It has been nearly exactly 5 years since my last round of radioiodine for thyroid cancer, and I recently returned to Mayo for my now annual appointment. Things have been largely going well. I had a deep vein thrombosis back in September, which had me off work for a bit and caused my primary doctor to take me off all hormone replacement therapy. This led to complex migraines and two really scary episodes landing me in the emergency room thinking I was having a stroke. Taking a lady off of estrogen suddenly, essentially inducing full menopause over the span of a single month, is HARD on a body, let me tell you. Plus weight gain, after I had worked so hard to lose 50 pounds. Just irritating but besides the point because I'm finally at the point where I'm feeling good again and "stabilized". So bring it on, Dr. Stan the Man.
I got to Mayo and had my blood work and ultrasound, and then headed off to my visit with Dr. Stan. He was awesome as always, reviewed my ultrasound, told me my TSH was too low and my medication too high. It's non-detectable, my Thyroid Stimulating Hormone. I don't want anything stimulating the remaining cancer. He wanted to lower my thyroid meds, as having such a high dose can lead to osteoporosis and be hard on my heart. But it's suppressing the cancer! And also... it's my metabolism, levothyroxine is, and I JUST stopped hormone replacement therapy and got re-regulated. I begged him not to change anything. PLEASE. Dr. Stan is a great doctor because he listens to his patients, and he listened to me. I told him I had had a bone scan and my bone density is just fine. I take calcium supplements and vitamin D and exercise regularly and visit the sun to keep my bones strong. My heart is good. "As long as you understand the risks," says he. "We can keep it as is for now." THANK YOU, Dr. Stan. Thank you for listening to me.
Dr. Stan reiterated that the lymph node we were most worried about was on my laryngeal nerve, the one that innervates my one remaining vocal cord. The one we can't do surgery on because of the risk of paralyzing that cord and leaving me unable to talk, breathe or swallow (hello feeding tube and tracheotomy). That's the one that if the cancer grows and invades the nerve will also lead to that same outcome. The precarious one. There are two other areas with cancer deeper in my chest under my breastbone, but those aren't in such a dangerous place. There's one along my esophagus and one by my aorta, but there's a lot of room in there, apparently, so those could grow and not hurt anything for a good long while. It's mostly the one on the nerve that he's concerned with. I've understood this for years. It's what we monitor. And for five years it's behaved itself.
But then Dr. Stan made an offhanded comment that kind of took me aback. My tumor marker blood work had not yet come in, so he was just making a conjecture. "It's been five years since your last treatment, and we got a good five years of suppressing the remaining cancer. That's more than I could've hoped! That's excellent. Your last tumor marker reading was 2.4. So if it goes up to 3, I think we should do another round of treatment and zap it again to see if we can get another five years."
Wait, what? The thought of more treatment had not even entered into my mind. He said it so casually, like it was no big deal, but treatment for me IS a big deal. I gained 20 pounds after each round of radioiodine. There is preparing for six long weeks ahead of time, the low-iodine diet and going off meds, and then isolation while radioactive, and not being able to work first because of feeling horrible and then because of being radioactive. I work with small children, so would have to stay away from them even longer than staying away from adults. It's a big deal, that takes a bunch of planning and PTO and coverage and all the things and I just hadn't even THOUGHT about any of that for such a long time! The idea of it took me aback, that he would even consider it. I thought I was pretty much done with treatment forever, and he made it sound like I was on borrowed time. Just surprised me.
What could I say? Just "OK. If it goes up, we'll do more treatment." UGH. I left his office and drove to Minneapolis to catch a flight later that evening to my cousin's funeral in Seattle. But I kept checking my Mayo app for thyroglobulin tumor marker results. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Come on baby. Refresh.
I was in the middle of Ikea next door to the Minneapolis airport when I got a notification. "New Test Result". I couldn't open the app fast enough. Thyroglobulin....... 1.7!!!!!! ONE POINT SEVEN!!!!! It went DOWN! Hallelujah! That's the lowest it's EVER been! Five years after my last treatment, and starving that cancer is causing it's long slow death. Thank you Lord! I was so happy. So So So happy. It's not gone. But it's dying. I'll take it.
And I don't have to go back and think about all this for another whole year. Life is good.
“Set free from human judgment, we should count as true only what God sees in us, what he knows, and what he judges. God does not judge as man does. Man sees only the countenance, only the exterior. God penetrates to the depths of our hearts. God does not change as man does. His judgment is in no way inconstant. He is the only one upon whom we should rely. How happy we are then, and how peaceful! We are no longer dazzled by appearances, or stirred up by opinions; we are united to the truth and depend upon it alone. I am praised, blamed, treated with indifference, disdained, ignored, or forgotten; none of this can touch me. I will be no less than I am. Men and women want to play at being a creator. They want to give me existence in their opinion, but this existence that they want to give me is nothingness. It is an illusion, a shadow, an appearance, that is, at bottom, nothingness. What is this shadow, always following me, behind me, at my side? Is it me, or something that belongs to me? No. Yet does not this shadow seem to move with me? No matter: it is not me. So it is with the judgements of men: they would follow me everywhere, paint me, sketch me, make me move according to their whim, and, in the end, give me some sort of existence … but I am disabused of this error. I am content with a hidden life. How peaceful it is! Whether I truly live this Christian life of which St. Paul speaks, I do not know, nor can I know with certainty. But I hope that I do, and I trust in God’s goodness to help me.”
I caught a glimpse of Reagan's English assignment today. It breaks my heart. She's such a laid back, easy-going kid that I think we don't realize how much she internalizes when things get tough around here.
I have had the distinct feeling through much of my life that I was living in the "before". You know. In the movies, the overly sunny, smiley-faced, hazy-around the edges, warm-fuzzy scenes before the Zombie Apocalypse hits and the whole thing takes a dramatic left turn. In the movies, you know that the "before" never lasts. It's not the actual story. It's the background, the happiness meant to make the "after" more shocking. Well, I've always felt that I lived the majority of my life in the "before". I have had a blessed life. I was born into a family that was stable and loving. I wanted nothing as a child, in fact had an idyllic childhood full of happy memories. My extended family was warm and fun and close - grandma, grandpa, aunts, uncles cousins were very much a part of my daily life. I went to a good school, where I made good friends, and made good choices. Went to college on a full ride, graduated with an advanced degree with nearly no debt, found a career that I loved and brought me joy. Not to say there weren't rough patches. This is Earth. There are going to be rough patches. But those rough patches were negligible in the big picture. It took what I considered a long time to find a spouse, but he came and we married when I was 26. It also took what I considered a long time to start a family. Five years. But eventually, at age 32, I became a mother. It was, bar none, the happiest day of my life, despite surgeries and NICUs and infant kidney issues. Despite four months of bedrest prior, despite a month of NICU after, despite extreme deconditioning and a long recovery for both mom and babies. I was a mom. I remember distinctly the day I was let out of the hospital after the boys' birth. Rob took me for a ride in the car to Presque Isle, and as we drove around he asked if I had any of that post-partum depression he'd read so much about. "NO!" I nearly screamed. "I am the luckiest mom in the world! All those poor saps get only one baby at a time. I get TWO!" I was so so so excited to start our family life.
While the boys were babies, I also remember Rob asking nearly nightly "do you think they're going to stick?" We were so in love with these two little humans, we were terrified they'd be taken away from us. After years of infertility, there was no taking these two for granted, that's for sure. Even as we grappled with this new-found overwhelming love that comes with parenthood, we knew that this felt like "before". Adding a long-awaited daughter four years later just intensified the feeling.
Back in college, I remember an assignment where we were to write out our "life plan"... what we dreamt of and planned for our lives. This was easy for me - I had my "plan" since I was little. Grow up. Go to college. Get married. Start a career that I loved. Start a family. Create for my family the same idyllic childhood granted myself. The End. That was my plan, and it was executed with gusto. Everything I did was geared toward the ultimate plan. It was my PURPOSE, to create this life. It was not perfect, and it was sure as heck not executed as well I would've liked. My role as a wife and mother was particularly more challenging to me than I had planned. As important as those roles were to me, I found that I wasn't very good at them. Lots of my friends were far better wives and mothers than I. They could keep a clean house, plan the perfect party, were always available to take their kid to this event or that event, were far more intentional at RAISING their children than I was. I may not have lived up to my own ideal, but was still focused on the goal, executing the life plan. It was my purpose. It was my direction. It's who I was.
Things started to change in 2020. Of course. The Pandemic brought everyone's "life as usual" to an abrupt halt. At first, though, it was fine. We still had our jobs. We had our family under our roof. We had, in fact, MORE togetherness. I suddenly had the time to do all those things I had wanted to do as a mother but never seemed to have the time for. Family game nights, dinner on the table every night, craft projects, daily walks with my husband. All the things. We weathered the start of that storm pretty well. Things outside our home started changing, though. As people huddled in place with their "germ pods", friendships started dying off one by one. Work was sporadic and certainly different, with masks and viral wipes, and isolated treatment sessions or virtual sessions. Church was absent completely, and along with it my spiritual food and sense of community. When life started back up again in fits and starts, things were not the same. Not by a long shot.
In the years since, the relationships that brought me joy and purpose have died, one by one. Friends have drifted away, moved away, gotten too busy. There are no monthly meetings over coffee with friends, chats after mass over doughnuts, or even daily texts to see how life is going. I have been to SEVEN funerals in the past year. Seven. We have lost my boys' best friend to suicide, a cousin and two favorite aunts, two small patients, and my mother in law. My heart hurts for these losses. My dad is failing, and I am 2000 miles away and unable to help. My boys have left for college and we no longer have any sense of "family". There are no family dinners, no movie nights, no games together. I miss my boys (even the one still under my roof that I literally almost NEVER see) and their friends, and the fun and laughter they brought to my world. Work continues, but there have been changes there, too, and I feel frustrated. And I realize that my "before" has ended... not with an invasion of zombies, but with the erosion of all those things that have, until this time, been important to me. I look at my life plan, and realize... I never conceived of life beyond the "before". I never wrote the "after" chapters. I don't know what "after" looks like, and as such feel unsettled, unanchored, and more than a little alone. I have been sad and crabby. It is cliche, this classic mid-life crisis. I realize that I am living through a cliche. It embarrasses me, but that doesn't make it any easier.
I am TRYING to write more chapters. I am TRYING to define the "after" and my place and purpose in it. It is a painful process, to be honest. Trying to find the joy and reason. I get glimpses. There are moments I feel it. "Oh, here's where you MATTER. Here you still make a difference in someone else's life." I will work on those things. I will try to find my place, but it is disorienting. I am still overwhelmingly blessed. I can't forget that. I don't forget that. The blessings are real and abundant, and I need to focus even more on those. But there is an active grieving process that permeates my days, at the loss of all that was. Please be patient as I work through that
Stumbled by complete accident upon this video, and it resonated deeply. To CLAIM is audacity, unless we LIVE as if it's true. I fail at that over and over and over and over again.
“Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has if you count the tail as a leg. When they answered ‘five,' Lincoln told them that the answer was four. The fact that you called the tail a leg did not make it a leg.” –Thomas Sowell
“If we have a box in which we keep our money, we know the one thing we must always give attention to is the key; we never think that the key is the money, but we know that without the key we cannot get into our money. The Mother of the Babe is like that key; without her we cannot get to Our Lord because He came through her. She is not to be compared to Our Lord, for she is a creature and He is the Creator. But without her we could not understand how the Bridge was built between heaven and earth.
As she formed Jesus in her body, so she forms Jesus in our souls. In this one Woman, virginity and motherhood are united, as if God willed to show that both are necessary for the world. Those things which are separated in other creatures are united in her. The Mother is the protector of the Virgin and the Virgin is also the inspiration of Motherhood." Archbishop Fulton Sheen
I have many blessings, I readily admit. Too abundant to count. Statistically, my existence puts me in the top privileged 1% of the world. On this Thanksgiving Day, though, I'm particularly struck by the blessing of my vocation. How thankful I am that I did not choose to follow the path of mechanical engineering, as my parents wanted, or the path of a children's author as I originally wanted. I ended up as a physical therapist, and I am so so so so glad for that apparently random decision years ago.
I remember the moment. I was at Washington State University, a sophomore walking down the hill to my next class, realizing that I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Engineering was so impersonal, so "at a desk staring at a computer", and I knew that my introverted personality and tendency towards sedentary pursuits would only flourish under such a career. It would be too easy to be a brain in a jar, an inert blob, as an engineer. I knew I needed a career that pushed me outside my comfort zone, or I would never grow. I did well in my engineering classes, but I did not enjoy them at all. They inspired no passion, and I remember sitting next to an upper classman in Fortran and hearing him say "I hate engineering, but I'm senior now, and it's too late to switch." I refused to let myself get in the same situation. Plus, I realized that I missed kids! Little kids were missing on college campuses. Everywhere I looked, there were only seas of young adults, and the whole place seemed so monotone, so FLAT without the energy and laughter of little kids. I just remember being struck profoundly by that. Where are all the kids? So I switched majors to family studies, in an effort to find the kids. I discovered within about a week, though, that THERE WERE NO RIGHT ANSWERS in that field. It was way too squishy. There was no intellectual challenge at all in family studies. It was pure emotion as a field, and that did not sit well. I'm much too logical for that. I HAVE a brain, and family studies did not use it at all.
So, walking down the hill that day in Pullman, Washington, it hit me. I remember the moment so distinctly. "I want to teach kids how to walk". Just that thought. It was overwhelming. Who taught kids how to walk as a living? Whose job was that? I guessed a physical therapist, but I'd never met a physical therapist before, and I had certainly never BEEN to therapy. At that moment, though, the way forward was crystal clear. I needed to be a physical therapist. And I skipped class, walked straight to the admin building, and changed my major within minutes, without consulting another human being. I never looked back. A pediatric physical therapist it was.
It's been 25 years now. Can't believe that. The time has literally flown by. After all these years, though, I still love my job, haven't regretted a single day of it. I love getting to enter into the imaginations of children on a daily basis. I love getting to laugh at the funny things they say and do. I love the relationships I get to build with families. I love being able to help them come to grips with the delays and disabilities of their child. I love being able to support them as they grieve, but also give them hope, too. Mostly the hope. Getting to show them the potential of their kid. I love getting to be chief cheerleader. I love watching kids defy odds, shatter expectations. I love that parents send me videos of their kids' first steps, their first time at the beach, their first time riding a bike, of them going on a hike in the woods with their family. I love getting to celebrate achievements with them. I love that parents WANT to share their kids' achievements with me, because that means I was a part of helping those achievements become a reality, and that is the best feeling in the world. I love being in the background of countless social media posts, of parents bragging on what their kid can do now. The "behind the scenes" person that helps the kid shine. That's the best. I love being surprised when a kid does something that I honestly didn't think they could do, even if I never said it. There's a whole bunch of humble pie in that, and I have learned to "never say never" in regards to a child's potential. We just work towards the next step, and see what happens.
Most of all, I love getting to be a part of people's lives, through the hard and the struggle and the tears and the triumphs. Through it all, I get to be there, right along side them. Yes, there's paperwork, and insurance, and sometimes not enough resources to do what needs to be done. There's the monotonous stuff, and the frustrating stuff, too. But that's minor compared to the joy. How many people get to experience actual JOY in their job? I do. What a blessing that is!
These are "my kids". These families become part of my own. I don't know how to do it any other way - it really can't be "just a job" because there's no leaving it behind when I get home at night. It's my vocation, who I AM, not just what I do.
What a blessing to find a vocation that brings such joy, such purpose.
"In the old days, people demanded 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' and to repay evil for evil. Patience was not yet on the earth, because faith was not on the earth either. Of course, impatience made full use of the opportunities the Law gave it. That was easy when the Lord and Master of patience was not here. But now that he has come and put the grace of faith together with patience, we are no longer allowed to attack someone even with a word—not even to call someone a fool without facing the danger of judgment. The Law found more than it lost when Christ said, 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven' (Matthew 5:44-45). This most important commandment summarizes in a word the universal discipline of patience, since it does not allow us to do evil even to people who deserve it."
“Evil is thus a kind of parasite on goodness. If there were no good by which to measure things, evil could not exist. Men sometimes forget this, and say, there is so much evil in the world that there cannot be a God. They are forgetting that, if there were no God, they would have no way of distinguishing evil from goodness. The very concept of evil admits and recognizes a Standard, a Whole, a Rule, an Order. Nobody would say that his automobile was out of order if he did not have a conception of how an automobile ought to run.” - Archbishop Fulton Sheen
I was having a discussion with some coworkers at lunch the other day, and one of them said "I just want to be happy. Isn't that the purpose of life, to be happy?" We were talking about the suicide of my boys' best friend, which is how the subject came up. He struggled with anxiety, but no one but his family knew. We were blindsided by his death, because we saw a happy, talented, well-liked kid who seemed to have everything: good friends, a loving family, a doting girlfriend. If someone like HIM could take his own life, so unexpectedly... are any of our children safe from such a thing? Which is when my coworker reiterated her thought. "I just want to be happy". And as I thought about this, it occurred to me that if the goal is happiness (which IS a good thing), and we strive primarily for happiness, we can go very far astray. Seeking happiness as the primary thing would lead you to avoid the hard, avoid the sad. You might pursue adventure, or prosperity, or things in an effort to "get happy". Because - what makes you happy? Taken to it's extreme conclusion -- seeking happiness can lead to hedonism, to selfishness. A good, taken to it's logical extreme, leads to a vice. And in the case of my family's young friend... seems unattainable, even if you have all the things that SHOULD make you happy.
The same is true of security. If the aim is to "be safe" in this world (again, a GOOD THING), if safety is our top priority... the extreme conclusion is fear, and existence without experience. Life is dangerous. Life is calculated risk. Our world in a pandemic has taught us this. With physical safety as our #1 priority, we have caused immeasurable harm in economics, social-emotional development and relationships, and spawned all sorts of political discord. Focusing on safety first has NOT improved our lives, even if it has ensured the prolonging of our physical health. Making us safer from a virus has made us safer from a virus - not safer overall, as suicide rates, drug overdoses, poverty, and riots can attest. "If you have your health, you have everything", the saying goes. This is a fallacy.
As I ran this "extreme end" scenario through each good thing I could think of that could apply for the job of "the purpose of life"... happiness, security, safety, contentment, prosperity, esteem, independence, self-sufficiency.... I realized that each "good thing" missed the mark, and actually became a vice if taken to its extreme end. And that's because these "good things" are not ends, but byproducts. If the byproduct is the goal, it mutates. It is off course - maybe by a little at the beginning, but by a whole lot at the end. The trajectory misses the mark substantially.
There is one thing, and one thing only, that encompasses all of the human condition, and is the only extreme end that leads inexorably to sanctity. That is LOVE. Love embraces the hard, the suffering. Love desires the good of the other, empties itself out only to be filled up in return with greater treasurers. With love as our aim, taken to it's final, extreme end... we see the face of God. With love as our aim, the byproducts come: peace, contentment, happiness, joy. But they are ordered as they should be - as byproducts, and not the goal. If you DESIRE joy, don't seek joy. Seek love. There will be sorrow as well, so that the joy is richer, but there will be joy. If you DESIRE peace, then love. Not that there won't be war, but the "peace that passes all understanding", the fortitude to endure life's battles knowing the end before it begins... that leads to internal peace. If you DESIRE contentment, then love. Your life may be tossed around like a ship in a storm, but with your focus on the horizon, with love as your guide, you can steady yourself, and weather whatever is thrown at you calmly. All these goods are the off shoot of a properly ordered existence. We all just need to know where to aim.
The same is true of marriage. We all want a happy marriage. But a happy marriage isn't the goal. It really isn't, unfortunately. Because when the marriage is invariably NOT happy, we think it must end. "I'm not happy. You're not making me happy. You can't make me happy anymore". And so the marriage must die. Happiness as the end of marriage leads only to the death of the marriage. The true purpose of marriage is LOVE; not twitter=pated infatuation. Not lust. But deep, abiding love -which at times hurts, and is hard, and suffers. Hurting and suffering without love is ugly and evil. We avoid it, as we should - run away from it as fast as we can. Hurting and suffering with love is redemptive. It heals the hurt, assuages the suffering. It walks into the hurt, rather than running away from it. Love is the transformative difference in all things. The willing of the good of another person greater than good of yourself - agape, self-giving love - is the most powerful thing on the planet. The most unexpected, paradoxical thing. The person who empties themselves out for others is the fullest. The one who gives away most receives. Through death comes life.
Went to Mayo for my 6 month follow up. Wasn't nervous at all this time. Expected "same ol' same ol'", and am fine with that. Turns out, though, that my tumor marker actually went DOWN to 1.4, which is the lowest it's ever ever ever ever been!!! The ultrasound showed again that the one node they can visualize hasn't grown, and isn't well-vascularized, so overall, GREAT news! The doctor was super pleased by these results. So pleased, in fact, that he said "This is as close to a cure as you might get", and then told me we didn't have to follow up for 9 months. If at that time, things still look good, I don't need to come back for a whole year. Super cool.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”
“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?
There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.
When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.”
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.”
“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”
My Grandpa Phil was a dear, upright, honest man who I loved very much, and miss every day, even 21 years later. He died April 24, 2000, at the age of of 81 years old. I was recently cleaning out a closet and found the program from his funeral. In it, I had written the following, and I'm copying it here so it doesn't get lost.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM MY GRANDPA:
1. Kiss anyone who walks through the front door, just in case they're a grand kid.
2. Everyone can have the nickname "honey".
3. Reminisce often.
4. Always get a good night's sleep.
5. When you pray, pray from the heart. It's okay if you tear up.
6. Do the dishes after every meal.
7. Every family gathering is a photo opportunity.
8. People's names may come and go, but music will stay with you forever.
9. Be generous to a fault with those you love.
10. Say "I Love You" often.
11. If you can't remember whether you've said good bye or not, say it again. You'll get another free kiss out of the deal.
12. The meal's not done 'til you've licked the plate clean.
13. A daughter is never too old to call you "daddy".
14. Live and enjoy each moment as it happens. It really doesn't matter if you remember it later.
15. Love Jesus with a humble and gentle spirit.
16. Never miss a chance to dance at a grandkid's wedding. Eighty year olds can still boogie (they just get bursitis afterwards).
17. If you can't remember something, just smile and admit it. "I don't remember things as well as I used to".
18. Catch a wink of sleep wherever and whenever you can get it.
19. Always put your family above anything else.
20. If you've loved and lost, don't be afraid to love again. God just may fill the void with another "soul mate".
I have always been drawn to the tombs of famous people. When I was a student many years ago in Washington, D.C., I loved to visit the graves of the Kennedy brothers on that lovely hillside in front of the Custis-Lee Mansion. In Paris, I frequently toured Père Lachaise Cemetery, the resting place of, among many others, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Abelard and Jim Morrison. When on retreat at St. Meinrad Monastery in southern Indiana, I would often take a morning to visit the nearby Lincoln Boyhood Memorial, on the grounds of which is the simple grave of Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln’s mother, who died in 1818. I always found it deeply moving to see the resting place of this backwoods woman, who died uncelebrated at the age of 35, covered in pennies adorned with the image of her famous son.
Cemeteries are places to ponder, to muse, to give thanks, perhaps to smile ruefully. They are places of rest and finality. The last thing that one would realistically expect at a grave is novelty and surprise.
Then there is the tomb featured in the story of Easter. We are told in the Bible that three women, friends and followers of Jesus, came to the tomb of their Master early on the Sunday morning following his crucifixion in order to anoint his body. Undoubtedly they anticipated that, while performing this task, they would wistfully recall the things that their friend had said and done. Perhaps they would express their frustration at those who had brought him to this point, betraying, denying and running from him in his hour of need. Certainly, they expected to weep in their grief.
‘Jesus is Laid in the Tomb’ by contemporary American artist Laura James, 2002.
PHOTO: LAURA JAMES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
But when they arrived, they found to their surprise that the heavy stone had been rolled away from the entrance of the tomb. Had a grave robber been at work? Their astonishment only intensified when they spied inside the grave, not the body of Jesus, but a young man clothed in white, blithely announcing, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.”
The mysterious messenger’s communication was, to put it bluntly, not that someone had broken into this tomb, rather that someone had broken out. In St. Mark’s version of the story—which is the earliest that we have—the reaction of the women is described as follows: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them.”
If the grave of a hero is customarily a place of serene contemplation, the tomb of Jesus is so disturbing that people run from it in fear.
If the grave of a hero is customarily a place of serene contemplation, this one is so disturbing that people run from it in fear—and thereupon hangs the tale of Easter. Especially today, it is imperative that Christians recover the sheer strangeness of the Resurrection of Jesus and stand athwart all attempts to domesticate it. There were a number of prominent theologians during the years that I was going through the seminary who watered down the Resurrection, arguing that it was a symbol for the conviction that the cause of Jesus goes on, or a metaphor for the fact that his followers, even after his horrific death, felt forgiven by their Lord.
But this is utterly incommensurate with the sheer excitement on display in the Resurrection narratives and in the preaching of the first Christians. Can one really imagine St. Paul tearing into Corinth and breathlessly proclaiming that the righteous cause of a crucified criminal endures? Can one credibly hold that the apostles of Jesus went careering around the Mediterranean and to their deaths with the message that they felt forgiven?
Another strategy of domestication, employed by thinkers from the 19th century to today, is to reduce the Resurrection of Jesus to a myth or an archetype. There are numberless stories of dying and rising gods in the mythologies of the world, and the narrative of Jesus’ death and resurrection can look like just one more iteration of the pattern. Like those of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis and Persephone, the “resurrection” of Jesus is, on this reading, a symbolic evocation of the cycle of nature. In a Jungian psychological framework, the story of Jesus dying and coming back to life is an instance of the classic hero’s journey from order through chaos to greater order.
Novelist and theologian C.S. Lewis at Oxford, 1946.
PHOTO: HANS WILD/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
The problem with these modes of explanation was well articulated by C.S. Lewis: Those who think that the New Testament is a myth just haven’t read many myths. Precisely because they have to do with timeless verities and the great natural and psychological constants, mythic narratives are situated “once upon a time,” or to bring things up to date, “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” No one wonders who was Pharaoh during Osiris’s time or during which era of Greek history Heracles performed his labors, for these tales are not historically specific.
But the Gospel writers are keen to tell us that Jesus’ birth, for instance, took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria and Augustus the Emperor of Rome—that is to say, at a definite moment of history and in reference to readily identifiable figures. The Nicene Creed, recited regularly by Catholics and Orthodox Christians as part of their Sunday worship, states that Jesus was “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” a Roman official whose image is stamped on coins that we can examine today.
Moreover, the Greek word used most often by St. Paul to characterize his message is euangelion, which carries the sense of “good news.” The myth of the dying and rising god and the story of the hero’s adventure might be intriguing and illuminating, but the one thing they are not is news. Paul wasn’t trading in abstractions or spiritual bromides; he wanted to take everyone he spoke to by the shoulders and tell them about something that had happened, something so stunning that it changed the world. And at the heart of his euangelion was anastasis, resurrection.In a speech recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, St. Peter tells his listeners about Jesus, a man from Nazareth, who did great things in Galilee and Judea, who was put to death and whom God raised from death. Then he adds, almost as an aside, that he and the other Apostles “ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” This is just not the way mythmakers talk.
Faith in the Resurrection does not delegitimize political power, but it relativizes it, placing it decidedly under the judgment of God.
Christians have been teasing out the implications of this good news for two millennia, but I will focus on just three themes. First, for believers, the Resurrection means that Jesus is Lord. The phrase Iesous Kyrios, Jesus the Lord, is found everywhere in Paul’s letters and was likely on his lips regularly as he preached. A watchword of that time and place was Kaiser Kyrios, Caesar the Lord, meaning that the emperor of Rome is the one to whom ultimate allegiance is due. St. Paul’s intentional play upon that title, implying that the true Lord is not Caesar but rather someone whom Caesar put to death and whom God raised from the dead, was meant to tweak the nose of the political powers.
It goes a long way to explaining, too, why Paul spent a good amount of time in Roman prisons and was eventually decapitated by Roman authorities. Faith in the Resurrection does not delegitimize political power, but it relativizes it, placing it decidedly under the judgment of God. The Gospel writers obviously enjoyed the delicious irony of the sign that Pontius Pilate placed over the cross, “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews.” Intended derisively, it effectively made Pilate, Caesar’s local representative, the first great evangelist.
A 5-year-old girl prepares for Easter at the Parish of the Epiphany Episcopal church in Winchester, Mass., 2015.
PHOTO: JOHN TLUMACKI/THE BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY IMAGES
A second key implication of the Easter event is that Jesus’ extraordinary claims about himself were ratified. Unlike any of the other great religious founders, Jesus consistently spoke and acted in the very person of God. Declaring a man’s sins forgiven, referring to himself as greater than the Temple, claiming lordship over the Sabbath and authority over the Torah, insisting that his followers love him more than their mothers and fathers, more than their very lives, Jesus assumed a divine prerogative. And it was precisely this apparently blasphemous pretension that led so many of his contemporaries to oppose him. After his awful death on an instrument of torture, even his closest followers became convinced that he must have been delusional and misguided.
But when his band of Apostles saw him alive again after his death, they came to believe that he is who he said he was. They found his outrageous claim ratified in the most surprising and convincing way possible. Their conviction is beautifully expressed in the confession of Thomas the erstwhile doubter who, upon seeing the risen Lord, fell to his knees and said simply, “My Lord and My God.”
A third insight that we can derive from the Resurrection is that God’s love is more powerful than anything that is in the world. On the cross, Jesus took on, as it were, all the sins of humanity. Violence, hatred, cruelty, institutional injustice, stupidity, scapegoating and resentment brought him to Calvary and, it seemed, overwhelmed him. Like a warrior, he confronted all those forces that stand athwart God’s purposes—what the theologian Karl Barth called “the nothingness,” what the author of Genesis referred to as the tohu-va-bohu, the primal chaos.For believers ever since, if the crucified and risen Jesus is divine, there is a moral imperative to make him unambiguously the center of our lives. But we also have the assurance that God has not given up on the human project, that God intends fully to save us, body and soul. One of the favorite phrases in the writings of the Fathers of the Church is Deus fit homo ut homo fieret Deus, which means, God became man that man might become God. No religion or philosophy has ever proclaimed a more radical humanism than that.
Jesus fought, not with the weapons of the world, not with an answering violence, but rather with a word of pardon.
But he fought, not with the weapons of the world, not with an answering violence, but rather with a word of pardon: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead showed that this spiritual resistance was not in vain.
When he appeared to his disciples, the New Testament tells us, the risen Lord typically did two things: He showed his wounds and he spoke the word Shalom, peace. On the one hand, Christians should not forget the depth of human depravity, the sin that contributed to the death of the Son of God. Whenever we are tempted to exculpate ourselves, we have only to look at the wounds of Christ and the temptation evanesces.
But on the other hand, we know that God’s love, his offer of Shalom, is greater than any possible sin of ours. Christians understood this precisely because human beings killed God, and God returned in forgiving love. In achingly beautiful poetry, St. Paul expressed this amazing grace: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
In the Greco-Roman culture of the first century, the term euangelion was used to signal an imperial victory, the “good news” that Caesar had conquered. With characteristic panache, the first Christians twisted the term for their own purposes. In the Resurrection of Jesus, God has won the victory over sin, over corruption and injustice, over death itself. This is the Good News that issued forth from shock of the empty tomb on Easter morning, and that has echoed up and down the last 20 centuries
So a year ago, for my husband's 50th birthday, we all went to the Big Island of Hawaii. We stayed in Kona and had an absolute blast. Well, one Sunday, as we were walking by the Catholic church, we noticed a bunch of students on the sidewalk praying for the 40 days for Life campaign. We were so impressed with these students, and their calm but determined demeanor as they prayed in public on the street. My attention was drawn to them, and I heard one of the students say that they were with YWAM. I didn't know what that was. Later in the trip, we passed by a college campus, called "University of the Nations", and I was curious about what THAT was as well, and told my husband that I had a feeling the students we saw on the street praying were from this university. Turns out I was right, as a quick Google search showed. It's a Christian University that trains missionaries. We also drove by a "Kalani" street, and I took a picture of the road sign, and sent it to my friend Beth, whose son's name is Kalani. Kalani is of Hawaiian heritage. Long story short - I texted Beth repeatedly from Hawaii about this "University of the Nations", and YWAM, and how I felt like this would be such a great place for Kalani to come for college. Just seemed like such a natural fit.
A year later (tonight), Beth texted me to ask the name of the student group I texted about for her son all those months ago. When I told her YWAM from Kona, she sent me a "mind blown" emoji. Apparently, she never mentioned to Kalani about my texts last year. This past weekend, though, he met up with some Youth With a Mission students from Kona who came HERE to the Keweenaw. They met and talked, and Kalani tonight came to his mother and said that he feels God calling him very specifically to go to school in Kona! Hello. The very same place I felt he needed to be a year ago - even though I really don't know Kalani at all.
Sometimes, God isn't so subtle. Sometimes He uses peripheral people to confirm a message He's speaking into someone's heart. Sometimes, something random isn't random at all.
"The school of Christ is the school of love. In the last day, when the general examination takes place ... Love will be the whole syllabus." — St. Robert Bellarmine
