This post is a part of a series which features an assortment of adroit voices exploring how to think theologically about cancer and those who have it. Read the series introduction or view all posts in the series.

Like others have mentioned, there will be profanity in this post. If you don't like that - go ahead and skip this post.

Jake asked me to blog about cancer and theology. At first, I wasn't sure I'd have much to say. I mean, I don't have cancer. But then, I got thinking and realized that my grandmommy died of cancer and my granddaddy died of cancer and my uncle died of cancer and my father had a run in with skin cancer. I also served as a chaplain for a summer in a hospital and met many people suffering from cancer.

Now, I don't know if all that necessarily qualifies me for having anything of worth to say about cancer. But. On October 25, 2010, my wife and I lost our two twin baby boys, Micah and Judah, just shy of 20 weeks into our pregnancy.

While infant loss and cancer are very different scenarios, they both fuck with your mind, your faith and everything else — so... I guess that counts for some ability to muse about faith-disrupting diseases and losses.

When we lost our babies, it was like time stood still. I knew shitty things happened to people during pregnancies, but I didn't imagine it would happen to us. Why would it happen to us?

Of course I went into the whole theological debate with myself about where God was in all of this, whether God caused this happen, why God would let this happen... and all of those other thoroughly unhelpful questions that one cannot but help to ask in the beginning.

Then I just got pissed. Like, really pissed. At the time, I owned a little 150cc scooter. One afternoon, I took a ride out on some country roads and drove as fast as my little scooter would take me (about 65mph). Once you can get the comical image out of your mind of a guy racing through the country on a scooter screaming at the top of his lungs... I'm guessing you might be able to relate with that anger.

I was angry at God.

Fortunately, we had many people in our lives who cared about us and wanted to do what they could. My Facebook Wall was filled with kind sentiments, prayers and lamentations. People brought prepared meals to our home. They sent cards and flowers and text messages. And it all helped. It really did.

But then the cards stopped coming.

The food no longer was delivered to our house.

The flowers died.

My faith began to be messed with.

And everyone else's life went on, back to normal. And we were left alone, trying to figure out what life meant after the death of our sons.

Jake didn't want us addressing his specific cancer, but I need to say that when I first heard about his diagnosis, I remember seeing it on Facebook and just saying, "Shit." I don't remember what I wrote, but it was short, and I just wanted him to know that I knew.

I followed his subsequent tweets and video/blog updates with great interest. I wanted him to know I was there, at least digitally, for him.

But then life caught up with me. Things got busy. And I had to get on with life after his diagnosis.

No matter how great the support of your partner, family, faith community, and others is, at some point, you will be left alone with your grief and frustration and anxiety and loss. And it's at those times when I had to try to come to terms with the fact that somehow, God was with me in my faith-disrupting dark night of the soul. I wasn't sure how it all worked out theologically, and to be honest, at that time, that wasn't very important to me. What was important was knowing that God was as pissed and angry about the death of Micah and Judah as I was, and God was sitting with me, with us, in our sadness and suffering.

So, if I had to share with someone a theological one-liner that might be appropriate for people in these tragic situations of death, loss, cancer and grief... it'd probably be something like:

"Know that somehow... God is with you in this. God is just as pissed and angry about this shitty situation, and God is there with you, suffering with you."

Adam Walker Cleaveland is a Presbyterian pastor, father of 3 (1 living), husband, social media consultant, Apple fanboy, progressive Christian who lives in Ashland, Oregon. You can find him online at Pomomusings, Dazed Dad, Facebook, Twitter and of course, Google+.

The latest video update is below. If you're unable to see the embedded video, click here to watch it on YouTube.

If you don't mind, please be sure to "like" the video by clicking the thumbs-up while it's paused. Thanks!

As I mention in the video, one of the things I find myself struggling with lately is how to balance the continuing documentation of my treatment and all of its side-effects while remaining sensitive to the fact that nobody wants to watch video after video of me complaining and/or sleeping/vomiting/cramping, etc. In fact, during those times the last thing I think to do is reach for the video camera; I'd rather reach for (1) my wife or (2) some form of medication, and not necessarily always in that order.

Truth be told, I am starting to get really annoyed by the whole process. I am actually angered by the mere fact that I have to go in again on Friday ("...but I just started feeling better, damnit!") to get the next treatment — so much so that the thought of it makes my body respond by becoming nauseous (which, subsequently just makes me angrier). But yet I remain committed to documenting this whole crazy thing, and part of that documentation is the fact that life goes on despite the occasional interruption of chemotherapy and its terribly annoying and sometimes debilitating side effects.

This Friday is treatment number six, a number that seems unbelievable in two totally opposing ways: "It's already treatment number six?!" and "You're telling me I have to do this three more times?!" Oscillation between extreme optimism and pessimism is something that having cancer and enduring its treatment has made me uncomfortably familiar with. Again with the How-do-you-document-that-experience-on-film-without-being-a-Debbie-Downer? thing. Sometimes it seems as if the biggest battle is fought in the arena of my mind; the aforementioned oscillation isn't something that occurs over the course of days, it more frequently happens within the course of a single hour. One minute I'm convinced I'm at 100% and determined to be Really Productive Today and the next I'm hit with a wave of tiredness (a relatively benign side effect, I know) and convinced that Today Totally Sucks.

Thankfully, hope isn't contingent upon the scale of optimism overwhelmingly outweighing the scale of pessimism; it requires but the most infinitesimal difference. And in the grand scheme of things, hope always manages to win, even if by a hair. That's why, all optimism/pessimism talk aside: Let's freaking do this.

This post is a part of a series which features an assortment of adroit voices exploring how to think theologically about cancer and those who have it. Read the series introduction or view all posts in the series.

Our family is moving. As we pack up our stuff, making sure that each item is securely packaged, I’m also shifting things inside myself. My husband is going to start a new church. For the first time in fourteen years, I will not be a pastor serving a particular congregation.

As I sorted through this transition, my daughter asked why I loved being a pastor so much. I thought about my job and a list of duties ran through my head. It was not the business meetings, volunteer arm-twisting, or endless emails that made me satisfied at the end of a long day. I enjoyed preaching and teaching, but when I imagined what I loved, the first thing that came mind was that invitation to a person's side during those sacred moments.

"I'm with people in the most difficult times of their lives," I answered. "I pray with them and try to remind them that God is with them." I remembered the days of sitting beside a hospital bed, holding hands, praying the Psalms, and eventually standing over a person as they journeyed over from life to death. The experience always transformed us — both of us. When we understood our mortality, that feeling of absolute dependence grew and we learned something about God.

As I moved the boxes up to the attic, I was thankful for our sturdy, climate controlled, weather-proofed home. We lived here for almost seven years. When it was cold, we stayed warm. When it rained, we remained dry. When it was hot, I turned on the air conditioner. Even when a hurricane hit last year, the only destruction the storm could manage was blowing off a bit of side trim.

Most of us have houses that keep us separated from the outside elements. Many of us have jobs in offices with air conditioning and heat. Usually, we drive from our homes to work with regulated temperatures in our cars.

In the history of the world, have we ever done such a superb job controlling our environment? I don’t mean the larger environment — that is terribly out-of-whack. I just mean those tiny, dry, 73 degree bubbles in which we work and live — the rooms that are full of the humming of computers, the buzzing of lightbulbs, and the whispers from air-blowing vents.

I wonder if that particular, personal comfort is a small part of why there is a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward religious beliefs in our country. Think about it. If it stormed and we felt the brutality of wind and soak, if our food source came directly from the soil in our own fields, and if a water shortage meant nothing to drink, I imagine we would pray a bit more. Instead, we find shelter, go to the grocery store, and turn on a faucet.

In short, we’re out of touch with our own mortality. We pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," when our real supplication may be "God, help me to stay on this diet." When we come face-to-face with our human frailty, we tend to learn something about the nature of God. As it is, many of us do not feel that absolute dependence.

This Atlantic Monthly article says that when we become more aware of the end of our lives, we long to become a part of something larger than ourselves. I have certainly seen that happen. I appreciate this analysis, and yet it tends to reduce religion to a Terror Management tool. Religion becomes one of those moving boxes, a place where we can enfold our fears in order to get them out of the way. Terror Management Theory does not convey the flood peace and strength that the presence of God can give in these times of waiting beside the bed.

Usually, I sit with people who have cancer. Cancer creeps into the sturdiest of homes and even when we are dry and seventy-three degrees, it reminds us of our mortality. If we live long enough, most of us will have an irregular tumor, lump in the breast, blood in our urine, or another tell-tale sign of cancer’s effect. Cancer can leave us with fear and desperation. It can cut lives much too short. Other times, we become inspired by the great resilience of people who beat the odds. We want to grasp on to life with all of its abundance, extracting meaning from each moment.

In all of it, we understand the depth of what Friedrich Schleiermacher called the "feeling of absolute dependence." We become fully aware that it is in God that we live and move and have our being. Schleiermacher is considered to be the father of liberal Christian theology; however, I think he has had a considerable, unwitting impact on evangelical theology as well. (The "feeling of absolute dependence" sounds a lot like the "God-shaped vacuum" to me.) His work impacts us all.

As our lives move and shift, as we sort out the importance of who we are, as we gain perspective on our days, and as we struggle with something as profound as cancer, may we always be aware of our absolute dependence.

Carol Howard Merritt is a pastor at Western Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Reframing Hope and Tribal Church. She blogs at TribalChurch.org, which is hosted by the Christian Century and she cohosts God Complex Radio with Derrick Weston.

Above: Dietrich Bonhoeffer poses with boys who have just been confirmed (Spring 1932). After Confirmation the boys of the Zion's Church congregation have a weekend getaway.

On the evening of April 9, 1938, Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached a sermon he'd written for his small group of confirmation students — Maximilian von Wedemeyer, Spes von Bismarck, and Hans-Friederich von Kleist-Retzow — on the estate of the Kleist-Retzow family.

Though penned nearly seventy-five years ago, his words to the young confirmands are, in my opinion, as germane and stirring as ever.

Unfortunately, the text of Bonhoeffer's sermon, based on Mark 9:24, is buried deep within Volume 15 of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works series: Theological Education Underground, 1937-1940.

At the church where I serve, we recently had a group of young people confirmed. The week before the worship service in which the Affirmation of Baptism occurs, we hold a banquet for family, friends, and mentors of the confirmands. We break bread together, share stories, and (perhaps most importantly!) walk through the upcoming worship service so everyone is on the same page.

This year, however, while folks were eating their meals, I decided to read Bonhoeffer's confirmation sermon in it's entirety. While attempting to cobble together my own remarks, I kept coming back to Bonhoeffer's own words and eventually resolved just to read his sermon instead.

Though I probably shouldn't be, I was surprised at how well the folks at the banquet received Bonhoeffer's words; I quickly decided that I had just begun a new tradition. I'll be sending out a physical copy of the sermon to all the confirmands' families as well.

Because myself and others found the experience so moving, and because of the small amount of people who actually own Volume 15 of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works series, I am making the full text of his confirmation sermon available on this website in both Microsoft Word format and PDF, which can be downloaded below (the proper MLA attribution is available within the files).

Download Bonhoeffer-ConfirmationSermon.docx (132kb)	Download Bonhoeffer-ConfirmationSermon.pdf (73kb)

Feel free to use however this however you see fit. If you do wind up using it somehow, I'd be thrilled if you left a comment on this blog post describing when/how you worked it into your confirmation festivities. And if you see a typo in the Word document (I had to transcribe the whole thing) please let me know, and I'll get it fixed!

This post is a part of a series which features an assortment of adroit voices exploring how to think theologically about cancer and those who have it. Read the series introduction or view all posts in the series.

Warning: I'm going to start crassly and swear in this post... so if you don't like that kind of thing, do something else on the internet.

Jake asked specifically to NOT address his cancer in this post, so I won't, rather I'll do what I’ve tried to do with all my own theological work: I'll try to seek for God by addressing my own existential issues with this demon called cancer.

But to do that I first need to reference Jake one more time, before completely taking the spotlight off him and placing it on my borderline narcissistic self, (which I suspect many of the rest of you share with me, and talking about terminal diseases exposes it in us all). I say this as much as a confession as anything else, so here it is...

When I found out Jake had cancer I had two EQUAL emotions that moved into direct contemplation. First, I thought, Damn! poor Jake, how awful! This really, really sucks for him. I even prayed, Lord, have mercy.

But almost with the same intensity that I thought this, pretty much simultaneously, I found myself also thinking, Better him than me!

I know it sounds harsh; I know it makes me a true a-hole. But, it is cancer! There is little else in the world that I fear as much.

Then, like branches from a tree, the second emotion led to two reactions. Hearing it was Jake and not me, I felt both relief and dread at the same time. I felt relief that again somehow I had avoided the odds, missing out, at least for a few more days, on the arrival of the dark demon named cancer. But that relief was contaminated by another feeling: dread. I knew that if Jake could get it, then this demon was certainly real, and no made-up boogie man.

Life really is the linking of experiences and emotions into some kind of frayed but mystically-whole narrative. Our lives are stories that propel us from one plotline to another, building on themselves as they go.

The thing I hate about cancer, truly the thing that takes my breath away in fear, is how it appears, how it seems to bite like a shark, when you least expect it. Your life is going along just fine, as you bob in the turquoise water of your beach vacation, right there in the middle of your life, bang! you’re told it is in peril, the turquoise water turns red as the dead-eyed beast grabs your leg, as cancer takes its hold, thanks to the sterile emotion-less diagnosis of an overworked doctor.

It is the interruption, like teeth penetrating skin sinking to bone, it is the taking of your life’s unfolding and the beating it with a baseball bat that seems so terrible. Even in films, when it happen, when cancer is diagnosed, when it strikes, I'm sent existential. I'm man enough to admit it, I guess, even when I watched Stepmom, when Susan Sarandon’s character got cancer, I cried like a four year old with a bloody skinned knee. I cried because of the interruption, the way that cancer sought to steal her time with her children, to take from them the love of their mother. Cancer is an interruption that divides and separates. That’s why it is a demon; it is the work of demons to divide and separate, to interrupt so that they can steal.

One of my earliest memories was the dividing and separating that cancer, the demon, does. My first friend Benjamin, when we were both four years old, was struck with cancer, and dead months later. At four I watched it interrupt everything, stopping, like a car hitting a cement wall, the unfolding life of a child. I watched the shattering interruption as his parents dealt with the division and separation. And it all started so unassumingly, just with the spotting of a lump under the armpit of a child at bath; and then, then a test, then another, then the words of a doctor telling you that your unfolding life is fucked. And then months later the same doctor says that the interruption will win, that a little boy must be taken by the demon and his body put in that so unnaturally small casket and sent to nothingness.

I hate and fear cancer because of the interruption it brings, because it comes right out of the clear blue sky, blinding you to your future, taking you from love, from otherness, from the embrace we need to be human. Taking you from your very body, stripping you of hair and weight as it cages you in an insatiable concentration camp of violent interruption.

But not only cancer, not only do demons interrupt. So too does the act of God. So too comes God out of the clear blue sky to change all things. Saul's life is unfolding, he is firmly on the trajectory that his life has led him to, a Jew of Jews, circumcised on the eighth day as a member of the tribe of Benjamin. But then, he is struck, he is encountered and all is interrupted.

But this interruption does not act in the shadows with no name, as the demon cancer does, not as the statement of disease, not to divide and separate. Rather, this act of God's interruption comes in the encounter of personhood. It is I, Jesus, whom you persecute. He is the one, the person, to interrupt. And in this person, in the personal interruption, Saul is transformed (an interruption that moves from death to life). Saul becomes Paul; for Paul is not divided or separated but interrupted to be given to others. Paul is interrupted to be given union, to be found "in Christ."

The hope of the gospel, the hope for all those with cancer like Jake, or scared to death of it, like me, is that this God of Jesus Christ is a God that will stand in the breach. This God is given to us, to be person for us, so that He might overcome all division and separation, so that all demons may be cast out, and all that separated may be overcome in love, mercy, and wholeness. This God gives us Godself, so that the dying of our lives might be interrupted by the new life of a coming eschaton, of a new reality, made so in resurrection.

It is only a vision of a crucified God, a resurrected God that calls us to His person. It is I, Jesus! gives me hope that even if the demon comes, even if it is tomorrow, interrupting everything in my life, keeping me from embracing my children, from years with my wife, taking my life, that I will still live. For though the demon may kill me, my life is hidden in the love of the Father to the Son. A love that knows, that embraces, and indwells death, so that it has no more power to finally and completely separate and divided.

So I say to you cancer, “Fuck off, for my life is in Jesus, and though I am too weak and too scared to face you, my God has faced you down, being broken for me, and in so doing overcoming you by bearing you, so that your work of breaking has no power over me. I trust this as an act of faith... but still, just as much as an act of faith, I admit it, I’m still fucking scared.”

Andrew Root, PhD (Princeton Theological Seminary) is in Olson Baalson chair as Associate Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. He is the author of The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry (with Kenda Creasy Dean, IVP, 2011), The Children of Divorce: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being (Baker Academic, 2010), Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation (IVP, 2007) and Relationships Unfiltered (Zondervan/YS, 2009).

Above: Libby and I share a laugh at the fire while on retreat last weekend.

The latest video update is below. If you're unable to see the embedded video, click here to watch it on YouTube.

If you don't mind, please be sure to "like" the video by clicking the thumbs-up while it's paused. Thanks!

Additional, non-video updates

• I had heard rumors of this, but it looks like it's official now: My friend Erik is running the Dam to Dam 20K in early June and is raising money for Libby and I to help cover the cost of our medical bills, prescriptions, etc. His fundraising site is here. I share this not to solicit your donations (though they're obviously welcome), but to point again to the insane generosity of the people in my life. Erik is working his butt off to train for the event, and he's decided to tithe 10% of all donations to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Additionally, he says that if three people donate $200, he'll let me shave his head. This could be fun...
• The retreat at the farm was utterly fantastic. The video pretty much sums it up — lots of good food, rest, reading, and impromptu disc golf. Thanks again to Brandon and Abbey for hosting us. It was exactly what we needed.
• As you saw in the video, I had a pulmonary function test using a Plethysmograph on Wednesday. I won't hear the results until tomorrow, and I'm not entirely sure if this was a "baseline" test or whether they're able to ascertain problems without having had a test before treatment began. Either way, the following lines from a recent LLS email weren't very encouraging:
  

  My 12 rounds of chemotherapy ended in the fall of 2010. Unfortunately, I sustained lung damage from one of the chemotherapy agents and had to spend three weeks in the hospital recovering.

  Three weeks! Here's to hoping my lungs are in good shape.

That's all for now. Chemo treatment number five is tomorrow!

There's a very real chance that I have made it halfway through my chemotherapy treatment. In the video you'll hear the doctor explain other treatment path possibilities, but as of right now, I'm cautiously optimistic — there was a smaller tumor at the base of my neck that neither myself or the doctor can feel anymore, which is a pretty good indication that the disease is receding.

The latest video update is below. If you're unable to see the video embedded below, click here to watch it on YouTube.

And again, if you don't mind, please be sure to "like" the video by clicking the thumbs-up while it's paused. Thanks!

Additional, non-video updates

• The Kickstarter campaign for our documentary has officially ended, and we wound up crushing our original goal of $7,500; the final tally is a staggering $10,410! As Nate said in today's backer-only email: "Jake and I have a lot of work ahead of us, as a bunch more doors are opening for this project to make it even better, both monetarily (again thanks!) and production-wise." E.g., I bet you didn't know that we already have an incredible musician lined up to score the whole documentary, did you? Anyhoo. I'm totally convinced that this documentary is going to do amazing things, so one more time: Thank you. I suppose all that's left to do is fully recover and, you know, make the actual documentary.
• This Friday and Saturday, Libby and I are heading to a little farm in NE Iowa for some rest, relaxation, reading, and solitude. Our good friends Brandon and Abbey extended us an unbelievably gracious offer of hosting us for two days at their family's farmhouse — cooking meals for us, etc., while we get some R&R. Brandon and I have been to this farmhouse several times on spiritual retreats — it's a place with which I've fallen in love, and the location of several of my all-time favorite photographs. My plan for the two days is to eat, pray, converse, and read, though not necessarily in that order. Right now my reading list includes Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil and Every Riven Thing: Poems by Christian Wiman.
• Speaking of Christian Wiman, if you have 30 minutes to spare, watch this Bill Moyers Interview with Christian Wiman on Poetry, Love, Faith, and Cancer. Wiman is a poet and terminally ill cancer patient, and this interview is nothing short of beautiful. E.g.:
  

  "One thing that sustained me was not those solitary moments, which I found conducive to despair. What sustained me was the company of other people who believed."

  Wiman has an essay in The American Scholar from several years ago called Gazing into the Abyss which is also well worth your time.

• While we're still speaking of books (we are, aren't we?), I just recently finished a book of essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan titled Pulphead. Not only did I absolutely love it, but it also happens to be the first book I've ever read start-to-finish in e-book form (via Kindle on iPad) — If nothing else, this year's "Physical books read vs. e-books read" chart in the annual Books I Read post will be a little more interesting.¹
• Here's the official medical chart with the list of all of the drugs that I receive during a chemotherapy treatment.

Q and A

As I mentioned in the video, I'll be accepting any questions you might have about this whole cancer process and try to answer them in the next video (or perhaps I'll create a separate video just for Q&A).

There are a number of ways you can participate: You may leave a comment on the video's YouTube page; right here on this blog post; by @reply-ing me on Twitter; or by emailing me via this website's contact form. Don't be shy; the weirdest and/or most personal questions are probably the best ones.

Have at it.

1. Particularly astute and/or moderately obsessive readers will recall these words from one month ago: "I'm committing myself to completing [Personae], making it my first start-to-finish cancer read." Truth be told, I'm only 2/3 of the way through Personae; in addition to Hodgkin lymphoma, I have a condition known colloquially as "Reading ADD," for which condition I do not apologize.

This post is a part of a series which features an assortment of adroit voices exploring how to think theologically about cancer and those who have it. Read the series introduction or view all posts in the series.

First, I want to thank Jake for inviting me to post on this blog series — a huge honour, and a theme that, well — who can hope to do justice to this? All I have are some thoughts from the raw edge... I've read the other posts with great interest, yet I'm so aware that it's at times like this that theology simply runs out on us, because, as Mike put it so well: "Shit happens. There is no reason for it, no necessary cause."

I like that angle from Job. Slavoj Žižek, the Marxist atheist philosopher and cultural commentator, who can't seem to keep his mitts away from Christian themes, commented in his book Violence:

"After Job is hit by calamities, his theological friends come, offering interpretations which render these calamities meaningful. The greatness of Job is not so much to protest his innocence as to insist on the meaninglessness of his calamities. When God finally appears, he affirms Job’s position against the theological defenders of the faith."¹

Cancer cannot be sanctified. There is no sacrament in it. And to try is to move away from God, sat by Job's side, who mourns in agreement that it is, quite simply, meaningless. It happens, and it's not good. The divine act here is not theology — words about God — but theopraxis. And the theopraxis of cancer appears to be quite simple. How do I know? Because though I don't know Jake well, a very close friend of mine is currently dying of cancer of the liver. It's highly unlikely that he'll survive. It sucks. But I've learned something about theopraxis:

1. Don't get in touch and say "I'm praying for you." Not unless you've cooked a meal, taken the kids out, paid a hospital visit or just sat and been present.
2. Jokes are still funny. And some dark jokes are still very funny.
3. Don't say God has a plan for this. He doesn't.
4. But, in fact, good things can happen. Like cutting through all the crap that built up around a friendship, and realising just how special someone is.
5. Repent of the fact that it took cancer to cut through this crap, because it shouldn't have done.
6. Cancer is something that grows out of control, but it needn't be the topic of every conversation. Football still matters, and so does art.

While taking a walk with this friend, we fell to talking about whether it was worth praying for a miracle. My thought was this: Unless you are a hard-core materialist, and, in effect, believe that everything in our lives is determined already by the way the quarks lined up at the Big Bang, then you have to allow for the possibility that "this is not it." That there is something else that can happen. And I suppose praying for a miracle is not beating yourself in cries for God to heal, but simply protecting that flame within that lets hope survive, and that refuses to believe that all the options are closed.

Cancer itself has no meaning, but in its meaninglessness it can draw us together to reevaluate our priorities. And, for me, one that keeps popping up is that of our seemingly uncontrolled consumption. Cancer is often a disease of uncontrolled growth. Dis-ease. It's something out of joint, something gone wrong with checks and balances in a system. I hope it's not trite to highlight the parallels with the economic systems that worship ever-increasing rates of growth — consuming our earth's resources at unsustainable rates, bloating some parts of this world, while others wither.

Facing up to the reality of cancer in a young contemporary has, in a way, pushed me to reflect on the way I lead my own life. Healthy choices — for me and the planet around me. Living lightly, and not going for uncontrolled growth. These are tough issues for a consumer culture that loves having more. But something is out of joint. There is dis-ease. Things are not in balance. This isn't to say that cancer is some kind of divine punishment for a wrong lifestyle: Cancer is truly meaningless. It happens. But the hope within our faith is that we can draw meaning out of what is meaningless, through the theopraxis of learning to love one another better — and that, in the global scheme of things, means living for the good of everyone, whether they be Foxconn workers or Syrian asylum seekers — or friends who are suffering.

Here's the irony: Words explaining that words are not where it's at. So enough already, log off now, and, if you can, just quietly, do.

Kester Brewin teaches mathematics in London, and is also a freelance writer and blogger. His two books Signs of Emergence and Other are both available worldwide and have been hailed as some of the best writing to have come out of the emerging theology movement. He is currently finishing a book on pirates, and putting the finishing touches to a novel.

1. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008. 179.

This post is a part of a series which features an assortment of adroit voices exploring how to think theologically about cancer and those who have it. Read the series introduction or view all posts in the series.

Death and Resurrection

“Jesus thrown everything off balance.”

As some of you may recognize, those are the words of the Misfit, perhaps the best-known, and certainly the most murderous creation of the Southern Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor. At the end of her short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," a famous story about how (not why) bad things happened to good people, O'Connor has the Misfit explain why he does what he does, and as is often the case in O'Connor's fiction, it all centers around Christian practice and belief: "If [Jesus] did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can."

In other words, for the Misfit, the central problem of human life centers around death and resurrection — either resurrection is true or it isn’t, and your belief about it will change everything.

Yesterday, on Easter Sunday at my home parish of St. David's in Austin, Texas, we celebrated the Resurrection with balloons and music. We got dressed in bright-colored spring clothing, we gathered and told the stories, we experienced the liturgy, and then we walked back out into the world. Now, things have calmed down a little. The balloons have burst or floated away. And now, calmly and soberly we can ask:

What do we believe about death and resurrection?

Has Jesus thrown everything off balance for us as well?

Taking Holy Week as a whole teaches us some vital realities. It teaches us that we live in a world where pain and sorrow, suffering and death are normative things. The example of Jesus’ final week is that no human being is exempt from them, that even the best and most worthy of us who ever lived did not escape from the dark forest where cancer looms and accident strikes and the power of misguided men slays.

In the historic creeds, Jesus is consistently presented to us as completely human as well as completely divine, which means the experience of Holy Week is for all of us human experience. This is the truth that runs throughout human history:

People will suffer.
People will die.
People will mourn.

But Easter, the day and the season, remind us of another truth — that pain and sorrow, suffering and death, are not truly in control of our destinies.

And they remind us that resurrection — that miracles — are, in some sense, possible.
The traditional Gospel reading for the Sunday after Easter is that section of the Gospel of John we have come to identify with the character we usually call Doubting Thomas or Thomas the Doubter. We’ve been awfully hard on Thomas over the years, which I think is unfortunate, because it allows us to look down on him, to distance ourselves from his situation, to think of ourselves as somehow different or even better than he is, which we most certainly aren’t.

I think Thomas deserves a second look. The Gospel of John encourages us to see Thomas as a figure in dramatic contrast with the Beloved Disciple and with Peter, who see and believe in the Resurrection on much sparser evidence than Thomas is offered. But it also presents Thomas as the character who makes the climactic confession of faith in the gospel: "My Lord and My God!" — the highest Christological statement in any of the gospels, in fact, and John’s clear bookend to his majestic Prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 20:28, John 1:1, NRSV) He’s a complicated character—more complicated than “Doubting Thomas” allows him to be.

There are two traditional Christian ways of looking at Thomas. Matthew Henry’s 18th Century commentary summarizes one: that Thomas’s lack of belief is "not only a sin, but a scandal," and that Thomas is a fool not to believe in the possibility of resurrection on the testimony of his friends. In opposition to this, we find the Classical interpretation of this episode made by Augustine and Aquinas: that knowing Jesus the man and yet believing him to be very God, as Thomas eventually confesses, is in itself, an act of tremendous faith. As Augustine said of Thomas, "He saw and touched the man, and acknowledged the God whom he neither saw nor touched."

When I personally think about the story, I like to read Thomas as many biblical scholars suggest we should, as a symbolic and altogether typical character, for the truth of the matter is that, like the Misfit, most of us are Thomases. It’s so much easier not to really believe that Jesus is the risen lord, the Son of God. It shakes things up too much.

I like to imagine that there was a part of Thomas that thought, "No, it’s easier if Jesus is dead. It’s sad. But if he’s alive — if he really has come back to life — then that’s going to change my own life — my conception of the world — in ways I can’t even begin to imagine."

At this season in the Christian liturgical calendar, we too are brought face to face with the Resurrection, as Thomas’s story brings us face to face with the same questions in our own lives: Do we really believe in the risen Christ?

Do we really believe in the possibility that death doesn’t rule the world?

And if we do — or don't — how does that change us? How does it throw us off balance?

I know a little something about being off-balance. I grew up in a very conservative Evangelical Christian home. In that tradition, God was assumed to be capable of intervening in reality whenever someone with sufficient faith asked Him to; after leaving the Church for decades, I returned to a faith that was more skeptical of supernatural spirituality, one that made it hard for me to believe in Biblical miracles and harder still to get my head around the Resurrection.

This stuck me as being purely realistic. So few of the narratives we live our livs by seem to accept the fact that we are not in control of our lives, that what we do does not ultimately change our faiths in any sort of transactional way.

I was perfectly comfortable with thinking of resurrection as purely symbolic, of not wondering or worrying about whether Jesus truly returned to life and demonstrated that God truly had control over evil, sin, and death. It didn’t alter my faith in the God who had rescued me personally, my faith in my own personal resurrection.
I had been sick unto death, and through the friendship of some good people and the love of a wonderful church in East Austin, I had been nursed back to life.
So I knew death and resurrection to be personally true, whether or not they were biblically true, whether or not they were true for anyone else but me.

Then two summers ago, while I was working as a hospital chaplain at Brackenridge Medical Center, Austin’s regional trauma center, an experience I wrote about in my book Stories from the Edge, I was confronted with an experience I couldn’t ignore that made me consider the larger theological question anew. I saw lots of death and disaster at Brack; most victims of drowning, overdose, car wrecks, and other mishaps are taken to there, and during my summer at the hospital, I walked alongside dozens of patients and their families as they suffered great losses. Hard as that was to do, I felt strangely comfortable at their beds and in the waiting rooms.

I was able to identify with their suffering, for I have known suffering.

I understood their requests for God's miraculous intervention, because I have made such requests myself, and until the very end, none had been answered in the affirmative.

But I also knew — or thought I knew — that the trend of all matter in this material universe is toward death and destruction, and I hoped to help people accept that death is the inevitable result, the ultimate end of every story.

That is indeed the lesson of the first parts of Holy Week. From the high of a Palm Sunday when we are on top of the world, we are suddenly faced with reversals — cancer, heart attack, accident, heartbreak — that are analogous to Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

Many Christians skip over these dark days on their way to Easter — and many of us gloss over their existence in our lives and those around us. It’s essential, as I said, to face up to them honestly, to see that even the example of Jesus tells us that all of us will suffer and die someday.

But the example of Jesus on Easter?

Well, that thows everything off balance.

One day on the critical care ward where I was visiting patients, a completely undignified shout went up from the hallway. I looked in that direction, expecting to see nurses and other hospital workers moving over to shush whoever was making the noise.

Expected to see that, yes. Only it was nurses and hospital workers who were making all the noise. They were crowded around a handsome young man of around twenty, shaking his hand, clinging to his neck, and Jolynne, the charge nurse, must have seen my look of confusion, because she took pity on me: "That’s Perez, the famous Perez. He was in 606, in a coma." She indicated the intensive care room right across from us. "Thrown riding a bull. He was brain dead. We had a couple of ethics consults — most of us wanted to pull the plug." She sighed at the memory. "But the family asked us to give it three months."

"He was brain dead, padre," she repeated; I’m not a priest, but could not convince her of that. "We thought he’d never come out of it. But," she blinked, a tiny smile slowing growing all the way across her face, "he did."

Sandra, another nurse, bounced back from the hall and settled in at the nurses’s station, all aflutter. "Perez is here," she told Jolynne, who nodded and smiled back. "He’s walking and talking."

"Wow," I said. "He really beat the odds."

Sandra held up her finger to shush me. "There were no odds," she said, waving that finger at me. "He was brain dead, and nerve tissue don’t grow back." She looked down the hall, where Perez was walking to the far nurses’ station. "And now, look at him! He’s all walky-talky."

It’s clear that this story about the Famous Perez is a resurrection story, and although you and I know that this story is notable, that in this world resurrection almost never takes place, nonetheless, there it is. Like Jesus on Easter morning — something happened to him, with him, through him. I can’t explain it, can’t get my head around it, my life is easier if I don’t have to think about it, but in his story, as in the Easter story, God moved in some fashion to make things right, and things were never the same afterward.

Which is where I think we need to land in thinking about death and resurrection, sickness and health, brokenness and wholeness: something happened on Easter that changed everything, including, I hope, us.

Easter should change the way we think about our own suffering. It should change the way we face sickness and even death. It should change the way we live, in whatever time we have on the planet.

Progressive Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan has been speaking in recent years about “operational belief,” the idea that whether you believe the stories in the Bible literally or figuratively, those stories ought to make a living difference in your life. Archbishop Rowan Williams has likewise written about the Resurrection using that kind of reasoning: "What is vital to Christian discourse about the resurrection can be stated exclusively in terms of what happens to the minds and hearts of believers when proclamation is made that the victim of the crucifixion is the one through whom God continues to act and speak."

The resurrection story, however we understand it, whether or not we can explain it, should make a difference in our minds and hearts. It's supposed to; that's what resurrection does. Resurrection stands up against the tide of suffering and death, it proclaims hope over despair, and it tells us that whatever happens to us, thanks be to God, even the end of things is not really the end of things.

And honestly, that should change us.

The Greek word from the Doubting Thomas story in John that we usually translate as "belief" (as in "Doubting Thomas believed") suggests elements of trust, faith, and reliance, but it also suggests an action: it suggests throwing ourselves into what we have chosen to believe, swimming it, living it.

So whether you are a literal or a liberal reader of scripture, whether your Jesus is all walky-talky like Perez or is a meaningful story that helps explain the way the world has changed over the last 20 centuries, we are called to believe in it.

Really believe in it.

To let it throw us off balance.

To let it change us, as it has always changed people.

Christian tradition — probably apocryphal, but still, too good a story to throw away — tells us that Thomas, who in his initial exchange with the risen Jesus did not want to believe, went at last to India, where he preached Jesus as the Son of God and was ultimately martyred for those beliefs.

What happened to change him?

Easter happened.

And against the direct evidence of pain and sorrow, suffering and death, it has happened again, is happening even now — death and resurrection are contending in Creation.

And miracle of miracles —

Resurrection wins.

Greg Garrett is the critically-acclaimed author of over a dozen works of fiction, theology, and memoir, including The Other Jesus: Rejecting a Religion of Fear for the God of Love. He is Professor of English at Baylor University, and a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Church. He regularly speaks, teaches, and preaches across the United States and overseas, and has discussed his work for many media outlets, including National Public Radio, BBC Radio, Interfaith Voices, and The Bob Edwards Show. Greg lives in Austin with his family.

Now that I know there is a fair amount of people following these blog and video updates, I feel like I should have a unique term to address you all. You know, something to start blog posts off with: "Hey, ___________." My younger brother suggested "Lymphomies" a while back, but that feels just slightly off.¹ Any suggestions? Pun and portmanteau alike welcome.

Anyway, here's the latest video update. If you're unable to see the video embedded below, click here to watch it on YouTube. (Side note: This is the fourteenth video I have made. Crazy, huh?)

Oh. And please be sure to "like" the video by clicking the thumbs-up while it's paused. I found out that the more likes a video has, the more exposure the video gets on YouTube, based on its (YouTube's) algorithm.

Additional, non-video updates

• Libby and I made the difficult decision to see a different oncologist. Because my usual oncologist was out of town during a scheduled appointment last week, we met with another oncologist in the clinic and really liked him. We knew right away that we'd probably want to make the switch and after wrestling with it for a few days and being encouraged by friends and family, I finally bit the bullet and made the phone call earlier this week. The only thing that is affected (besides the obvious of having a new oncologist) is that my next chemotherapy appointment has been pushed back a day (to next Friday) to accomodate the new doctor's schedule. Go ahead and call me a softie, but that was a difficult thing to do. Phwew.
• As you saw in the video, I have started taking curcumin (pronounced KERR-kyoo-minn) to boost my health during treatment. A bit more on that: In one of the Blaylock Wellness Reports that our landlord graciously lent us, Dr. Blaylock writes extensively on the benefits of curcumin and its antioxidant, anti-cancer properties.² One of the things he writes is:
  

  "Curcumin powerfully protects the brain against the harmful effects of conventional cancer treatment. This is especially important when considering that chemotherapy has now been shown to cause significant brain damage that can lead to learning and memory problems... [My patients] were amazed that they did not get sick the way other patients not using curcumin did, even though some of my patients were getting [high doses] of chemotherapy."³

  Additionally (and again, graciously), our landlord ordered us Dr. Blaylock's book Natural Strategies for Cancer Patients, which Libby is planning to read during the month of April. I am particularly looking forward to seeing if taking curcumin helps lessen the post-chemo side effects after next Friday's (fourth) treatment.

• For the first time in a loooong time, I pulled out my guitar and began lazily working on a new song (As a side note: For those unaware, in a previous life I was a wannabe singer/songwriter — I even have an album on iTunes). The last song I put any effort into completing, Ghost In A Wedding Dress, was written over two years ago. Anyhow, like I said, I started fiddling around the other day, and the embedded tune below is what came out (Click here if you don't see an audio player).
  




• Minnesota Public Radio aired a show on Thursday titled The Challenges Facing Young People with Cancer on the show The Daily Circuit. Thanks to a few tips (thanks, Bethany!), I was able to tune in and catch the last 20 minutes or so. It was excellent. I highly encourage you to listen to the whole episode when you get a chance. Much of the stuff I have been trying to articulate in both video and written word is perfectly said during the course of the hour.

That's it for now. Thanks for tagging along for this ride, everyone. You're making this more fun than it should be.

1. Or does it?
2. You'll be relieved to know, as I was, that Dr. Blaylock cites many peer-reviewed journals; likewise, he is quick to point out that, "Because these natural substances [like curcumin] often work as well or better than drugs and with a far greater record of safety, the response of Big Pharma is to ignore them and, in fact, keep as much of this valuable information as possible from the public." (Blaylock, Russell L., ed. "Curcumin Protects the Brain and Fights Cancer." The Blaylock Wellness Report 8.8 (2011): 1. Print.)
3. Blaylock, Russell L., ed. "Curcumin Protects the Brain and Fights Cancer." The Blaylock Wellness Report 8.8 (2011): 7-8. Print.