Treading the verge of Jordan

On Easter Day this year Denise Inge, wife of John Bishop of Worcester, died. Last week Bishop John said thank you at the Diocesan Synod meeting. As a statement of resurrection faith it is really worth hearing, and so here is the link:
http://www.cofe-worcester.org.uk/news/news_n.php?i585.

When she was diagnosed with the cancer which was to kill her, she told her friends, "Whatever happens, Alleluia is our song!" I learned from the Dean's funeral sermon the Dean's funeral sermon that Denise Inge was something of an authority on Thomas Traherne, a Metaphysical poet about whom I'm shamefully ignorant. I have just begun to read some. Here's the last verse of The Recovery:
"The voluntary act whereby
 These (our gifts) are repaid is in His eye
 More precious than the very sky.
 All gold and silver is but empty dross,
 Rubies and sapphires are but loss,
 The very sun, and stars, and seas
 Far less His spirit please:
 One voluntary act of love
 Far more delightful to His soul doth prove,
 And is above all these as far as love." 

Kate Granger's "Dear Cancer"

I must copy this blog post from Dr Kate Granger, one of the bloggers I most admire, in its moving entirety. As a specialist in elderly medicine, she knows what she's talking about.

Dear Cancer…

Dear Cancer,

It has been an extremely interesting 2 years getting to know you. You gave me quite a shock in America all those months ago. To be honest your appearance in my life at that time was unwanted and frightening. My career was flourishing and we were planning to start a family. You took away all those aspirations in one fail swoop and left me in a mutilated and depressed state. I’m not sure I can ever properly forgive you for that although I immediately accepted that this was how my life was going to be, and that you were to be a constant companion that I was going to have to learn to get along with.

The months of treatment to suppress you and bring you under control took their toll on me both physically and mentally until I decided to stop the treatment and let you do your worst. I was determined to keep smiling and live my life to the full including a return to work before you got the better of me. In some ways it is because of you that I have been able to live the most wonderful lifestyle for the past year. I never would have been able to meet the Queen if it wasn’t for you so in a strange kind of way I am grateful. I think you have made me into a much more tolerant, optimistic and happy person and I thank you for that.   

Well, you’ve been asleep now for 19 months. I wonder every day how to keep you settled and peaceful in your slumber. I also wonder every day when you are going to awaken and how you plan to take my life. Are you going to obstruct my bowels? Are you going to cause a pulmonary embolism? Are you just going to overwhelm my body? I guess you haven’t decided this yet yourself, but please be kind and let it be quick whichever way you finally settle on.

Kind regards, 

Kate x

I do recommend you read her blog (http://drkategranger.wordpress.com/). It combines clear-sighted realism with a positive outlook which is such a contrast to the victimhood "pity-me" approach which all too many people encourage us terminally ill patients to adopt. It is simply beautiful. And inspiring.

The Enduring Melody

Yesterday I received a letter which began:

"Dear Michael

As you have said on 'Room With A View' that you are going to be buying books, may I take the liberty of telling you about 2 more?

If I had to choose something to take with me to a Desert Island, after the Bible, I would choose The Enduring Melody. It is full of wisdom, courage, humour, culture, huge spiritual stature, a truly grace filled book. I’d also like a PC to look up all the wonderful references."

The other book Ann recommended was Learning to Dance. I ought really to have both books as they were written by Michael Mayne, who was Dean of Westminster Abbey when I was appointed to be vicar at Stanford in the Vale. I was interviewed for the job in the Jerusalem Chamber in the Abbey, as the Dean and Chapter had their turn as patrons, and in those days patrons really did the appointing. I don't think it was the Dean who interviewed me, but two of the Canons.

Michael Mayne had two bouts of debilitating ME, but The Enduring Melody was written at the time when he had terminal cancer of the jaw.

Here are three extracts from the attachments that Ann sent to whet my appetite.

"From that icy moment of diagnosis, when you know that everything has changed, I recognised two things. First that this would prove an unwanted but important test of the integrity of what I most deeply believed, both as a human being and as a priest: a kind of inquest on all those words spilled out of pulpits or in counselling others or at hospital bedsides. A few months earlier I had attempted to tease out what I had come to think of as ‘the enduring melody' of my life. This was the time to see how well it would stand up to the fiercest scrutiny.
"Secondly I felt the need in whatever lay ahead not to waste the experience, but to write about it as honestly and as I could day by day, both as a form of therapy and (hopefully) to bring something creative and redemptive out of an inevitably dark time."

"No-one has ever claimed that praying is easy. I may try to carve a few moments out of the day, or I may join others in worship, but very often my attention level is low and at once the distractions come: all kinds of trivia are washing round at the surface level of my mind and one thought leads to another, and I come to with a guilty jolt. It doesn’t improve with age. I take comfort from the fact that in our prayer life what matters is that a bit of me knows that there is deep within, deeper than all the occasional doubts and constant distractions, a Cantus Firmus, an awareness of and longing for the love of God as I have glimpsed it in those rare life affirming moments ( and will again). I guess that’s how it will continue to be, and that’s alright, for my desire is to recall the melody, knowing at the deepest level, that I am His, loved beyond my imagining and held by His grace."

 He reflects on the figure of Christ, standing out luminous against the prevailing night,

"That solitary figure stands at the heart of my own cantus firmus. If the atheists are proved right and I am proved wrong, if my deepest beliefs are what many dismiss as mere fairy tales; if there is nothing at the end but Prospero's 'such stuff / as dreams are made on, and our little life / is rounded with a sleep'; then I shall still not wish to have based this one precious life on other facts and allowed them to define and motivate all I have done. For, despite all the darkness, they have not only brought much persisting joy, but I can think of nothing that would have so satisfied my deepest and most haunting human desires, convictions and hopes."

And finally this comment from a piece written a few days after his death, which appealed to me for obvious reasons! His wife was Michael’s angel in human form. “What transforms such a time”, he writes, “is having someone beside you with whom you can share the journey, but it’s easy to downplay the cost to them. Theirs is a more difficult role, demanding patience and courage."

Thank you so much, Ann. You have succeeded in provoking me to read them!

The miracle of life

I have a great friend, Peter, who has the same slow form of ALS/MND as me. In fact we met again last week at the hospice. He wrote to me yesterday about someone who'd died recently after the quick form of the disease. He said, "We are so lucky. I saw something in the paper last week by a teenager who died of cancer. He said, 'Life is suffering but every second is a miracle'. So true." 

Sunrise

A friend of mine, just back from another round of cancer treatment, quoted this today: "Life is a constant sunrise, which death cannot interrupt, any more than the night can swallow up the sun." George MacDonald in Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood. Isn't that good?

By the way, today is the feast day of St Thérèse of Lisieux, from whose journal Story of a Soul I took the title of Jozanne Moss's and my book, "I Choose Everything". I've been reading the entry about her on Catholic Online. She died at the age of 24 in 1897, having been a Carmelite nun for less than ten years. She lost her mother when she was a child. When her father was committed to a mental institution, "Horrified, Therese learned of the humiliation of the father she adored and admired and of the gossip and pity of their so-called friends. As a cloistered nun she couldn't even visit her father. This began a horrible time of suffering when she experienced such dryness in prayer that she stated, 'Jesus isn't doing much to keep the conversation going.' She was so grief-stricken that she often fell asleep in prayer. She consoled herself by saying that mothers loved children when they lie asleep in their arms so that God must love her when she slept during prayer."

Blessings

I owe a lot to my friends Miles and Sarah, who now live in posh London. They used to live in Stanford in the Vale where I was vicar. Sarah has a lovely voice and used to lead worship for us. Every now and then she makes a comment on Facebook about a singer whom she's discovered. When I've found them on YouTube, she invariably proves a great talent spotter. One was Alison Krauss. Yesterday she posted, "Just discovered the amazingly beautiful voice and lyrics of Laura Story - loving Blessings." So I followed it up, and of course she's right! Blessings on YouTube

On her website, I found this account by Laura Story, which I reckoned was very helpful and rather good theology.

"The album that I did three to four years ago happened right after my husband went through surgery for a brain tumor. So a lot of the ideas that I was writing about then were just very fresh, about how do we worship in the midst of trials. So fast forwarding a few years later, a lot of things have changed. A lot of things have gotten better with his health, and a lot of things have not. We pray for God to bless us, but what does it look like when I spend four or so years praying for healing for my husband that never comes? I feel like we’ve kind of gotten to a place of having to make a choice. Are we going to judge God based on our circumstances that we don’t understand, or are we going to choose to judge our circumstances based on what we know to be true about God? Not that I choose the right thing every day, but I’m learning that every morning when I wake up to choose to trust God.

"And that’s what 'Blessings' is about. It’s just considering that maybe the blessing is actually found in the absence of the thing that I’m praying for. No one wants a brain tumor, and no one wants a severed marriage and these things that we pray that God will reconcile. But even though this situation is definitely nothing that we ever would have asked for or prayed for, there has been a depth of intimacy with the Lord that I’m not sure I would have known apart from such a hard road that we’ve walked. And in the end, if I’ve learned to cling to that old rugged cross all the more, I truly can say that I’m a blessed person."

http://laurastorymusic.com/2011/09/story-behind-the-song-“blessings”/

Isn't that a paradoxical insight: "maybe the blessing is actually found in the absence of the thing that I’m praying for"? I wonder what Laura means by learning "to cling to that old rugged cross". (It was a favourite funeral hymn among Stanford villagers, which always fascinated me...!) I suspect it's to do with learning to trust the love of the crucified God in the teeth of everything. 

Withered joy and blasted hopes

When I lived in London, my brother was training at St Thomas's Hospital and I used to visit him in Lambeth. That's when I first came across the imposing Metropolitan Tabernacle at Elephant and Castle. It was built to accommodate the huge congregations that came to hear the Victorian Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon. According the Wikipedia he preached to more than 10 million in his lifetime - which in the days before broadcasting and electronic media is a remarkable statistic. He still has a lot of fans today, including someone who teaches preaching near here. Simon put this on his Facebook this morning. 


Great focus for today from Spurgeon: "'Yet,' says Moses, 'though we are always changing, Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place throughout all generations.' The Christian knows no change with regard to God. He may be rich to-day and poor to-morrow; he may be sickly to-day and well to-morrow; he may be in happiness to-day, to-morrow he may be distressed - but there is no change with regard to his relationship to God. If He loved me yesterday, He loves me to-day. My unmoving mansion of rest is my blessed Lord. Let prospects be blighted; let hopes be blasted; let joy be withered; let mildews destroy everything; I have lost nothing of what I have in God. He is 'my strong habitation whereunto I can continually resort.' I am a pilgrim in the world, but at home in my God. In the earth I wander, but in God I dwell in a quiet habitation."

I thought it was worth repeating. Another friend of mine in the Far East who has cancer wrote, "Real theology comes out of suffering." That's probably true of Spurgeon who suffered from depression. By the age of 22 he was the most popular preacher of his day, preaching to audiences of 10,000+. "On 8 January 1856, Spurgeon married Susannah, daughter of Robert Thompson of Falcon Square, London, by whom he had twin sons, Charles and Thomas born on 20 September 1856. At the end of that year, tragedy struck on October 19, 1856, as Spurgeon was preaching at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall for the first time. Someone in the crowd yelled, 'Fire!' The ensuing panic and stampede left several dead. Spurgeon was emotionally devastated by the event and it had a sobering influence on his life. He struggled against depression for many years and spoke of being moved to tears for no reason known to himself" (Wikipedia). He must have gone from elation to devastation, feeling his "joy withered". But God proved his place of "quiet habitation".

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."