Cancer and the Kingdom: Embracing Exile, a Future and a Hope

Came across this article I wrote back in 2006 about Hannah in the immediate aftermath of her brain surgery. With her graduating this past week and the fourth anniversary of her surgery coming up in just a few weeks, this just seems timely...

The essential meaning of exile is that we are where we don’t want to be. We are separated from home. We are not permitted to reside in the place we comprehend and appreciate our surroundings. We are forced to be away from that which is most congenial to us. It is an experience of dislocation – everything is out of joint; nothing fits together. The thousand details that have been built up through the years that give a sense of at-homeness – gestures, customs, rituals, phrases – are all gone. Life is ripped out of the familiar soil...and dropped unceremoniously into some unfamiliar spot of earth. The place of exile may boast a higher standard of living. It may be more pleasant in its weather. That doesn’t matter. It isn’t home.  Eugene Peterson, Run with the Horses

She lay unresponsive on the bed, eyes open but vacant, paralyzed. An MRI had been scheduled to hopefully find some answers to the ongoing headaches that doctors only wanted to medicate, the increasing difficulty in movement, the steady weight loss and nausea.  I carried her to the car and rushed her to the emergency room – little realizing that she would not return home for another sixty-six days. Scans were performed, tests were run, a large, malignant brain tumor was found; surgery was scheduled within the hour. New vocabulary for our family: medulla blastoma. It was Tuesday, June 27th, and we thought it fortunate that we had the fourth of July weekend coming up – hopefully she’d be ready to come home soon afterwards. All uncharted territory, filled with uncertainties, fears, doubts. No grid, no maps, no prospectus, no words.

That is how our journey started with Hannah’s cancer ordeal. Now, some seventy days later, she is just about through with her radiation treatments and her first cycle of chemotherapy. And she is home. The hospital staff uses words like “amazing” and “miraculous” to describe her – grace and fortitude evident in and upon her physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Initially we looked for a crack in some exterior façade of cheerfulness, but gave that up long ago. The girl just beams as she carries a load that we imagine would cripple us. It’s coming from something planted deep within. Divine life emerging, breaking through like green growth through cracks in steamrolled asphalt. The outlook for Hannah, we are told, is excellent – no further signs of cancer having spread anywhere; an 85% cure rate with no further recurrence; a cancer highly treatable and susceptible to radiation and chemotherapy. But, although home now, it will be a long haul with ongoing rehabilitation and chemotherapy. As it was put to Hannah rather directly as she was holding out for winter camp come February: “Your life will be on hold for at least a year.” With that same smile, she says what all of her RNs and CNAs have grown accustomed to hearing: “Okey dokey.” Her eyes show not resignation, but almost a playful, “We’ll see about that.”

As the numbness wore off, as a dad observing and experiencing all this with his fifteen-year-old daughter, I struggled for words – for the map, the grid, terra firma on which to stand, footing from which to move through the mire of cancer. The first word was given to me while with her on her first day pass. She chose to go see the new Pirates movie (obsessed Johnny Depp fan that she is). As Jack Sparrow faced off with the sea beast with its massive tentacles and gaping jaws, he said defiantly, “Hello, beastie!” and then pitched into it, allowing himself to be consumed by it, but with sword in hand. A divine image, framed even, just for me. “You can do that!” I heard in my heart. I have found myself saying, “Hello, beastie” many times since. In his faithfulness and mercy, God does give us footing, he gives us vocabulary for whatever it is that we are facing.

“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile.” Throw yourselves into the place in which you find yourself, but not on its terms, on God’s terms. Pray. Search for that center in which God’s will is being worked out and work from that center…The aim of the person of faith is not be as comfortable as possible but to live as deeply and thoroughly as possible – to deal with the reality of life, discover truth, create beauty, act out love…You are in Babylon for a long time. You better make the best of it. Don’t just get along, waiting for some miraculous intervention. Build houses, plant gardens, marry husbands, marry wives, have children, pray for the wholeness of Babylon, and do everything you can to develop that wholeness. The only place you have to be human is where you are right now. The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at this moment. Eugene Peterson, Run with the Horses

The second word came a few weeks later. “Exile.” Not a very cheery word. But a very apt word for what we were in the midst of. It was towards the end of Run with the Horses – Eugene Peterson’s ruminations on the life of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. “Exile,” he said, “is being where you would rather not be.” It is the experience of dislocation, disjointedness. Much of Israel had just entered into exile in Babylon. They were confused, lost, uprooted, adrift on a sea of hopelessness. Prophets appeared with good news: “Don’t unpack your bags. God promises your best life now! You’re going home soon! Deliverance is at hand!” The prophet Jeremiah, still in Israel, sent a message to the captives: “Don’t be deceived by smooth talking prophets promising you the world. Settle down where you are. Dig in. Build houses and live in them. Plant vineyards and eat their fruit. Marry, have children. Seek shalom in the place where the Lord has exiled you – for the peace of that place is your peace. And when seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will bring you back home. For I know the plans that I have for you, plans to prosper you, to give you a future and a hope.” Many times we quote Jeremiah 29:11 with its “prosper” and “future” and “hope” – and it’s a good verse. I had just never appreciated the context of the promise as I did at that moment.

I would pull into the hospital parking lot muttering “I hate this place.” I would walk its halls murmuring, “One day we’ll be out of here.” The Lord stopped me in my tracks with Jeremiah. It was as if the Lord had penned a personal note to me, reading “Seek my shalom, my restful, wholesome peace here. Settle in these halls. Kiss the ground of this parking lot. Embrace exile here. For it is in the context of embracing exile here that a future and a hope is ultimately received and trust for it nurtured. It certainly isn’t natural. It doesn’t get much more upside down. It seems more logical to assume that kingdom theology means release from thorns, from tumors, from hospital beds and bedside commodes. And, I suppose, ultimately, it is such release. The kingdom of God is the radical breaking in of the effective reign of God in the midst of a fallen, corrupt and groaning creation. The form of such breaking in can be reversal and restoration of what is broken – cancers are healed, thorns removed, tumors dissolved, bodies restored whether by event or by process or by combination of both. The kingdom also comes, perhaps less dramatically in our estimation, in bestowing divine grace that is sufficient for us, even in “exile.”

Exile is the worst that reveals the best. “It’s hard believing,” says Faulkner, “but disaster seems to be good for people.” When the superfluous is stripped away, we find the essential – and the essential is God. Normal life is full of distractions and irrelevancies. Then catastrophe: Dislocation. Exile. Illness. Accident. Job loss. Divorce. Death. The reality of our lives is rearranged without anyone consulting us or waiting for our permission. We are no longer at home. All of us are given moments, days, months, years of exile. What will we do with them? Wish we were someplace else? Complain? Escape into fantasies? Drug ourselves into oblivion? Or build and plant and marry and seek the shalom of the place we inhabit and the people we are with? Exile reveals what really matters, which is to seek the Lord with all our hearts.” Eugene Peterson, Run with the Horses