Blessings and breast cancer

A friend of mine today put this on Facebook: "It's been a long hard week....but it's been a week where I've lost count of the blessings in my life......thank you, God, for each and every one of them!!..." 

On our neighbours' roof, too many starlings to count!

You'd better believe it when I say that her life is tough at the best of times. Her father has Alzheimers and she herself seems to have an as-yet undiagnosed condition like mine. He was rushed into hospital for a heart operation last weekend. The shock and disorientation for someone already confused cannot be imagined. Neither can be the distress for his loved ones. And yet she writes about losing count of her blessings this week!


It put me in mind of a remarkable article I read this week, Exquisite and Excruciating: The Life of Married Love. Before those of you who are single switch off, please don't, because it's a remarkable article in itself and says a lot about God's love and suffering. It begins like this:

"Like many survivors of breast cancer, I have some serious battle scars. My un-bandaged body after breast cancer certainly made for some interesting pillow talk between my husband and myself.

"Going into the crisis long ago, we barely considered what it would mean for our love. But when I was done with all the treatment, the question lingered unspoken in the air—what would our marriage look like? Stranger still, what would it feel like?

"I knew he loved me before all the surgeries. Fourteen happy years and three children assured me of that. But we had never really, really been tested by the experience of heartache, loss, and fear that a cancer diagnosis brings.

"In the aftermath, I could not begin to fathom what our intimate moments might be like, now that I had been surgically taken apart and permanently altered.

"My husband just smiled and kissed the boo-boos. And he never stopped.

"The miraculous healing power of lips to scars transformed the broken hearts and the marriage that cancer had tried to lay to waste, better than life-saving surgery ever could...." 

Marc Chagall, Wedding

Pat Cohn's article is as inspiring as it is beautifully written, and I recommend reading it all, because the truth is, as St Paul tells us, that married love is just a picture of Christ's love for the Church; that means you and me. I hope I'm not being irreverent if I say he wants to kiss our painful scars and heal our broken hearts.

You'll not be surprised that I picked this bit out too:

"Our marriage is a vowed life until death. We know one of us will get there first. We just don't know how or when.

"So when headlines shout to us about making physician-assisted suicide legal, or whether or not it is ethical for a "healthy" spouse to divorce a "sick" spouse because the illness has robbed the marriage of its protracted happiness, we know that we have to redouble our efforts to affirm life and love."

She ended her article like this: "This is the truth of laying one's life down for the sake of the friend, the spouse. It is how we, mere mortals, live Eucharistic lives: "This is my body, given up for you" (Lk. 22:19).

"Loving someone until death is as hard as it is beautiful. It will mean sacrifice. It will also be a well of deep, refreshing joy.

"You will have battle scars over time from the hardships that life throws at your marriage. But when we invite Christ into our marriage, he sends graces to heal every scar that our fingers can trace, as his love magnifies and lingers in every embrace."