It’s not hard to find cancer stories these days. I’ve mentioned a few in past blogs: John Diamond, Colm Toibin, Clive James. Recently the broadcaster George Alagiah has opened up about his bowel cancer and his struggle to find ‘a place of contentment’. Just last night on The One Show the actress Laurie Brett spoke about her mother’s breast cancer and comedian Joe Pasquale about his father’s fatal prostate cancer. It wasn’t always like this. Cancer was the great unmentionable. I remember my mother speaking of someone who had a ‘lump’. Which didn’t convey a great deal until the woman in question underwent serious surgery and follow-up treatment. Even medical people could be coy in their use of the word. Years ago I was speaking to a retired Nursing Sister who mentioned a man who was unwell. She said: ‘I think it’s . . . (and here she mimed the word ‘cancer’.)
Things seemed to change in the late 1990s. The journalist Ruth Picardie wrote in The Observer of her breast cancer cancer experience which would eventually lead to her death at age 33. And then there was John Diamond who wrote a column in the The Times. He was diagnosed with a neck cancer in 1997 which was then discovered in his throat and tongue. Most of the latter was removed and eventually his condition was deemed inoperable. Through all of this John wrote about his experiences in a way that moved and inspired many people although there were some who deplored this modern tendency to wallow in misery. In line with the honesty that would later run through his book he probes his initial motive for writing:
‘What I was trying to do was looking for a way to make cancer acceptable, to be the man who had discovered chic cancer. I wasn’t doing this for the greater good of cancer patients everywhere, for all that cancer patients everywhere wrote to me to thank me for the favour. I was doing it as a form of very public denial therapy . . . I was trying to change the problem from one of pain and physical constraint and possibly impending death into one of best journalistic practice . . . how to make a momentary thought a greater philosophical reflection. And in doing so I wasn’t, of course, unconscious of the times when I was putting a jaunty spin on something depressing, when I was feigning bravery or indifference.’
As he goes through treatment and surgery he works out any notion of ‘chic cancer’ from his system but his self-analysis is powerful. I went through something like this when I began these blogs and to some extent continue to do so. Why am I writing? On a practical level I am keeping in touch with congregations and friends, people who want to know how things are progressing. And yes, it is good therapy for me. I feel more like myself. If I can’t preach then I can write. The worst thing is that niggle that I am jumping on that cancer band-wagon that could lead to self-indulgence.
As far as I know my own heart, however, the decisive weight that tips the balance is the knowledge that whatever the questions that arise and the struggles that threaten to overwhelm the God who is revealed in the mission of Jesus Christ is involved and that is a truth worth bearing witness to. And not because I must stoically screw up my inner resources to believe. By the grace of God I stand with Paul when he says:
‘I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans 8: 38-39)
It is hard to grasp this when you consider the depth of pain endured by individuals and the extent of suffering in the world at large but listening to the ancient voices of faith in Scripture is to hear a people who knew their God and were convinced of His presence, love and purpose even in their worst of times. The supreme assurance of this flows from the crucified Christ. It has never been easy for Christians to live with the truth that the supreme expression of God’s love is seen in the tortured body and derelict soul of Jesus. But that cannot be expunged from the story. It is the story.
Going back to John Diamond. In his book C because cowards get cancer too he declares himself ambivalent about religion. He was brought up as a ‘secular Jew’. But there are moments when it seems that he is being touched by something beyond himself, however he might disagree. Having gone through severe treatment and horrendous surgery and about a year before he was finally overwhelmed by the cancer he describes spending some time alone with his wife (Nigella Lawson). For no apparent reason he begins to smile and says:
‘It’s a strange time . . . I’ve never felt more love for you than I have in the past year, that I’ve never appreciated you as much, nor the children. In a way I feel guilty that it should have taken this to do it, I suppose. But it is strange, isn’t it.’
He goes on:
‘For the first time I found myself talking like this without resenting that it had taken the cancer to teach me the basics, without resenting that there was part of me capable of talking like a 50s women’s magazine article without blushing.
‘I still don’t believe that there is any sense in which the cancer has been a good thing but, well, it is strange, isn’t it?’
It may be that something beyond even the most precious human relationships is happening here. Intimation that the outflow of God’s love and purpose in the world is working for good, shaping our lives for the best, even in the worst of times. Even the worst of all, death itself, powerfully described by Shakespeare as the ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’ has been transformed to the way to life irradiated by the presence of the One who did return and guides His people to that place He has promised to prepare for them.
