Hope-full

Dear Friend,

Yesterday we met with our oncologist. 

This month’s scan looks almost exactly like last month’s, which looked almost exactly like April’s, and so on all the way back to January. This is an unambiguously good result. It seems our doctor is satisfied that whatever we are seeing in the scan (and we are definitely seeing something) is scarring or inflammation due to radiation or just a thing that happened somewhere along the line and may or may not resolve in time. 

But it is not advancing cancer. Unambiguously good. We are unambiguously grateful for more time. Time together.

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There is more than one valid way to respond to such a report. One way, of course, is to allow hope to take deeper root and to extend further and further into the future. To allow ourselves to imagine discussing this particular scan over a bottle of good red wine on the porch in the fall of say, 2026 or even 2030, around a warm fire with dear friends who walked this path with us and who remained faithful and caring.  Friends who demonstrated God’s love and did not flinch, even when it was almost impossible not to flinch. Friends, who in Nouwen’s words:

…instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures,  chose rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand….Who were  silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who stayed with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who courageously tolerated not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and faced with us the reality of our powerlessness.

Friends who did the hardest work of caring, and left curing to others.   

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Another way to respond is to wake and drink in this morning’s new mercies, and maybe, and only maybe, give some thought to tomorrow’s. But also, to resist going too far past the day after that. To try not to let an unambiguously good report create expectations that this will go on forever, because this will not go on forever. Not for us and not for anyone. To try not to let an unambiguously good report take us from where and when our feet are, and they are here and they are now, to some distant place in some far-off time. Try not to let an unambiguously good report cloud our vision of God’s here-ness and now-ness and with-ness. To resist hope’s subtle shapeshifting into magical thinking, which can often rob me of the joy of what is by turning my attention to what may (or may not) be.

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To be clear, I am not suggesting that one way is better than another. I have long tried to hold both of these hopes in my hands at the same time, and found it almost impossible not to crush one or the other. Found it almost impossible to hold onto hope for the future while, at the same moment, embracing the beauty of the present

This is where grace comes in, I think. Which, mercifully, seems to be in unambiguously great supply these days 

Oremus,

C