Theatre of the Absurd

Yesterday we dealt with the things of life, my students and I, and we laughed together and prayed together, and it was good medicine. During chapel, we gathered in the library of the school, surrounded by books—all those stories that teach about life by only hinting, as Emily Dickinson said, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant…the truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind—and Aaron and I told our stories about living with cancer. He was not even out of grade school when his mother found something that wasn’t right on his skin, and she had to persist and persist with doctors until one saw, right off the bat, that it was melanoma. A year of treatment. “I just couldn’t get how it could be me,” he said. “I know other people get cancer, but it was me.” 12 years old. That puzzlement, that confusion. “Why me?” The way of the universe with us makes no sense. The laws of physics that inject cancer in us make no sense, not immediately, not obviously.  We joked about how his biopsy was with a knife and mine was with an 8 inch needle (of course for me it would  be a needle, and it was 8 inches—Robert was there and can verify I’m not exaggerating—and it was not just once), so I got the better deal, and he can’t remember his biopsy—must have blocked the whole thing out—good for him! And we joked. We could. Because we sat there next to each other in front of the others and realized out loud together that God has gotten us through those things. This 8^th grader, talking about the goodness of God after a biopsy, and melanoma, and cancer in his lymph nodes, and surgery, the same as mine (surgery in the armpit! He blushed and laughed) and a BIG scar, he said, and terrible headaches from the interferon, and I am so honored to be sitting next to this kid who has grown up and moved to Oz and is brave and faithful and beautiful.  Even though the laws of physics in our universe make no sense.

And in the evening the six juniors and seniors came over to my house and we ate quesadillas made with hand-ground corn tortillas (how I’ve missed those), and the girls cut up the avocado and tomato and set the table, and Ryan told a true, tragic story about someone he’s not related to that was impaled. And we wondered together, Ryan, too, how we could laugh when there is tragedy, but there’s something funny, too, and how do you do tragedy and comedy together? But of course that’s Shakespeare’s specialty, and we were gathered at my house to watch a parody, a tragi-comedy of Hamlet, a play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which is of a genre called Theatre of the Absurd, where the dumber of the characters is always just on the verge of discovering the laws of physics but doesn’t. An apple falls on his head. He creates an elaborate paper airplane. He drops a ball and a feather from a balcony. And he discovers nothing. And the whole time, both characters are wandering in and out of a greater story, the story of the insane Hamlet and his murderous uncle, and they discover nothing. No one understands. And the two lost characters talk about death, the state of nothing, where you don’t come back. And they die in the end, as most everyone in Hamlet dies, and they never do discover anything. “We were sent for,” is all they ever know. And it’s tragic. And comic. How is that?  A good, hearty example of existentialism that I wanted my students (I wish!) to ponder because they have access to another point of view. Telling truth slant.

Because life doesn’t make sense. Cancer doesn’t make sense. 12 year old kids with scars in their armpits don’t make sense. Being here for 14 days and going back to Oz doesn’t make sense. It’s absurd. And we can laugh when the needles and knives are put away, and we breathe normal again. Even pagans can laugh because God wired them that way. And even though I don’t understand. I can laugh sometimes.

One of my students wrote a question on a piece of paper: “Did you have any sleepless nights?” Yes. From steroids. From who knows what. But not from worry. Aaron said, “God got me through.” And though Aaron and I still don’t understand, and the world is still wonderful and terrible and absurd at the same time, we know the One we trust. And we sleep most nights.