Through the Portal.
I’m going to keep this first post short, even those of you who know me (which at this point is: everyone), knows I am not a woman of few (written) words. But I have so much to say, I’d never start if I thought I had to say it all. It would be a clog, and not a blog.
Eight days ago, I was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare cancer. What makes it funny is that this particular cancer usually strikes teenage boys, in their bones. I am 39, and it turned up in my lungs. Yesterday my oncologist told me that there have been only 11 previously reported cases of primary lung Ewing’s sarcoma in the world, to this point. I am number twelve.
My husband Peter is marvelling at how strange it is to be one of only 12 of somebody in the world. The same number of people have walked on the moon. The number of disciples of Jesus Christ. I hope I am not Judas, but one of the lesser disciples who escaped untimely death, say, Thaddeus. My dad thinks I am going to be famous. Oncologists all over Boston will stop each other excitedly by the water cooler and say “I rode up with her in the elevator today!”
I’m joking, as a defensive mechanism (does sarcoma make you sarcastic? Is it a LetterMan thing?) but I’ll be honest: I’ve been absolutely terrified, and deeply sad. I started this blog promising myself that I would be honest. Too many people hide when they’re sad or in pain, but I am an extrovert in this sense—I’m an external thinker, and an external feeler. I need to feel my feelings out loud, to get them out. You might be, too, even though you usually hide until the storm passes, until you can tell your friends it’s all worked out, thanks, you’re all set, you don’t need them.
There is the problem that a lot of my church folks might read this, and that my sadness or fear might trigger yours. Whenever someone we love is sick, or sad, or depressed, there is a certain amount of osmosis. It’s even more powerful between ministers and their flock—ministers have a place in the emotional life of a church that is much larger than they deserve. But I’m blogging and letting you in for two reasons: 1, so I can keep it out of the middle of our church’s life and communication and ordinary traffic (not entirely, of course, just want it to take on its proper proportion in our beloved community), and 2) so you can see that I am entirely human, and so, when it’s your turn, you can be entirely human, and be unashamed to tell the truth about your life.
Why did I call the blog Holy Spirit Portality? Well, when this whole thing started—was it only about 7 weeks ago? When they first found the 3 cm mass in my lung, by accident, at Mt. Auburn Hospital, the first thing I did was call my friend S., who works there. S. is a great woman of faith, who really believes in the power of God, AND who also really believes in modern medicine, what it can do to heal and cure. This combination is harder to find than you might think. S. has been an incredible source of support and wisdom and strength and counsel for me during this most difficult, ever, time of my life.
Anyhow, I went to get a CT scan to get a better look at the mass, and met S. for coffee in the caf afterward. I was flummoxed. What could this be? “Maybe it’s your Holy Spirit Portal!” she said. Holy Spirit Portal. A way for God to get in.
I’m fond of preaching that as adults, the only way we grow or learn anything is by having something broken. Kids are eternally open, messy, curious, egoless—it is easy for them just to run around in the world poking, smelling, leaping in, soaking up experience and knowledge and insight. But grownups—we’re so tightly held, controlled, afraid (especially of death), that the only way God can get in is to chisel an entry, to take something that seems to us to be working just fine, thank you very much, and make a paper cut, or smash the damn thing open.
Let me be clear about one thing: I don’t think God ‘gave’ me cancer. But, like I’ve been saying about the earthquake in Haiti (especially to those people who think it was “God’s will,” as if a good God would do that to an already impoverished and beset people): God didn’t send the earthquake, but will damn sure USE the earthquake. And this, my earthquake—it’s not just for me. It will rock lots of us, change us, break us open, re-route us, in ways we can’t imagine. I have some evidence of that already. More to come on that topic.
A week after S. named the Holy Spirit Portal, they (there’s always a They in the midst of a medical crisis, yes?) had decided they wanted to biopsy it, or really, they just wanted to take it out. I was resistant: I had grown attached to it. What if God had given me this unique wireless device, a divine mobile communication? And now I was just going to cut it out? I asked S. about this.
“If they think it’s something possibly dangerous, you should let them take it out. Then you’ll have an even bigger Holy Spirit Portal.”
Ok, so much for short. This is me, after all.
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