November 7, 2011 - Kyrie Eleison

This morning I rode the train back to New York City, for some follow-up scans at the Nuclear Medicine Department at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. One was a repeat of the same scan I had the day before my radioactive-iodine treatment.  The other was a CT scan.

Last Wednesday, the day before the treatment, I swallowed a pill containing a small amount of radioactive material. It was just for diagnostic purposes, the technician informed me, and was small enough that it didn't call for any special safety precautions.

The scanner wasn't the familiar donut-shaped CT scanner. It had the same exceedingly narrow table to lie down on, but instead of the donut there were a couple of square pads, each about the size of an old LP record album.  They could be positioned a number of different ways on movable arms.

When I asked, the technician told me it's called a gamma camera (at least in layman's terms). The difference between this scan and a CT scan, he went on, is that a CT scan provides its own radiation, but this gadget simply measures the radiation already present inside me. The contents of the capsule I'd just swallowed, in other words.

OK, so this is one of those bring-your-own-radiation joints.

I had a similar scan again today, with the difference that those square pads are looking for radiation emanating not from last Wednesday's appetizer but from Thursday's 120-millicurie main course. I suppose this gamma scan result, combined with the CT scan, tells the doctors something worth knowing about either the effectiveness of the radioactive-iodine treatment (whether there was indeed any residual thyroid tissue left over after the surgery and whether the radiation successfully zapped it) or about how my body's doing at getting rid of the radioactivity.

The technician who ran the CT scanner told me afterwards that there's going to be some kind of medical pow wow tomorrow, and that I should hear something not long after that.

What I can expect to hear, I have no idea, since my understanding has been that the radioactive-iodine treatment is merely a prophylactic measure following my (presumably) successful surgery. What these scans will actually tell the doctors is beyond me.

Before getting off the New Jersey Transit train, I'd been listening to music on my iPod.  I decided I was familiar enough by now with my itinerary through the New York subway that I could act like so many other straphangers and leave the headphones on. It so happened that I was listening to Gregorian Chant by the Benedictine monks of Christ in the Desert Monastery of northern New Mexico. I'd spent a week of my sabbatical with them a half-dozen years ago.


It was a rather odd experience to make my way through the bustling commuter crowd in Penn Station with the otherworldly tones of Gregorian Chant sounding in my ears. Although my noise-dampening headphones muted most of the station noises and P.A. system announcements, the louder ones were still intelligible. Those station noises sounded like they'd been dipped into the monastic chant like a waffle immersed in maple syrup.

I found the chant changing my attitude towards the day, and about my fellow-travelers as they charged about every which way, Manhattan-style, on whatever urgent business had brought them to those subterranean transit-chambers.

Kyrie eleison, sang the monks of Christ in the Desert. Lord have mercy.

Kyrie eleison on me, medical pilgrim that I am.

Kyrie eleison on the Wall-Street type in the pricey tailored suit with the American flag pinned to his lapel.

Kyrie eleison on the woman in a chador, pulling her sleepy-eyed preschooler along by the hand.

Kyrie eleison on the two soldiers leaning against the wall in their desert-camouflage uniforms.

Kyrie eleison on the young woman with the flowing black hair and the hoop earrings, tottering along in suede boots with impossibly high heels.

Kyrie eleison on the homeless man on the bench, and on the transit cop prodding him awake and ordering him to move along.

Standing on the uptown subway platform, looking across the two sets of tracks at my downtown-bound counterparts, I decide to launch some silent kyries at 'em.

Random acts of prayer. It seems somehow subversive.

They have no idea, those people I've picked randomly out of the crowd to target with my kyries. Do they even know someone's just blessed them?

Do I realize the same, when I've been similarly blessed by some other anonymous fellow-believer?

I feel, in those moments, like we're all swimming together in a sea of blessings.

June 7, 2010 - Is Google Making Us Ignore God?

Came across a thought-provoking article today by Ernesto Tinajero on Sojourners Magazine’s “God’s Politics” blog. It's called "Is Google Making Us Ignore God?"

Here’s an excerpt:

“God calls on us to meditate on God and God’s word. However, does the fast intake of information from TV, film, and especially the Internet make us less likely to experience God? According to new research, electronic gadgets actually change how we think and focus. Nicholas Carr famously asked ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ Will it also make us ignore God?...

The theological perspective is that this busyness of the business of modern life draws us into the world of Martha and away from sitting at the feet of Jesus. We are being called to distraction, and the quiet, still voice of God goes unnoticed – unnoticed in the flood of ever new links to follow, unnoticed in the hectic pace of modern life, unnoticed in the flood of events, information, and distractions. Through it all, God continues to call us to sweet voice of prayer. Yes, the call I am heeding –returning to simplicity and healthier life – may seem too simple to make a difference. Yet, does it make it any less true?”

I wonder what the implications of this 24/7 deluge of distractions are for our immune system, and for the cancers like lymphoma that sometimes beset it?

Judaeo-Christian religion has a time-honored solution: it’s known as sabbath. Periodically creating for ourselves islands of spiritual peace – places and times for encountering the divine – ought to be central to any long-term program of recovery.

August 5, 2009 - Pulling the Boat to Shore

More from Rabbi David J. Wolpe’s Why Faith Matters...

Wolpe retells a centuries-old rabbinic parable, about a man in a boat pulling on a rope, in order to bring his boat to shore. From the illusory perspective of a passenger on the boat, it may seem as though the boatman is pulling the shore to him. In reality, of course, it is the boat that is moving. The land is solid, substantial, immovable.

Prayer is like that, says Wolpe:

“People have much the same confusion about spiritual weight and motion: In prayer, some believe that you are pulling God closer to you. But in fact the heartfelt prayer pulls you closer to God.

I have prayed in fear and in joy, in crisis and in calm. Each time I understood that what I was asking for was not the object of my prayer. My prayer that I would be healed was a prayer, stripped of all its topmost layers, to be assured that whatever happened would be all right. Every prayer in this way is a prayer for peace; it is peace in the world and in one’s soul, the certainty that the pain is not empty, the world not a void, the soul is not alone.”

- Why Faith Matters (HarperOne, 2008), p. 142.

No wonder so many scripture passages describe God as a rock that cannot be moved.

So much about the way we live our lives is egocentric. We really do believe – as the ancients believed about their home, the earth – that the universe revolves around us. One of our deep, spiritual tasks, as we mature through life, is to dispossess ourselves of this mistaken notion.

Cancer has a way of bringing that truth home all the sooner.

July 31, 2009 - Praying in the Tube

Finishing out my vacation, I’ve been enjoying some quiet time up at our Adirondacks place, near Jay, New York. One of the good books I’ve been reading is Why Faith Matters, by Rabbi David J. Wolpe. David thoughtfully sent me a copy of his book, after reading my May 9, 2009 blog entry about him.

The book has a lot to recommend it. It’s a thoughtful, honest answer to recent critics from the scientific world, like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who have ridiculed faith and elevated scientific insights in its place. (It’s also a quick read, very accessible to people without extensive training in either theology or science.)

David is in the same place I am on that question, maintaining that religion and science need not be in conflict with one another. There’s no reason why a scientist cannot also be a religious believer, nor a believer someone who also accepts the insights of evolutionary biology or physics.

One part of the book that speaks personally to me is when David shares his personal experience as a cancer survivor. Like me, he has non-Hodgkin lymphoma, in an incurable form. Some years previously, he had surgery to remove a brain tumor. Here, he writes of his experience of prayer, as he’s undergone various medical tests:

“Throughout my various illnesses, I prayed. My prayer was not answered because I lived; my prayer was answered because I felt better able to cope with my sickness. Each time I go for my regular tests, the CT or PET scans or an MRI, each time I am moved into the metal tube that will give an image of sickness or health, I pray. I do not pray because I believe God will give me a clear scan. I pray because I am not alone, and from gratitude that having been near death I am still in life. I pray not for magic but for closeness, not for miracles but for love.

The novelist George Meredith wrote, ‘Who rises from his prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.’”

– Why Faith Matters (HarperOne, 2008), p. 25.

Some of the most heartfelt prayers any of us pray are those uttered “in the tube.” When we find ourselves in the tube, what do we pray for? Miracles?

I’ve wondered, on similar occasions, what the point is of praying for a negative test result (“negative” is, of course, a positive or good result in medical parlance). The machine, be it CT scanner or PET scanner or whatever, is simply taking a picture of whatever is there. I’m not praying for the result to come out skewed, of course – it’s in my best interest that the test be accurate, that my doctors fully understand whatever’s going on inside my body. When we offer prayers in the tube, are we praying that, if there’s a malignancy there, God will vaporize it then and there, in the few seconds before the picture is taken?

No, as David indicates, I think prayer is a good bit more complex than that. When we pray, we often do have specific results in mind, but more importantly, we’re seeking to be in communion with God, and perhaps also to feel a sense of solidarity with others who form the community of prayer. Indeed, we pray “not for magic but for closeness, not for miracles but for love.”

Of miracles, C.S. Lewis once wrote: “Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”

The point is, to catch that larger vision.

Prayer changes things. Prayer changes us.

October 27, 2008 - George Herbert on Prayer

In my study-leave reading, I ran across a remarkable poem by George Herbert. I’ve long admired the poetry of this seventeenth-century Welsh divine. Herbert, a sickly man from a noble family, was ordained a priest at mid-life and labored in an obscure country parish. He died soon after, and would have quickly been forgotten were it not for his poetry, stunning in its imagery and use of the English language.

Reading a George Herbert poem is not easy. Like the scribblings of Shakespeare, his writing is studded with archaic vocabulary. To the persistent, though, what seems dense and incomprehensible at first slowly reveals hidden treasures.

Here’s the poem:

Prayer (I)

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.

So, what is prayer, anyway? Herbert’s answer comes in the form of metaphors, slung at us readers rapid-fire. Their meaning is so rich, you have to spend a little time with each one, turning it over and over in your hands...

“the Churches banquet” – a biblical allusion, to any one of a number of passages that see the life to come as a rich feast. Isaiah sings of “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear” (25:6). Jesus tells a parable about a host so determined to fill every seat at his banqueting-table that he throws the doors open to street people (Luke 14:15-24). “You that have no money, come, buy and eat!” (Isaiah 55:1). Prayer is a feast, to which all are invited.

“Angels age” – Since Herbert doesn’t use apostrophes to indicate possession, this could mean “angels growing older,” or it could be – with an apostrophe – “the era of the angels.” I think it’s the latter. There’s something timeless about prayer.

“Gods breath in man returning to his birth” – The poet of Genesis sees life as breath: the Creator God breathing life into nostrils of inanimate clay. To Herbert, prayer is a sort of exhalation, an exchange of respiration.

“The soul in paraphrase” – To paraphrase dense prose is to render it understandable. In prayer, the human soul gives voice to its subtlest heartbeat, its deepest longing.

“heart in pilgrimage” – This one’s self-evident. Prayer is a long and deliberate Godward journey. It also suggests that prayer is best engaged as a long-term discipline.

“The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth” – To us, “plummet” means to drop or fall, but it’s related to an old word for “lead.” The plumb is a lead weight a builder hangs from a line, in order to build a perpendicular wall. Ancient mariners would fling a lead weight overboard, attached to a line, in order to gauge the ocean’s depth. This technique was called “sounding.” Prayer, then, helps us test the depth of dark and incomprehensible mysteries.

“Engine against th’Almightie, sinner’s towre” – The next few lines are about prayers of lament or imprecation: angry prayers that give honest voice to human pain and frustration. The “engine” is probably a siege engine, the ponderous wooden contraption an attacking army would wheel up against a city wall. Some of these siege engines were so tall, they could be called towers. A woman in my lymphoma support group was speaking recently of how her cancer has led her to ask the “Why me?” question. Cast in the form of prayer, such a question is an “engine against th’Almightie.”

“Reversed thunder” – If God sends thunder and lightning upon the earth, then prayer is our means of sending it rumbling right back. “The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind; your lightnings lit up the world; the earth trembled and shook” (Psalm 77:18).

“Christ-side-piercing spear” – Here, the poet considers the full implication of prayers of lament or imprecation. Such prayers, while honestly voicing human pain, are as the spear that pierced Christ’s side.

“The six daies world-transposing in an houre” – Prayer actually compresses time, wrapping the six days of Creation up as in a single hour.

“A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear” – There’s an old tradition of singing our way through suffering. Think of African-American spirituals, or the rhythmic chanting of chain gangs. As long as Christians can still sing, as long as they can still pray, oppressors hear and tremble.

“Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse, exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best” – Prayer is power, but also it gives voice to feelings of deep and perfect peace.

“Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest” – Herbert returns to his earlier image of reversal, of dynamic exchange. Earlier, he described an exchange of breath (“Gods breath in man returning to his birth”). Now, he gives us an exchange of wardrobe. In prayer, heaven takes on the garb of an ordinary peasant, while humanity is attired as a grandee. In Herbert’s time, clothing instantly revealed what level of society its wearer belonged to. Laborers who habitually wore “ordinarie” homespun could never aspire to the silk doublets and hose of the nobility, let alone the fine cloth and lace collars of the rising merchant class. Prayer, however, is equally accessible to all. It flattens the most pronounced social division of all, that between earth and heaven.

“The milkie way, the bird of Paradise” – Exotic images, these. Prayer allows us to reach out and touch the unattainably beautiful.

“Church-bels beyond the stars heard” – One of my most enduring memories of my year at Oxford in 1976-77 is the weekly, Sunday-evening rehearsal of the change-bell ringers. For an hour or so each Sunday, the skies above that town of many spires echoed the glorious cacophony of the bell-carillons, their ringers all practicing at once. It seemed like those melodies could reach even to the stars.

“the souls bloud” – Someone once observed that, if writing is the act of transforming blood into ink, then the dramatic act of speaking it aloud is the transforming of ink into blood. As the poet pours out the blood of human experience upon the page, so too does the poet transform “the soul’s blood” into the words, or even the silent communion, of prayer.

“The land of spices” – Another exotic image. To people of Herbert’s time, the far-off Indies, the spice islands, exerted an exotic and compelling pull on the imagination.

“something understood” – Herbert’s final metaphor for prayer is his simplest and most compelling, in an understated way. When we pray, often and with regularity, we gradually come to understand.

September 30, 2008 - A Surgeon's Perspective on "Watchful Waiting"

Flying back from Utah the other day, I finished reading Pauline W. Chen’s insightful memoir, Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality (Knopf, 2007). Pauline is a liver-transplant surgeon, which means she’s spent her professional life at the edge of high-tech innovation. Sometimes she’s part of the surgical team that helicopters in to harvest organs from the body of a dying accident victim, pops them into an ice-filled cooler and flies them to a distant city. Other times, she’s on the receiving end of those precious deliveries, implanting the harvested liver into an otherwise-dying patient.

This work has given her a unique perspective on life and death. From the brain-dead body of a patient who’s breathing with the aid of machines, she salvages living tissue that just may save another’s life. It’s hard to imagine a more heroic occupation.

Far from celebrating transplant surgery’s technical razzle-dazzle, Pauline appeals for heightened awareness of the emotional side of medicine. She reminds her colleagues that, when the risks of surgery are too great and a patient cannot be saved, the doctor has a continuing responsibility to care for the patient’s emotional needs - rather than abandoning the person to others, out of fear of medical failure.

I was intrigued by this lengthy passage, in which she reflects on how the “watchful waiting” approach to treatment troubles many of her surgical colleagues:

“There is no mistaking the heady exhilaration you feel when you walk into the cool and ordered operating room, pull out all the technical gadgetry and wizardry of the moment, and within a few hours solve the essential problem. Surgery is a specialty defined by action. As a student of mine once said, ‘Surgeons do something about a problem, not just sit around and think about it.’

But surgeons are not alone in this doer’s paradise. While surgery, particularly liver transplantation, represents an extreme, even physicians in specialties with little or no ‘invasive’ procedures feel compelled to do. A patient visits with a problem, and the appointment is incomplete without a prescription for medications or tests or some tangible diagnosis.

Even medicine’s essential framework for approaching clinical problems – the treatment algorithm – presumes physician action. Frequently diagrammed in textbooks and medical journals, these algorithms outline step-by-step therapeutic plans for different diseases. For every point along the algorithm there are several possible outcomes that in turn may have several of their own possible therapeutic options. On no branch of the decision tree, however, is there a box reserved for Do nothing or Hold tight or Sit on your hands. Instead, if no treatment is required, we describe the waiting as an active, not a passive, period. Treat with intravenous antibiotics for six weeks and then reassess may be part of the algorithm. Or we may decide on a course of what is euphemistically termed expectant management or watchful waiting, as if our therapeutic intervention is just being held temporarily at bay. Even in deciding to wait or do nothing, we imbue these periods with action. It is as if we are dynamically managing time and at the end of that time there may be more treatment for us to initiate.

We can confuse these interventions with hope, particularly at the end of life, and equate more treatment with more love. Any decision to hold or even withdraw treatment becomes near impossible, and not treating a patient the moral equivalent of giving up. Moreover, once treatments have started, there is an obligation to the interventions themselves. Having done so much already, doctors – and many patients and families – find it nearly impossible to let all their efforts simply drop.

In an attempt to display competency or undying love, we lose sight of the double-edged nature of our cutting-edge wizardry. We battle away until the last precious hours of life, believing that cure is the only goal. We inflict misguided treatments on not just others but also ourselves. During these final, tortured moments it is as if the promise of the nineteenth century has become the curse of the twenty-first.” (Pp. 147-148)

Quite naturally, I’ve been inclined to view the soul-numbing tedium of watchful waiting from my own perspective as a patient. Pauline’s book has helped me glimpse it from the viewpoint of my doctors as well. Turns out, we both wish we could do more.

The contemplatives have long taught that intentionally doing nothing – doing it with our whole being – is one of the most difficult of spiritual tasks. This is the point Martin Luther was getting at when he observed how his puppy jumped up on the table, then waited expectantly for a morsel of food dangled from the hand of his master. “Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches the meat!” Luther reflected. “All his thoughts are concentrated on the piece of meat. Otherwise he has no thought, wish, or hope.”

Fully engaged and mindful waiting is my own spiritual challenge these days. There’s something in me that wants to reach relentlessly into the future, fretting about what treatment may await me down the road. Ultimately, this is an abdication of the present discipline of waiting that has been given me.

“Let us then labour for an inward stillness –
An inward stillness and an inward healing;
That perfect silence where the lips and heart
Are still, and we no longer entertain
Our own imperfect thoughts and vain opinions,
But God alone speaks in us, and we wait
In singleness of heart, that we may know
His will, and in the silence of our spirits,
That we may do His will, and do that only.”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Christus: A Mystery,” in The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, vol. 5 (Houghton Mifflin, 1851), pp. 313-314.

June 29, 2008 - Reflections of a Pancreatic Cancer Survivor

The other day I came across an article written by the Rev. Bill Forbes, a fellow Presbyterian minister. Bill’s a member of a highly exclusive club: pancreatic cancer survivors.

Bill used to be pastor of a large church in northern New Jersey. Shortly after leaving that position to become a vice-president of our denomination’s Board of Pensions, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and given just months to live. Now, more than two years later, he’s still with us. So far, he’s beating the odds.

The article Bill wrote appears in The Presbyterian Outlook – a small, independent magazine not widely known outside Presbyterian circles. His thoughts on survivorship are wise, and deserve to be more widely known.

Here are some things he says pancreatic cancer has taught him.

“Each and every day of life is a gift.”

“My effort to live a life and ministry of encouragement shapes my life today as never before.... Pancreatic cancer has assisted me, indeed it has endowed me, with a mandate to re-order my priorities. I don’t ‘sweat the small stuff’ nearly as much as I used to!”

“Prayer shapes and guides my life more than it did pre-diagnosis.”

When people learn that a friend has cancer, they often feel at a loss for words. Here’s what Bill suggests they say:

“When you know of someone who faces challenges – a serious illness, a family tragedy, a professional crisis, or a personal conundrum, don’t avoid them! Avoidance is tantamount to isolation. When someone faces the direst need, there is a tendency to feel forgotten. Questions such as ‘Why hasn’t your hair fallen out?’ or ‘What caused your situation?’ or ‘What kind of treatment will you have next?’ or ‘What is your prognosis?’ or ‘How are you handling the loss of your job, your spouse, your child, your... ?’ translates into ‘How does it feel to be without hope?’ And that’s not what those who suffer need.

Each of us has suffered or will suffer at some time in our lives. The Book of Job was a preview of what can happen to the most faithful and to the least faithful. Yet, the greatest gift we can offer to one another is encouragement – encouragement through spoken or written word, through deeds however small or gracious, through intercessory prayer and through the kindness of recognition: ‘I know this is a difficult time for you and I am holding you in daily prayer.’ God’s gift of life is truly amazing!”

Just one more example of how cancer changes a person.

April 1, 2008 - The Center Does Hold

In Wendy Harpham’s book, Happiness in a Storm, she recalls a time when faith made a profound difference in her life. Wendy explains how she grew up with a strong appreciation of her religious tradition (Judaism). As a young adult, she – like so many others, of various religious traditions – put her active practice of faith on the back burner for a time. Then, along came lymphoma:

“During the weeks after my cancer diagnosis, I became preoccupied with existential questions. I had to know if I believed in God and, if so, if God could hear me. My rabbi came to my home regularly to pray and study with me. Over the next few years of cancer recurrences and various treatments, mystical experiences touched my soul and nourished my trust in a universal order beyond my farthest-stretched imagination.

My spiritual life took a dramatic turn one sizzling Texas day in mid-June of 1992 when I was strapped onto an icy-cold table in a chilly room, my head held motionless by a custom-made plastic mesh mask and the rest of me immobilized by fear – fear of imminent radiation therapy, fear of my lymphoma, and fear of pain and death. The technician shut the heavy lead door, leaving me the only living creature in the room. The machine’s light focused on my neck and chest, and a buzz sounded. Without realizing what I was doing, I started chanting in my head the familiar Hebrew words of the ancient central prayer of Judaism. The words of the Shema were rote, but the prayerfulness behind them was foreign and emanated from an unfamiliar part of me. I believe it came from my soul. What struck me was not the newfound spirituality of my fervent praying but that I felt heard. Mine was the only heartbeat in that radiation suite, but I was not alone. With all earthly distractions silenced, I experienced an indescribable sense of spiritual company in my physical aloneness. Once introduced to this awareness, I’ve been able to tap into it ever since. It brings me peace and strength whenever needed. Like Job, I don’t know if I connected with God in that radiation suite, not the way I know if I’m hungry or I know that two plus two equals four. I have faith, and it’s a faith that has made my life happier.”
– Wendy Schlessel Harpham, M.D., Happiness in a Storm: Facing Illness and Embracing Life as a Healthy Survivor (Norton, 2005), pp. 335-336.

(Thanks, Wendy, for sharing so forthrightly and so personally.)

I found much the same thing, as the reality of my cancer diagnosis sank in. As a preacher, I’d been teaching faith for many years, but there had always been certain aspects of the message I’d passed along secondhand. It’s hard to do otherwise, when you begin your ministry in your 20s. Much of what we preachers share from the pulpit is not our wisdom, anyway, but the wisdom of the church. We read, we talk to other people, we listen – and from these insights we distill what truth we can find. From such derived truths we construct many – if not most – of our sermons. Firsthand testimony is always the most compelling, but secondhand will do in a pinch: after all, it’s still testimony.

For me, that’s changing. Like Wendy, I’ve found that, the longer I traverse the high, windswept plain of cancer survivorship, the more I realize I’m not alone. It’s never been a burning-bush, nor a voice-from-a-whirlwind experience, but something more akin to the “sound of sheer silence” the prophet Elijah experienced:

“He said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” (1 Kings 19:11-12)

Biblical scholars have long debated the proper translation of that Hebrew phrase. In the New Revised Standard Version, it’s “a sound of sheer silence.” Earlier Bible versions go with “a still, small voice” – but, no one’s entirely happy with that translation, either. In her account, Wendy says simply, “Mine was the only heartbeat in that radiation suite, but I was not alone.” Her version is as good as any, I suppose.

I remember lying on my side on an examining-table in Dr. Lerner’s office, waiting for him to punch through my pelvis with a sharp, metal instrument and extract a sample of bone marrow. I was feeling scared at the prospect. I remember consciously centering my heart and soul on some far-off place. In that place, I knew I was not alone. I knew, then, the sound of sheer silence would get me through whatever pain might come (which, thankfully, wasn’t so bad, because Dr. Lerner is so adept at bone-marrow biopsies).

I’ve learned to practice that kind of centering on numerous occasions since, as I’ve dealt with other pains and discomforts that accompany cancer treatment. In recent days, I’ve been living through post-operative pain resulting from my hernia surgery, and that too has been more manageable than I’d guessed.

I realize that, in the cancer world, there are far more serious pains, far more grueling challenges than those I’ve had to undergo. Each fresh obstacle presents its own level of difficulty. Yet, I’m coming to realize this same principle holds true, at every level. God is right there with us. The sound of sheer silence speaks. Together we travel, one step at a time.

Isaiah puts it another way:

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.”
– Isaiah 43:2

It’s a combination of spiritual gift and learned response. That’s the only way I can describe it. And what is it we learn? In one of his most famous poems, “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats gives us a frightening image of chaos. He’s thinking, no doubt, of the collapse of civilization, but his words also evoke a more personal terror:

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned...”

Finding God in the midst of a personal struggle with illness, or some other crisis, leads me to realize that, yes, the center does hold, after all.

December 21, 2007 - Not On Our Knees?

I’m thinking about something I read the other day in Leroy Sievers’ “My Cancer” blog on the NPR website. Leroy’s the TV news producer who’s been struggling against colon cancer that's advanced to his brain and spine, and whom Ted Koppel recently profiled in a documentary on cancer survivorship.

In his December 18th entry, Leroy’s musing on the subject of strength, and where we find it. “Where does the strength come from to keep fighting, even when the odds may be stacked against us?” he asks, rhetorically.

Then, he dips into his rich experience in news broadcasting to come up with a potent image: “Back when I was working in Latin America, one of the rules was that if you were stopped at a roadblock, you never got on your knees. Others, including journalists, had been forced to kneel. Then they were executed. So the thinking was, never get on your knees. Well, I may have bad days. I may be weakened by the pain. It may be all I can do to fight through the day. But with all of that, I'm sure as hell not getting on my knees. Ever.”

So speaks a man who’s had some grueling days of late, but who’s determined not to give up. I think he’s right. The only way to persevere as cancer survivors is for us to refuse to get on our knees.

Of course, from the Christian standpoint, I’d be quick to point out another meaning of the phrase, “on our knees.” Sometimes it refers to prayer. Now there’s an “on our knees” experience that doesn’t symbolize resignation or defeat. We’d all do well to get on our knees, in that sense.

Some look on prayer as a weakness. It’s the last resort. “Say your prayers,” growls the evil villain in the movies, before finishing off his victims. Yet, the most effective prayers are those uttered not out of panic, in extreme situations, but rather as a joyful, ongoing spiritual discipline.

Leroy’s right. We shouldn’t bend the knee to cancer. Not ever. Yet, there is one to whom we can bend the knee, without fear of being destroyed. It is this one who gives life, even in the face of a fearsome adversary like cancer.

“Happy are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.

As they go through the valley of Baca they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools.

They go from strength to strength...”

– Psalm 84:5-7a

September 29, 2007 - Weaving the Safety Net

Last night a friend called me, to talk about her father, whose lung cancer has relapsed. She was anxious and upset, nearly beside herself with worry. For the first time she’d heard the dreaded words, “Stage IV.”

What could I do? What could I say? I’m fresh out of magic words that can make everything all right.

I did the only thing I could do. I listened. Every once in a while, I threw in some small piece of advice about navigating the cancer-care maze: the importance of sitting down with the whole family and talking frankly about the situation, the need to make sure the right-hand doctor knows what the left-hand doctor is doing, the value – nay, the necessity – of getting a second opinion (preferably from a specialist at an NCI-accredited Comprehensive Cancer Center).

By the end of the call, she seemed to feel much calmer. I didn’t do very much, really, other than listen. But that was enough. It was the needful thing.

Certain experiences in life are better done on our own: pulling on our clothes in the morning, ordering from a menu, deciding what book to bring along to read on a plane. Facing cancer isn’t one of them. No, when a cancer diagnosis looms, the first thing to do is assemble a posse.

Reynolds Price, poet and novelist, was a well-known figure in the literary world before he got cancer, and started writing about it. A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing tells the story of his treatment, mostly by surgery and radiation, for life-threatening spinal cancer. Never a man of overt religious faith, but always one of deep religious sensibility, he discovered a web of support he never knew was there: people who found their way to him at his darkest moments, people who prayed for him when he barely believed in prayer. Here’s something he wrote:

“One of the strongest and most ironic assurances came from a woman I hadn’t seen for years, who’d herself been placed in an isolation chamber for several days shortly before a whole capsule of radium was implanted in her body to bombard a pelvic cancer. She phoned me on a dismally low Sunday morning and, with no preface, calmly said, ‘I’ve called to tell you you’re not going to die of this cancer.’ Then she quoted the famous talisman lines from Psalm 91 that so many soldiers have taken to war,

‘He shall give his angels charge over thee;
to keep thee in all thy ways.’

Soon she was dead but her word on me is still in force.

At moments of exhaustion those unsought assurances could ring a little crazily. I well understood that the vast majority of human prayers get No for an answer, if any answer at all. I knew that my threatened life was surely not an exception to that dark rule.... But as things sped downward in my mind and body that summer and fall, and a blank wall was all the end I could see, those promises from friends of unquestioned sanity carried more weight with my battered mind than most other messages. Bad as I often felt, they seemed oddly credible. And I’m still not convinced I chose to trust them only because I needed to. Even now as I recall each one and the moment of its arrival, I can hear its battlefield-bulletin prose as welcome and trusty; and I take great care not to make empty promises to troubled friends unless, as I very rarely do, I have a firm sense of their ongoing luck.” (Reynolds Price, A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing – Plume, 1982, pp. 64-65.)

It was a pretty gutsy thing for that woman to do, phoning her friend and pronouncing medical absolution over him, when she wasn’t even a doctor. I don’t think I would be so bold. Yet, somehow, her preposterous prophecy seemed to make all the difference for Reynolds. Along with other good friends, she slid under him when he was falling, and caught him.

A weaver, creating a blanket, sends the loom’s shuttle sliding back and forth, again and again, crafting a web of gossamer thread that has far more strength than any one cord alone. This is what we do for each other, when the touch of cancer’s icy, skeleton finger would chill us to the bone. We wrap one another in listening, and, more rarely, speaking. We stand at the end of a frightful chasm and halloo our prayers into the darkness, then together await the echo.

Thank God we are not alone.

September 25, 2007 - Insurance Denied, Assurance Supplied

This morning I receive a phone call from Cindy, my new case manager from CIGNA Care Allies (last week, they moved my case from their general oncology division to their stem-cell transplant division, which necessitated a new case manager). She gets right to the point, informing me that a physician on their staff, reviewing my case, has denied Hackensack University Medical Center’s request for pre-approval of funding for donor-compatibility testing of my two brothers.

This denial, she’s quick to explain, is just for the donor testing. The reason their doctor gave is that I’ve not yet been approved for a transplant, so the testing of Jim and Dave is premature. Cindy will send me paperwork I can use to appeal this decision, if I wish. This is the type of call she hates to make, she adds (I can sympathize with her on that, on a personal level, but it doesn’t bring me a whole lot of comfort).

This decision doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, I explain. Isn’t the information about sibling donors essential to deciding whether or not a stem-cell transplant is the way to go? There’s also the element of time. Because sibling donor testing – and a subsequent search of the national donor registry, should that prove futile – can take a while, I thought the point was to get as much of this preliminary work out of the way as possible, in case future circumstances should make a transplant suddenly urgent. The insurance company evidently doesn’t operate that way. If it’s not urgent, it doesn’t matter how important it is.

Dr. Donato told me Hackensack offers a “Family and Friends Program,” a subsidized program that reduces the cost of donor-compatibility testing for patients whose insurance doesn’t cover this. I believe she said the subsidized cost was $150 per potential donor, which I would need to pay out of pocket. I didn’t pay close attention to her at the time, because I was assuming Highmark Blue Cross/Blue Shield would step up to the plate, but now I see why she mentioned it. Evidently, this sort of denial happens often enough that the hospital has developed its own work-around arrangement.

This is the first time, since I got sick, that any insurance claim of mine has been denied. I suppose I should count myself lucky that I’ve gone this long without getting the ol’ thumbs-down. Thanks to the Family and Friends Program, it’s not that large an amount of money; I’ll probably just pay for it myself, then submit an appeal and hope for the best. (I’d probably only have to pay for Dave’s testing, anyway, since Jim is evidently already in the national registry.)

Cindy’s call leaves me with a strange, empty feeling: more betrayal than anger. I don’t feel it as being directed towards her (she’s just the messenger), but rather towards the nameless doctor on the insurance company’s payroll who wields the rubber stamp. Who is this guy, anyway, and what makes him think he knows more than Dr. Donato, a nationally-regarded stem-cell transplant specialist?

I put all this out of my mind, reminding myself that I haven’t even heard from HUMC’s Tumor Board yet (I’m supposed to call Brenda tomorrow, to find out their recommendation).

This evening, I attend a meeting of Monmouth Presbytery – the regional governing body of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) of which I’m a member. In the past year or so, the presbytery has been meeting less frequently, about four times a year. Some of my fellow presbyters I haven’t seen in quite some time. I swiftly lose count of the number of people who come up to me, shake my hand, and ask, “How are you?” – with emphasis on the “are.”

It’s not just a casual “How ya doin?” There’s a genuine desire to hear some details. I know most of my minister colleagues in the presbytery, but a good many of these people who come up to me with words of support are elders (elected lay leaders) from other churches – some of whose faces I recognize, but whose names don’t come readily to mind. I’m been on their church’s prayer list, they explain, and they’ve been concerned about me.

It’s a very different experience, this evening, than I had with my insurance company this morning – although, of course, the circumstances are quite different. In both cases, there are people I don’t know who have been considering my medical situation. Some of those people responded by wielding the dreaded rubber stamp. Others joined hands in prayer.

Note to self: Never forget to be thankful for the church of Jesus Christ, which has a way of coming through when you need it.

September 16, 2007 - A Hole in the Roof

This morning I’ve got a guest-preaching gig at the Morning Star Presbyterian Church of Bayville, New Jersey. This is a first for me. Never once, in a quarter-century of ministry, has anybody asked for a rerun of one of my sermons.

The sermon is one I preached for Morning Star ten years ago, at their chartering service, when they were formally established as a congregation. A few months ago, I was surprised and pleased to learn from my friend, Myrlene, their pastor, that my sermon of ten years ago influenced the architecture of their new building (into which they’ve recently moved). That’s why they wanted me to repeat it – or, at least to preach on the same scripture passage.

I’ve had sermons result in all sorts of things, over the years: action, discussion, questions, jeers, slumber. Usually, the effects of sermons are pretty ephemeral. Never before have I had a sermon result in architecture.

The new Morning Star Church has a cupola, which sheds borrowed light into their worship space. Their roof is not literally open to the elements, of course, but symbolically it is. Several of their members insisted on this, I’m told.

The sermon is on Mark 2:1-12, the story of one of Jesus’ healings. This is the story that includes the rather colorful detail of a paralyzed man on a stretcher being lowered through a hole in the roof – this, in order to get around the crowds who are pressing so tightly around the house that no one can get in.

What I said to the people of Morning Star ten years ago – and repeat to them today – is that they need to keep a hole in the roof, so hurting people may continue to find a way in. Some long-established churches have a way of forgetting how to do that: focusing more on serving the needs of their members than welcoming those from outside their walls. New churches like Morning Star tend to be pretty good at this, but the more years of history a church accrues, the harder it becomes to maintain a missional outlook.

Today is a day I’ll always remember. One of the frustrations of ministry – particularly the wordsmithery that is preaching – is that tangible results are so hard to identify. Plenty of preachers have retired after many decades in the pulpit, wondering if they’ve made much of a difference. However long I remain healthy and am able to continue in ministry, I’ll always be able to recall that, in south-central New Jersey, there’s a church that keeps a symbolic hole in its roof, because of something I said to them back in 1997.

During the service, reminders of cancer are all around. Myrlene’s late husband, Ed – a minister who co-founded the church along with her – died several years ago of brain cancer. Candy, a church member who’s leading the intercessory prayers, asks for prayers for herself, as she’s recovering from breast-cancer surgery. Another woman asks for prayers, remembering the loss of several family members to multiple myeloma. A man tells how he's preparing for kidney surgery in a few weeks – again, a cancer diagnosis.

Most churches, in fact, are filled with people whom cancer has touched – either directly, or indirectly through family members and close friends. They are like the crowds pressed around Jesus, in that little house in Capernaum.

Let us always remember to make room for more!

July 24, 2007 - Providence

Yesterday, I was supposed to have a PET/CT fusion scan and an accompany- ing CT scan. That didn’t happen, because the PET/CT fusion scanner broke down. Atlantic Medical Imaging called yesterday morning to tell me not to bother to come in. Of course, I’d already drunk half a bottle of the chalky contrast fluid the night before, as instructed.

Oh, well. I’ll just have to repeat the procedure on Wednesday night, for my rescheduled Thursday scan. Through a fortunate error, they gave me an extra bottle of the lovely stuff, so at least I don’t have to make an extra trip to their facility to pick up another.

I wonder what medical-imaging companies do when their high-tech machinery breaks down? Call the repair service, I guess. Does the dispatcher tell them, “Make sure somebody’s there tomorrow, sometime between 8 am and 4 pm?” I have visions of some guy showing up in a panel truck, wearing a toolbelt over his greasy, low-riding jeans, saying, “OK, show me where ya got dis here PET scanner...”

Today, I’ve been reading an excellent article, “Security Check,” from the July 10 issue of The Christian Century. It was recommended to me by Carol, a friend and ministry colleague. It’s an excerpt from an upcoming book by Scott Bader-Saye of the Unversity of Scranton, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear (Brazos Press).

Bader-Saye tells the story of an acquaintance of his, a cancer patient named Steve, who received a letter from a well-meaning, but theologically clueless friend. This woman knew – she just knew – God would heal Steve, if he would only believe.

The letter didn’t bring a whole lot of comfort, because Steve was astute enough to realize the implication: if he did not receive a gift of miraculous healing, it would be his fault, because he did not have enough faith.

Steve was offended enough by the letter to venture a reply, even though – because of his weakened condition – he had to call on his brother to write down his words:

“I share your faith in the almighty power of God to heal and sustain us. There may be times, though, when God's greatest miracle is not the miracle of physical healing, but the miracle of giving us strength in the face of suffering. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 12 that he prayed God would remove a thorn in the flesh, but God answered simply, "My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness . . . for when I am weak, then am I strong." Also, Jesus prayed in the garden that he might not suffer, but it was God's will, and he faced that suffering with a perfect faith.

As I read the Bible, God's promise is to remove all our suffering in the next life, though not necessarily in this one. In this world, we will sometimes weep, suffer and die. But in the New Jerusalem, ‘God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away’ (Revelation 2:14).

I sincerely hope that if my cancer continues to grow, no one will see it as a failure of my faith in God, but that perhaps people can see me as faithful even if I die while I am still young. I do not claim to understand God's will, but I do know that I am in God's hands, whether in life or in death.”

Commenting on the woman’s letter, Bader-Saye speaks of the theological doctrine of providence, which many people take to be synonymous with a promise of protection. It’s not:

“She mistook God's promise to provide for a guarantee to protect, and once she had done that, she could only lay the blame for Steve's cancer at his own feet. Once she had ruled out the possibility that the cancer could result from chance or misfortune (and her understanding of providence left no room for contingency), she assumed that someone had to be blamed for the illness. This perverse theological form of adding insult to injury results from misunderstanding the connection between providence and security. Providence does not guarantee protection; rather, it assures us of God's provision (making a way for us to go on) and redemption (restoring what is lost along the way).”

I like that. I’ve never taken providence to mean protection, myself, but Bader-Saye reminds me anew that God promises to provision us for the journey, however difficult it may be. As the most beloved of Psalms reassures us:

“Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff –
they comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4)

God doesn’t spare us the arduous journey – but God does hand us a rucksack, filled with provisions for it (if only we are willing to accept the gift). And, at journey’s end, we are welcomed with a feast that redeems the suffering:

“You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.” (23:5)

The only thing my cup’s overflowing with, these days, is radioactive contrast fluid, but no matter. There will be other cups, and more meaningful libations.

June 16, 2007 - Labyrinth

I arise today at Presbyterian Camp Johnsonburg, where I’ve spent the night. It’s our church’s Family Retreat weekend. I like to attend at least a portion of this event each year, before heading back home to finish my sermon and conduct Sunday worship services.

Most retreat participants are families with young children. It’s a nice opportunity for them to get away and spend time together and with other families. Because Robin, our associate pastor, advises the planning committee, I have little to do, other than be here and enjoy the kids and their parents at play. It’s a refreshing change.

This morning, between the fishing and rowing on the lake and the noontime barbecue, I take a stroll over to the camp’s labyrinth – a walking-path in a sort of spiral pattern, whose boundaries are laid out with smooth stones. The camp staff put it in a few years ago, at the height of the labyrinth craze, as Christians were rediscovering this medieval devotional practice.

Most modern labyrinths are modeled after the famous one in Chartres Cathedral, in France. The idea is to spiral your way slowly into the center, then turn around and make your way back out again. Nothing could be more simple – or, more weighty with non-verbal meaning.

Johnsonburg’s labyrinth is pretty rustic, which is part of its appeal. It’s overdue for a little spring cleaning, but I don’t mind. Bright green seedlings poke their heads up amidst the stones, and the walkways are dusted with the crumbling detritus of last fall’s leaves.

From walking other labyrinths in times past, I’ve learned the best thing to do is to simply empty my mind and see what happens. This one has a rude wooden cross set up on a cairn of stones in the middle. When I reach it, I stand there and contemplate the cross for a moment, then realize I was probably meant to carry a stone in with me and place it on the pile. No matter. I see someone else’s stone lying on the ground nearby, evidently toppled from the top of the cairn. I pick it up and drop it onto the pile. Recycling is a good thing.

As I make my way out again, it occurs to me that this labyrinth-walk has some parallels to a human life. The first part of our lives is spent on a Godward journey, a spiritual quest. At one point or another – typically, closer to the end of life than its beginning – most of us start to become more concerned with what we’re leaving behind, than with what we’re attaining for ourselves. This is a fundamental turning, and for Christians it can occur as we’re contemplating the cross of Jesus. In one sense, it’s the vision of the cross that allows us to complete that turning.

Not that religious people have a monopoly on this kind of thinking. It’s a common- enough experience, in any human life – part of the process of maturation. The adult developmental psychologists speak of it as a season of generativity, as we come to think more about giving back than getting (see my November 20, 2006 blog entry for more on this).

Political scientists speak of second-term Presidents becoming increasingly concerned with their “legacy” – with how future historians are going to view them. That’s just one example of the secular form of this turning, which is expressed in Christian spiritual terms as a mid-life call to repentance and renewal.

At 50, I’m already a bit past the mid-point of my life (according to the average life expectancy for American men). The cancer adds a whole new ingredient. Sprinkle some positive CT-scan results into the actuarial stew, and you’d be well-advised to set the kitchen timer to go off a little sooner. I don’t think I’m being morbid or pessimistic as I say that. It’s just the facts – and, incidentally, the reason I got turned down last fall, as I tried to buy additional life insurance. Maybe I’ll be lucky, and live well into my 80s or 90s, as I always figured I would. My cousin Andy, who’s always touting the value of “good MacKenzie genes,” will insist I’m being alarmist in even thinking this way. But the actuaries, squinting through their Coke-bottle glasses, think not.

Cancer has carried me to the center of the labyrinth, to the place of turning, a bit sooner than most people. At the moment, I’m alone in this peaceful, woodland spot – yet, if I envision the company of all my fellow travelers walking beside me, most of them look older and grayer than me.

Of course, when I look at myself in the mirror, I realize I’m a good bit grayer than I used to be. It happens. Yet, still, I don’t feel ready to make the turning.

Enough of this. Back to the children.

October 22, 2006 - Power Grid

I conducted a couple of difficult funerals this week. No funeral is easy, but each of these involved men in their thirties – the sort of death that’s just not supposed to happen. One man died in a car accident, the other from stomach cancer that was diagnosed only four or five months ago.

Both funerals involved the familiar ritual of family and friends gathering at the funeral home, for what is blandly and euphemistically called “visiting hours.” In my more than 25 years of ordained ministry, I’ve been to more of these gatherings than I could possibly count. It goes with the territory, when you’re in ministry.

There’s not a lot that happens, during visiting hours (or so it would appear, to the untrained eye). After spending a few moments greeting the bereaved family and expressing words of sympathy, most guests simply sit or stand around, sharing small talk with neighbors. It’s one of the few occasions in life when all you have to do is show up.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize there’s a lot more going on during visiting hours. What the eye sees is but the tip of the iceberg.

There’s a new book called Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, by Daniel Goleman, that’s been getting a lot of press. I haven’t read it, but from the reviews, it appears to have a lot to say about what goes on behind the scenes in many human interactions.

Based on psychological research, Goleman’s point is that a large portion of our emotional interactions are non-verbal, and take place on a subconscious level. In an October 10th essay in the New York Times, “Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing,” Goleman describes his findings:

“Research on the link between relationships and physical health has established that people with rich personal networks – who are married, have close family and friends, are active in social and religious groups – recover more quickly from disease and live longer. But now the emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of how people’s brains entrain as they interact, adds a missing piece to that data.

The most significant finding was the discovery of ‘mirror neurons,’ a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.”

Goleman reports that some researchers have used language like “the merging of two discrete physiologies into a connected circuit.” They think they’ve found evidence in brain chemistry to prove the existence of such a connection. While the physiology of this brain-to-brain link is highly speculative at this point, there does seem to be some circumstantial evidence that such a link exists: such as one study that asked women volunteers to submit to MRI imaging, while awaiting a mild electrical shock. When one of these experimental subjects waited alone, her anxiety level increased. When a stranger held her hand, her anxiety level was unchanged. Yet, when the woman’s husband held her hand, “she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue.”

No, there’s a lot going on during visiting hours in the funeral home – as people awkwardly mill around, seemingly doing nothing. They may not be consciously aware of it, but they’ve come there that day to plug into the power grid of spiritual and emotional support. By their mere presence in the room, they lend strength to their bereaved family, friends or neighbors.

Centuries ago, the Elizabethan preacher and poet John Donne penned these famous words, as he wondered, during a time of plague, whether the funeral bells from a nearby church might soon be tolling for him:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” ("Meditation XVII," from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions)

One thing my cancer has taught me is the importance of these connections between people. We can be agents of each other’s healing.