a few hours, finally giving way to the pain meds that the doctors kept having to bump up and up and up some more.  In fact, just this morning our wonderful nurse practitioner laughingly recalled me praying a prayer of thanksgiving for narcotics!  (A prayer, incidentally, I have only the vaguest memory of praying!) 

When there hasn’t been high drama, there has been an incessant sameness to the days.  Vitals, Rounds, Blood Tests, Reruns on TV.  All of the routine has only increased the blur factor. But all the while, I am convinced that like the blind man before me, a faithful Companion has not only waited with me for clarity to come, but worked actively to help bring it about.  

In the last few days, my temperatures have begun to settle and the fog has begun to lift.  I remember with startling clarity the moment in the predawn dark when the nurse entered my room to announce that my neutrophils (immune cells) had reached the magic number of 500--engraftment had almost certainly begun! In the days since, that number has climbed beyond 1000, and my discharge from the hospital is now imminent.  

And like the blind man before me, I feel the hands of a Healer, hands which have refused to release me in the semi-darkness of confusion.  Instead, the Healer has held me until clarity has come.  And as I depart this place, like the blind man before me, I know that the healing I have received may only be for a time--but what a glorious time!! I now see the road before me as I’ve never seen it, as a place where even deeply needy bodies and souls like mine receive another ways to walk, and the light necessary to walk it.

The Great Cloud of Witnesses

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.  

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.  

Light and Darkness

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.

three crises

Three scenes of crisis.

A couple huddles together, staying out sight behind a stand of trees.  Time is running out on life as they’ve known it.  They’re scared of what they’ve done and even more frightened of what they may be facing.  

A group of friends scurries inside a room where they think they’ll be safe.  They shudder as the wooden plank rasps into place, locking them inside.  They’re not sure what scares them more: being locked helpless inside this room together or walking around outside with no idea of who’s friend and who’s foe.  

The patient hears through morphine-laced consciousness: it’s cancer, and it’s everywhere.  He retreats into the fog, hoping against hope that the scans are wrong, that the symptoms are imagined.  He stumbles into the shower, dragging his IV pole with him, pulls the curtain closed, and waits for the nightmare to end.

Three scenes of crisis.  Two Biblical.  One personal.  

And at the center of them all: Death.  

Death explodes like a roadside bomb, shattering form and order and flesh and bone.  And we huddle in horror behind trees and doors, substances and shower curtains.  And whether death comes because of our own bad decisions or because of some sinister force at work randomly in the world, it always leaves us with less.  Less confidence.  Less stability.  Less security.  Less life.

And into our lessened lives comes the Living One, who comes like a thief in the night, intent on stealing us (steeling us?) from death’s grip.  And because the Living One shows up in person--in flesh--death turns on the Living One.  And the Living One is suddenly collateral damage in our own showdown with death.  

In the garden, the One who had dreamed up these beings in love and tenderness and affection, seeks them out and discovers their treachery.  But the Living One does not offer condemnation, but redirection.  The life of these living ones will be changed forever, but not ended forever.  They can still be fruitful.  But the fruit will come only as a result of their own struggles and toil and sweat.  Their sentence: life.  Life without a garden, except of their own cultivation.  Life without walls, except of their own construction.  Life without God, except of their own dim recollection.  

Except that the Living One who sends them out cannot help but summon them back.  The Living One who sets a guard at the garden gate hums tunes in the evening hour that remind the living ones of the Life they have lost.  The Living One misses them.  And eventually, the Living One comes to see them--just like in the garden.  

And some--the living ones with ears to hear--receive what the Living One offers.  It’s like cool water when they’re really thirsty.  It’s like a loaf of warm bread when their stomachs are empty.  It’s like a beam of light when they’re stumbling around in the dark.  And they are redirected again.  Away from paths that lead nowhere, to a Way that leads back to fruitful, abundant, enjoyable life.

But the Living One refuses to ignore the living ones who still won’t listen.  And the Living One raises his voice to help them hear.  And they shout all the louder, convinced of their own version of things.  And the contest of voices becomes a contest of wills.  And the contest of wills becomes a contest of strength.  And the only strength the living ones know is brutal, coercive, lethal.  And the strength of the Living One is in refusing to play by their rules.  

This time it is the living ones who send the Living One outside the walls, intent on reclaiming what they think is theirs.  And the Living One absorbs the most ferocious, fearsome death the living ones can inflict.  And the contest seems to be over.  The Living One seems to have been silenced, one more casualty of the tsunami that began with the earthquake of disobedience in the garden so long ago.

Those who had listened to the Living One hide themselves, just like the original couple had done in the garden.  Afraid because of what has happened, petrified of what it means for the days to come.  And the Resurrected One seeks them out in their hiding place, and invites them to see the marks of his devotion.  They are no longer marked for death, because the Resurrected One now bears the marks instead.  Their lives are now swallowed up in his, and his life has entered into death and come out the far side.

In the hospital shower, huddled behind a curtain with tubes in each arm and a diagnosis that sounds like a death sentence, the voice of the Resurrected One bids me not to be afraid.   “Peace be with you...do not doubt but believe.”  And I receive what I need, as Adam and Eve and the disciples did before me, to live in the time-in-between-times.  And I believe, not because of what I’ve been taught--though I surely have been taught something by now--but because the Resurrected One has sought me out, a lost soul who needs a Savior and knows it.  And the hiding place I’ve chosen is the precise place the Resurrected One knows to look--in dark places where people have given up hope, in dry places that long for living water, in desperate places where lonely people yearn for Someone who knows their sorrows and cares for them deeply.  

Three Crises, and a Resurrected One who redirects, reappears, reassures.  Why try to hide what death is doing to threaten us?  Didn’t the Living One come just so we could rely on him in moments when death seems to have the upper hand?   Didn’t the Living One become the Resurrected One by excavating death itself, hollowing out even Hell, so that we may live these days--however many there are--unafraid of death’s grip, unperturbed by death’s threat?

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