Reprinted from Upstate Oncology Newsletter of the Greenville (SC,USA) Hospital System, March 1992. Copyright by the author. This article also serves as the Afterword for Healing Intentions: A Travelers Guide for Your Healing Journey [Index]
It was that tense time between biopsy and pathology report -- awkward for the doctor, but frightening and deeply troubling for the patient. She asked what I had found. At that point, I could say only that I was concerned about the way it looked. We would have to wait for the final report before I could know for sure.
Facing cancer calls for great courage. The most courageous people I have seen have been my cancer patients. Cancer is a confrontation with the possibility of death. Death is a certainty that we all share, but which we do not face until there is a point of crisis. Cancer is confrontation with the deepest questions of life, questions of who we are and what we mean in the greater scheme of things.
Facing cancer requires drawing from the deepest wells of our spirituality. By spirituality I do not refer to the occult, but to that potential for awareness of the image of God within ourselves which is the hallmark of being human, and which is the function of that religious sensitivity that we call faith.
My patient looked at me that day and quoted Saint Paul. She said, "The Lord hath not given a spirit of fear, but of power, and love, and of a sound mind. Whatever it is, we can face it."
That has always been an especially powerful thought for me too. A newer translation says "self-control" instead of "sound mind," but I like the older version better. It implies that the spiritual power we have through faith encompasses our reason and our ability to use it, our ability to think clearly and react effectively. It implies that such power is also the key to mental health, to the wholeness of the person, and it is a power that reaches out in love and understanding. With such spiritual strength, we have no reason to fear. "Whatever it is, we can face it."
"Sound mind" also conveys to me the idea of sensitivity in our daily lives to the eternal scheme of things. It means an awareness of that deeper reality that most of us sense and which even quantum physics now acknowledges.
Cancer also brings us into confrontation with the question faced in Rabbi Harold S. Kushner's book, When bad things happen to good people. However, if we think deeply about that, we will see that it is a question that puts ourselves, not God, at the center of the universe. Often the question really means, "how can bad things happen to a god like me?"
How could there be earthly life without death, renewal without challenge? For most patients, cancer will be faced and conquered. Many such patients have said that the diagnosis and treatment period was for them a spiritual time that gave a "new lease on life." Death would come eventually, as it will for us all, but it would come to a person renewed in the challenges of life, strong in faith, sound in mind and fearless in the confrontation with eternity.
In the Peter Brook film of the Hindu sacred epic Mahabharata, a senior divinity is escorting a questioning young boy through all the scenes of the human struggle to find good despite evil, and to bring order out of the chaos of life. The boy turns to the divine and says -- not skeptically, but admiringly, and with a sense of wonder -- "Sir, are you really the author of this poem?"
That is our question, too, as we, patients, nurses and physicians alike, play out this epic poem that we call life. It is a question that is resolved in the power of faith. Yes, God is the author of this poem. Even when one of the scenes in the poem is cancer, we need not fear.