It was late autumn atop Lookout Mountain, a leaf-haunted wind-raked day typical of the season, the walkways and architecture of the college campus embalmed in fog, earth scents mingling in the air. I had received an invitation earlier that day to a small end-of-the-semester gathering at a friend’s apartment, and that most hospitable of phrases—“a pot of chili”— had been uttered. It was the sort of summons that no college student on a meal plan would reject lightly, even during the strain of final exams. All day the notion of eating a home-cooked meal in an actual home had cheered me as I arranged my work and school schedule to accommodate it. Having at last completed my final hour of carpet cleaning duty and hefted my textbooks on my desk, I was eager to catch my ride in the parking circle down the hill from my dormitory and enjoy my reward.
I remember stepping out of Founders Hall into the luminous fog, feeling the icy air suck my breath clean off of my ribs as I hunched my shoulders and set off down the hill, when my attention was diverted by the unlikely emergence of voices from a patio to my right. This patio, so full of student activity during the early sun-soaked days of the semester, was usually abandoned to dead leaves and litter this late in the term. Tonight, however, a handful of students had gathered around one of the grills and started a fire, likely fueling it with expired classes’ notebooks and handouts. Their shadows were exaggerated to aboriginal dimensions in the fog and the firelight, and their voices sounded eerie, carried with the stinging whiff of campfire on the breeze. Flurries of sparks kindled the smoke around their hoods.
My Shakespeare class had ended only days earlier with the topic of “King Lear,” and my professor had enriched our study of this tragedy by integrating it with numerous passages from the book of Job. Little wonder, then, that the phrase, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” came to my exam-primed mind as I beheld this small conflagration.
I found myself revisiting that twilit night three years later as I sat in the waiting room of Georgetown Physicians after hours on a cold February dusk, my hands folded against my strangely protuberant belly while I forced small talk with my parents and waited to be called in for my hastily scheduled consultation. I had seen a physician’s assistant earlier that morning to discuss my experience of recurring urinary tract infections and encumbering sciatica. She had taken one look at my stomach and scheduled a CT scan for that very afternoon. When the results of the scan had come in, I was summoned to this late meeting, and told to bring my parents as well. The late hour, the hurried nature of it all, and the suggestion of parental involvement conditioned the three of us to feel anxious indeed.
Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. There in that waiting room I heard Job’s bleak wisdom yet again. It occurred to me that people speak this way of their callings: “I was born to do this!” If this was trouble—and how could it not be, considering these circumstances—then I was born to it. Such a perspective shift emboldened me to face the diagnosis of ovarian cancer in the oncologist’s consultation room several days later, to steel myself for the surgery and treatments that followed.
Like all big troubles, my hardship was the sort of experience that made the “big questions” in life uncomfortably pressing, that laid an imperative upon my soul to seek out answers. My (oh so human) reaction to my diagnosis was, predictably enough, that chestnut of a question: WHY? It found a ready and absolute answer, if not an easy one, in the pages of Scripture. The phrase “under the curse” is an old-fashioned one, one that evokes an atmosphere of fairytale, but it portrays a truth that is all too evident in this vale of tears where we pitch our earthly tents. Unfortunately, its very obviousness makes it the sort of truth from which we tend to get diverted. In a sense, this curse is like a beast to which we all are chained as a condition of our entrance into life. We learn to accept our beast as an unpleasant but inescapable part of life, a part of life we prefer to ignore, or simply fall into the habit of ignoring, when there are so many other matters that call for our notice. We allow ourselves to be distracted from the knowledge that the “way of all flesh” is ultimate destruction at the claws of the beast. Looking about, we see that almost everyone else lives in a sort of habituated truce with his beast, and so we feel comfortable doing the same. And when the evil thing strikes at last, we are always taken off guard.
It was thus with myself. I might have acknowledged intellectually that in this world I would have trouble, but my shock when this prophecy came true made it clear that I had not before understood the nature of this beast to which I was chained. For the first time I truly understood that I was a part of that group, man¸ that was born to trouble. Rather than distinguishing me in some way from the human world around me, my trouble confirmed me as a member of it. Reluctantly I realized what this meant for my behavior as I coped with cancer: that I could not wallow in my trial, flaunt it as an emblem of distinction, or lug it around with me as a justification of or pretext for my deficiencies—actions that my family and I jokingly described as “playing the C-card.” The C-card wasn’t mine to play. Or rather, perhaps, it was, but only in the sense that in my father Adam I had played it on myself. It’s no wonder that that old sad story took on deeper poignancy for me as I considered my own unfolding drama in its baleful light.
The Scriptures taught me more than this, however. I am so grateful that, as I wrangled with these difficult ideas, I was also able to know that the God of my trust was a personal God, a God who was involved in every detail of my life, a God who numbered the hairs on my balding head. And this God, who loved me to the unspeakable extreme (how I love to speak it!) of dying in my stead and carrying in His perfect person the taint of my sin, this God sent me this particular inheritance of trouble. By His grace I never doubted that His will was good both for me and for His kingdom. He had proven Himself to me over and over, and my heart was gloriously at rest in His love, from which I knew I could never be estranged. On these grounds, I boldly approached the Creator of the Universe to request further insight into the nature of my mission. Why had He chosen this specific portion for me? It was not a complaint (at least most of the time it was not a complaint), but rather a sincere endeavor to acquaint myself better with His will—because if this was His will for my life, I wanted to search it out and live in accordance with it as fully as possible.
I decided, as I reflected upon His purposes, that God had given me cancer at least partly as an opportunity to pause my life in medias res and roam its frozen landscape. I would never have thought to do this on my own. And even had I desired to, I could never have afforded the bounty of time that God in His kindness lavished upon me. My new life was a treasury of empty hours! As I waded through them and wondered how God meant for me to fill them, that line from Milton’s Sonnet 318 “On His Blindness” rang frequently in my mind. They also serve who only stand and wait. It gave me a place to start. I tried to regard it as my calling to stand my heart at attention before God, for there was little else I was equipped to do. Stripped of the strength and opportunity to pursue many of the things that would normally have occupied my time, I waited on Him. In the cushioned recliners at the Lack’s Cancer Center Infusion Ward I waited. In the long still hours in my empty house I waited.
I thought that it would be easy service, this standing and waiting. Perhaps it was the phrasing of Milton’s words, that disarming little “only” he inserted into the meter: They also serve who only stand and wait. I quickly realized how wrong I was! Most of the time my mind was too preoccupied with chasing after its unruly flock of thoughts to fix its whole focus, or even most of its focus, on heaven. How difficult it is to seek God with a pure heart, even for someone living a life of solitude and reflection! So often my spirit echoed the cry of Fredrick Buechner’s saint, the hermit Godric, who agonized, “What kind of hermit can he be whose heart gads about the very world he’s left for Christ?” There in the wilderness of chemotherapy and weakness, with the heedless capriciousness of an infant at a funeral parlor, my heart was still gadding about the world.
This humbling realization of my own frivolity forced me into an internal conversation that I ought to have begun long ago: a discussion about what was truly valuable and worthy of attention in this life.
In her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard urges aspiring writers to “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.” Her advice bears pondering even outside the realm of literature, for this world does indeed consist solely of terminal patients, and our lives ought to be expressive of the solemnity such a state of affairs requires. She goes on to pose this sobering question: “What would you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
Especially in the uncertain early days between tentative diagnosis and surgery, when I was not yet sure of my survival prospects, I was given the gift of fleeting insight into what my life might look like to a terminal patient. Peering through the lens of my mortality, the triviality that my life communicated to me was indeed enraging. In the hermit months that followed, I had daily cause to reflect with consternation on the waste and vanity of the life I had led, and to ponder the shape that my few remaining mortal days ought to take. I desperately wanted my life to be an expression of truth, a message that imparted meaning, and certainly not a mere doodle or limerick or hollow platitude. I wanted the terminally ill to be able to look at my life and find reason to hope and rejoice and be at peace. In a word, I longed for my life to express CHRIST. I wanted my testimony to be that of the Apostle Paul, who jubilated that to live is Christ and, recognizing the terminal diagnosis afflicting his audience, to die is gain.
Is this partly what Christ meant when He said that I must lose my life in order to find it? Looking at my distracted and frivolous life from the Spartan battlements of my disease, I did not regret the loss, for it was all vanity. My outer body was wasting away but I had found my life in Christ.
It has been ten months now since I completed my final chemotherapy treatment. My life teems with duties and delights, and I have renewed strength to accomplish them and faculties to enjoy them—daily labor and pots of chili alike, and in good measure! It is so easy to forget the cold dark space between the two, the sparks flying upward. Often I behave as though my tomorrows will never cease, as though I have world enough and time to gad about this Vanity Fair and revel in its distractions. That is why I sometimes feel a sense of nostalgia when I remember how clarifying cancer was, those spacious hours of frailty and vision. Their memory anchors my straying heart, challenging me to live a life that expresses the truth of my salvation: a life that values time, holds the things of this world loosely, and waits for my eternal "happily ever after," confident that, because Christ broke the curse, it will be mine to enjoy.
Even so, come quickly...
