Thirst

Dear Friend,

Before anything, I owe you a medical status. I so deeply appreciate your patience as I’ve left you hanging far too long:

There have been no changes since I last updated you.

I had a scan a couple of weeks ago, and My Little Tumor Friend (MLTF) still seems to be sleeping gently. I want to say sleeping soundly, but of course, I can’t really know that, and to stake that claim would just be my attempt to offer hope that is not mine to offer. I hope he sleeps soundly, and for a very long time. But we know MLTF is alive and well, and will almost certainly someday waken.

In the meantime, I’ve come to think of chemo as a monthly shot of glio melatonin. Or Ambien. Or Xanax. Somehow I prefer this 100-fold to the idea of sending ruthless killers to rid my body of a foreign invader. So much collateral damage. I left the “battling cancer” metaphor on the side of the road a few miles back. I hated it so much, and prefer the idea of attending to MLTF, a phrase offered to me by a new friend, rather than trying to kill him. Tomato-Tomahto, I guess.

But I’ll take the gentler, Tomahto, and remember that each morning MLTF stays asleep is a precious gift to be cherished.

Anyway, how about this? I promise to do my best not to leave you wondering for so long again. I’ve resisted turning our letters into medical updates, mostly because there are much more interesting things about which you and I might wonder together. But maybe a quick note every couple weeks to tell you that MLTF is resting comfortably, or that he is starting to stir, or that he woke up in a rage, or that he seems to have quietly slipped out one night and maybe went to Florida for the winter and took all his stuff with him, as if he has no interest in returning. But for now, the monitors/scans show only that he is sleeping…gently.

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Part One: Details

I have come to the Blue Ridge Mountains for the month of October, and maybe a week or two beyond that. (My college friend who came to visit me a couple of weeks ago thought that my calling them mountains was “cute.” He had spent some time in the young and marvelous Cascades near Seattle, so his contempt for the splendor of these wise and ancient creatures is almost tolerable. Almost.)

I am writing from a small, not tiny, farmhouse where all the doors and threshold are an inch or two too short, and where the porch ceiling fan is my own personal skull magnet. Right now I’m sitting at a tiny table in a tiny room that has only space for a worn blue couch, a picnic table bench, or maybe an old-school church pew, that serves as the coffee table. There is a polka-dotted swivel chair in the corner across from me. There is a blue glass pitcher on the table at which I write with lavender statice and maroon mums and fading blue hydrangeas that Kathryn arranged over a week ago, and a wild marigold stem that I found while Carley and I walked today. Carley is asleep at my feet. Mercifully for both of us, I remembered to turn off the speaker, so the only sound is the sound of Carley’s sigh-yawns and the clackity keyboard and the creak of the old cane chair whenever I shift positions. The aroma of the flowers is faint until I notice it. Then it is not at all faint.

I walk most mornings. It’s been pleasant and warm this fall, and each morning Carley and I go out to check on the deer and the leaves and the birds and the sun. Watching for changes from one day to the next. Seeing the sun rise a little further south each morning. Noticing how there are no longer any Cedar Waxwings, and that the Canada Geese have moved onto wherever Canada Geese go in October. We try to notice how the color of the leaves changes from day to day. The gentle-sloping walls of the valley are unmistakably more yellow today, or at least a bolder shade of yellow than they were yesterday. The maples seem to be holding on to summer the longest, and we are only now beginning to see hints of red in the morning hills.

On the days that we do not walk, we sit by the pond. This week we watched a blue-jay and hawk play a rousing game of tag over the goose-less pond. Shrieking with delight as they each took their turn at being it.

In the time that I’ve been here, I’ve seen the aurora and, though faint and whispy, it appeared close enough to reach out and touch. I’ve looked across a valley and watched a comet emerge from a sunset, then watched it follow the sun’s path until it, too, ducked behind the distant blue ridge. I’ve seen high, gentle cataracts awakened into angry cascades, and heard them take deep breaths and count to ten to calm themselves.

I’ve tasted the apples from local orchards and produce from the valley farms. I’ve smelled the wet ferns that lined the paths of Nelson County.

I’ve stood face-to-face with a buck (from what might have been a safe distance, but who knows?) and I have marveled at a quiet, powerful doe bounding down a creek, then trying to hide behind the brush and turn her back in a “If I can’t see you, then you can’t see me,” sort of game, but she is betrayed by her white tail. How often, I wonder, do I make this very same mistake?

Carley notices these things, too. We talk about them when we get home, and sometimes she has noticed things that I have not. Usually the scents, of course. These are the best walks. When Carley and I lay our walking treasures on the table and silently trade stories.

Each of these details, like each moment, matters. Not because I can explain them or because I am learning something new. They matter simply because they are, and they would matter whether or not I noticed them. Of course they would.

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Part Two: Wonders

I hope you are not weary of my wondering about belovedness, but even if you are weary of it, this is a different sort of wonder. I’m wondering if we (and I mean all, or at least most of us) don’t desperately want God to be, and perhaps more desperately want God to be in love with us. It’s a fair thing to ask what that might even mean, so here is where I am walking this morning:

When I strip away all the toxic positivity and hopeful (and rarely maintained) gratitude journals and my unrelenting attempts at self-improvement and the noise of the next great thing, and when I recognize the having an iPhone 16 and a great BMI and a fat wallet and a thousand instagram followers and a keen intellect, and that whether my candidate wins or loses and whether the US is around for three more months or another three-thousand years,… well not one of these things is going to do all that much anything to satisfy the thirst that haunts me. That taunts me. I might get a quick dump of dopamine if something happens to fall my way, but ultimately, the dopamine dissipates, and I still thirst. I understand this is a hard sentence to look at, but look at it I must. I don’t mind a bit if you look away, or if you can offer something that exposes the flaw in this logic. If you can tell me how even one of those things can make a lasting effect on the empty that lives inside of me, or if you have found a different stream to fill it, I am listening. Truly. But I don’t see it.

Because no matter what I find, no matter how promising, I always return to this uncomfortable and inescapable truth.

Just like the 101 billion people who have lived and died before me,

Just like the 8 billion who are living now, this is the arc of my little life:

I love. I laugh. I suffer. I die.

And when I steel my resolve and consider this uncomfortable fact, for fact is precisely what I believe it to be, my culture tells me I have very few options for dealing with this truth.

1. I can engage in a lovely and life-long game of wishful thinking. I can wake every morning and intentionally take a fat blue pill. I can pretend-generate pretend-control of my all-too-real world. I can make my own pretend-meaning in an attempt to quench my own thirst, or I can borrow somebody else’s meaning, that either they pretend-generated themselves or borrowed from somebody else. The beauty of this approach is that there is always, always, always somebody around to sell me on the idea that they have unlocked the mystery of control, or even on their idea of meaning. There is always, always, always another blue pill in the bottle. And it’s a good thing because when I wake at 3:00 am and my internal filter is fast asleep, I know, really know, that I will develop a tolerance to any blue pill because I have always developed such a tolerance, and there will definitely come a time when the pill I am currently taking will no longer suffice. It’s a comfort to know I can always find a bigger-better blue pill. Something to carry me through the next day until I mercifully run out of days, hopefully before I run out of blue pills. Or…

2. I can numb myself. When I have the courage to look at the illusion of my control, or the ridiculousness of my self-generated meaning or my borrowed meaning with a clear eye, or when I am forced to do so by life’s inevitable crises, it’s impossible for me to continue the self-deceit of wishful thinking that I have somehow enlightened myself, or that the things to which I have given my heart, even the good things, can bear the weight of my hopelessness. So I might choose to numb. There are so many different ways to do this, and most of them, I think, involve addiction in the very broadest sense - addiction to substances, sex, screens, money,…, you already know all of this. We’ve talked about it to death. But I’m going to say this part out loud: Addiction might be a relatively gentle way of numbing. Relative to the ultimate numbing, I mean. Or…

3. I can become a stoic. I suppose in my most honest moments, those moments when I am ready to chuck my wishful thinking and when I am absolutely determined not to numb, in our culture there is another option - stoicism. I am left with the Sisyphean idea that survival is its own meaning - a sort of idealized notion that to be fully human is to learn to suffer without complaint, or even to suffer with a sense of pride and to carry on without hope of anything more than suffering. To roll the rock up the hill each day, and to do it again the next, and the next, and then to ask for a heavier rock. As much as I reject this notion, I have to respect it. There seems to be so much more intellectual integrity in this option than the first two. But it leads me down some dark paths, not the least of which is what I might call the idolization of suffering and the sanctification of those who suffer best, simply because they suffer best. Stop for a moment to consider where this might lead. How might this path affect the way we treat ourselves? Others? The Universe? Everything an object. Even ourselves. Nothing a subject. This is terrifying to me, and especially terrifying when, in my limited view, this perspective is gaining purchase in our culture, often hiding behind the mask of holy masculinity. I am 100% not here for it. Or…

4. I can quit. (The ultimate numbing.)

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Maybe popping blue pills, self-medicating/numbing, or learning to suffer in silence is enough to get you out of bed each morning (and I am truly offering no judgment or condemnation if any of them is), but not one of them, or even any combination of them is enough for me. I don’t care a great deal if that makes me weak. I already know I’m weak. But I crave more than a lifelong game of make-believe and more than life in a bottle or brothel and way more than learning to suffer in silence like a pack mule. Finally, I’m not even close to quitting life, so in the absence of any alternatives within our culture, I turn outward.

And I look for God. And I desperately want God to be. Desperately is not too strong a word. In fact, it’s not nearly strong enough to describe what I mean. The closest I’ve ever read is in Psalm 42:1.

As a deer pants for flowing streams,
    so pants my soul for you, O God.

I don’t think this is just another ordinary deer looking for a cool drink of water after an afternoon of grazing in a quiet field. I think this is a deer on the edge. A deer on the run whose very survival depends on finding water. I’ve been that deer. I am that deer, and I wonder if you are or have been, too. In The Message, Eugene Peterson ends this verse with:

That is what I mean by desperate for God to be.

I’m thirsty for God-alive.

(It takes a poem, doesn’t it? It always takes a poem.)

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You might say that belief in God is just another blue pill - self delusion in the extreme, and you would not be the first, and maybe you’d be right. After all, I am convinced that anybody who claims to have 100% empirical proof that God is - is 100% lying. I am convinced there is an uncertainty gap that must be filled by the grace of faith. Is the grace of faith just a nicer, churchier way of saying magical thinking? Maybe, but I don’t think so. There seems to be enough evidence (not proof) that God is. (To be clear: The evidence to which I am referring looks nothing like Christian apologetics.) Perhaps there is not enough evidence for you, and there is certainly not enough to tip me over into absolute intellectual consent, or to claim that I know. I do not know, and certainly not enough that I would dare to try to convince you. (That work that is way, way above my paygrade.) The evidence I am talking about are hints and suggestions nearly everywhere I turn that allow me to believe, to give my heart to, the truth of God’s is-ness.

You might suggest that this is my way of numbing. Others, like Nietzsche, have suggested exactly the same. Maybe you’d be right. But again, I don’t think so. It seems there are far, far easier ways to numb than belief in God. I mean, why not skip God altogether and go straight to opium? It tends to act more quickly and honestly, might be more effective in masking pain. The idea of substituting God for opium seems completely irrational to me. I don’t suggest that I always act rationally, but c’mon. I would choose the easy path on this one every time.

But even if this really is just magical thinking or numbing, it leaves the question of the source of my thirst unanswered. It ignores the fact that I am parched for meaning, and that I simply am unable to generate that meaning on my own, or to borrow it from another. I mean, where did that thirst come from in the first place? If I was the only thirsty person in the world, I could chock it up to madness, and would gladly do so. After all, there is probably a pill for madness. It’s probably blue.

But it doesn’t seem like I am the only one. Far from it.

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I am parched for God-alive. It’s the only thing that will suffice. It’s almost as if my life, my very survival depends on it.

Because it does. Literally. Metaphorically. In every way. My survival depends on the is-ness of God.

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But that isn’t enough, is it? I contended even more potent that our desperation for God to be is for God to be in love with us. Why does this matter to me? Well, because I am human and I mess things up. And my only hope of living a meaningful life is a God who is not merely sovereign, but one who is good and offers grace freely. One who doesn’t merely love me for being good enough or for having stumbled onto the proper theology, but one who cherishes me no matter what. Even when, and maybe especially when I am at my worst. Who delights in me. Who is in love with me, and willing to prove it by walking with me when I’m a filthy, stinky, ugly, unkempt mess. Because I often am. I need a God who is in love with me. Not a God who finds me lovely. Anything less simply won’t do.

I suppose I overstepped when I suggested that every person longs for God to be, and for God to be in love with him or her. I suppose that I was projecting my own desperation onto all of humanity. Probably so. What would you say?

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I just realized how long this is. Can we pick where we left off next time? Can we talk about the gap between belovedness and being lovely? (I think it’s more a canyon than a gap.) Can we marvel at the grace in which our lives are soaked? Can take a moment to sit in all the evidence, the overwhelming evidence, that God is, indeed, Grace, and in rapturous love with us? And can we talk about how our attempts to make ourselves more attractive to God, while cute in a “Bless your heart” sort of way, are simply ludicrous from the drop (and maybe even a little insulting?) Can we talk about how God’s delight in us unlocks any prison cell we might lock ourselves in?

And how if this is true for us, then it must be true for every single person. Literally,

Can we?

More soon.

Oremus,

C