Through the doorway, pt 1

“You have many more years together.” The room is dimly lit, with essential oils vaporizing into the air, Christmas lights twined around a fake fern plant, and a small group of men and women gathered around an elderly couple. Their hands look welded together, and over the years they match one another like puzzle pieces made of flesh and bone. The woman lets out a deep shudder of relief.

A cancer diagnosis is one of those things, at least at the time of writing this, that can feel like the world has fallen down with all its weight on top of you. The word itself is synonymous with death, evil, and the end of things. So when my friend received news of the discovery of an aggressive lung cancer they were understandably distressed.

This friend and his wife are a part of a loving, communal, charismatic, and prophetic church. This church's response was to gather around the couple and to pray, a beautiful response. Often in this context some well-meaning individual will share what they feel is encouraging and perhaps they also believe it is prophetic. I have my speculation about the motive… but in this case what was shared was, "We hear that you have many more years together. This is going to work out. You have many more years."

Well, he has a pretty aggressive form of lung cancer. And this time there was no miracle of healing. He did not survive three months. 

I would expect grief. Confusion. Pain. The shell shocked, cottonmouthed, fearful silence that moves in like a coat to wrap itself around the widow. I did not expect this particular church to offer my late-friend’s wife a reinterpretation of their words, "Those many more years are in Heaven. They are coming. You guys get those together and it's going to be okay."

This isn’t a blog about prophecy or miracles or the understanding of suffering. I am still a student of it. What I do know is that suffering is promised to us, though we are told to take heart for the world has been overcome (John 16:33 ESV). This is an invitation to take note of how we respond to the suffering of those around us, and of our own suffering.

What happened in the case of my friend was that his community dissociated from the heavy news of the diagnosis. How? Because they went straight to, "It's going to be fine. Don't worry about it. You're going to get healed." We have such little capacity to sit in the devastation without trying to fix it.

And then again, when my friend wasn't healed, his community dissociated once more by reinterpreting with, "Oh, those many more years together are actually in the future." They left them alone in the suffering of the diagnosis and the fear of walking through the doorway of death.

What would it have looked like instead for us to hold hope while acknowledging the very real likelihood that this might be his final weeks? Can we learn to journey with others in the shadowy lands of the unknown? Can we experience suffering because it is part of what it means to be human, which also lets us experience joy? 

Can we slow down so that we might be more intentional and actually live our lives, not just survive them? This is a paradox, as are you. In naming our limitations, we access the infinite. 

In opening up to our grief and our losses, we access our joys and the hope of real gain. 

As my friend Dr. Dan Allender once told me, “we are but drops of dew in the morning sun…  here for a moment and then gone”. It is my hope that my legacy, and the legacy of the people that choose to live with this paradox, is that we cultivate a resilience that can push us into suffering. 

It is a posture that does not shirk away from the doorway that is coming. In slowing down in the daily, we actually live our lives.

The Wild Iris

by Louise Gluck

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little.  And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.