Bright Sided

“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life…(da dum, da dum, dadumdadumdadum.)” Our Host brother Ben invited us to watch a Monty Python movie with him: Life of Brian. And there is Jesus, singing this song on the cross. It’s so ludicrous, it makes you laugh. And then cry.

Yesterday I got a message from “Charlotte.”  I’m just halfway through my chemo, and tomorrow she starts her first of sixteen. Sixteen. My heart dropped to the floor. You hate it. You ask is there another way. But sometimes there isn’t. There  just isn’t. The cup of poison just sits there. And then what? There has been something bothering me for a while, and Charlotte’s  message brought it back. It’s about how not to pray for me, and Charlotte, and if I stir up trouble, you can tell me. Be gentle. You won’t be the first.

So as for me this week: Bring me soup. Send me funny cat comics. Text me about my last ER visit. But here are a few things I need you not to do.

A few months back, I was in a women’s get-together and in the middle of coffee and fruit salad, someone stood in the doorway and gave us the news that a woman we all knew had just gone into a comma. Something had gone terribly wrong in child-birth, and she had lost her baby and most of her brain activity. Women began to pray, but one prayer stands out to me that went something like this: “God, we pray against this prognosis. We pray against these doctors.” This made me feel so uneasy I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t get up the nerve. Pray against doctors? Against people who were doing everything in their power to help this woman and keep her alive? Pray against people who had told her grieving husband a blunt but necessary truth? Pray against fellow human beings whom God was using as instruments of care and truth? They had failed to heal—yes. But God had been there, just as he is here now through my Dr. Blue-and-Brown. So I’m thinking, whatever happens, please do not pray this prayer for me.

When Robert’s mom died, he was not a believer but an avowed agnostic. His best friends were a drinking, partying crowd all going to a Christian school on weekdays, and church on Sunday. Robert wanted nothing to do with the hypocrisy. His mother died of breast cancer, which metastasized eventually to her brain, where it killed her. She fought for five painful years, and according to cousin Michael, at the end, only Robert was strong enough to lift her body and shift her in bed. I can see him doing this: he was a nurse or surgeon in some past life (albeit an utterly practical one). Some people came to visit Joan in her last days, to pray for her and encourage her. They said that she was sick for lack of faith. It was not their faith that was lacking, or God’s willingness, so the fault obviously lay in her. While she lay weakened and dying, they undermined her faith that what was happening to her was God’s loving will. They filled her with doubt. Of all the things that happened in those days, this is what Robert remembers and tells me.  I do not think I want this kind of comfort.

I think there is something out there that shakes our faith in God and undermines our peace. It has many labels. It claims that what happens to us is for us to choose, if we can just drum enough faith and right thinking. It says we can force God’s hand by trying. We cannot. We are in this world, though not of it, and that means filling up the sufferings of Christ.  How can we face this mess we face without full confidence that God is holding us in his hands, sending absolutely everything that is good our way, working through everything and everyone, and no matter what our state of courage, keeping us safe? THIS is our right thinking.

Sure, we make stupid mistakes and pay for them. Lots of time we pay for other people’s mistakes, too, like putting too much pesticide on my tomatoes or too many chemicals in my air. See, the only way for Jesus to save us all is to keep us all connected like this, so that while the failure of one couple doomed all humans, now the life of one man undooms them all. He needs us to be connected so that His life can reach us all. That means suffering cancer and all the ugly consequences of sin along with everyone else. Sure, God longs to heal us, and sometimes he unmasks his power for reasons of his own and heals miraculously. But most often he is shy, working through unsuspecting, (perhaps unempathetic, fashion-challenged) doctors. Who fail.

And God cries when we hurt. He knows that to rescue this world requires not just the pain of Jesus hanging on a cross, but the pain of us all, and he hears every wordless groan. Read Paul. Pray for courage for me, laugh and grieve with me, but don’t, don’t reject what God sends my way. He needs it. I need it. And in some insane, backward way of Grace, the world needs it. How’s that for Drama Queen.

P. S. If you want to read a good book about the negative side of positive thinking, try Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich. Breast cancer got her writing, too.