491 - Waiting for the Morning Star

Waiting for the Morning Star
By Thomas G. Long

“Suffering," wrote Paul, "produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope" (Rom. 5:3-4).

Sometimes, of course, this is not so. Or, if it is so, it is true in a way that mocks human attempts to grasp it. "I don't understand what I'm supposed to do," said a disoriented Tolstoy just before he died. Some suffering is so inexplicable, so random, so vicious, so out of human scale that it seems to have nothing to teach, except the pitiless truth of its own chaotic cruelty.

But there is a suffering that does grant wisdom-a harsh light, to be sure, but light, nonetheless, illumining the pathway at least to a place of greater courage, if not to deeper faith, hope, and love. Walter Benjamin, reflecting on the moral growth possible even in terminal illness, spoke of "love at last sight."

Unfortunately, the wisdom suffering can impart is often available only to the sufferers themselves. Not only is much about suffering ineffable, there is the nearly irresistible impulse on the part of the rest of us to pass by on the other side. "Everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster," Auden reminded us, and, if not a studied avoidance, at least an impenetrable silence surrounds the private moments of suffering.

Physician Lewis Thomas, author of The Lives of a Cell, once noted that one of the problems with today's young physicians is that they have never been sick, not really sick. As children of the age of antibiotics, they, unlike previous generations of doctors, have never personally experienced a life-threatening disease, and, thus, they cannot know the fear, pain, and desperation of their own critically ill patients.

Lately, however, and to the benefit of all of us, the experience of grave illness has found voices capable of breaking through the wall of silence and dread that separates the sick from the well, allowing all who are willing to learn access to suffering's wisdom. Quietly, a compelling literature of illness has developed, candid autobiographies of pain and loss, hard-won trust and love. "Inside every seriously ill person," observed a man battling cancer, "there's a Kafka … trying to get out," and, in at least three recent books, the voice of Kafka-or perhaps even the voice of Job-has spoken afresh. These volumes are Intoxicated by My Illness by

492 - Waiting for the Morning Star

the late literary critic Anatole Broyard, A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing by the novelist Reynolds Price, and Cancer and Faith: Reflections on Living with a Terminal Illness by theologian John Carmody.

In their own ways, all three of these witnesses testify that one of the earliest lessons of suffering concerns time. When disease strikes, time, suddenly in short supply, becomes urgent and treasured. "Time had tapped me on the shoulder," writes Broyard of the moment he learned of his life-threatening prostate cancer. "I had been given a real deadline at last."

The taken-for-granted commodities of life-books, food, music, friends, trees, the first light of a new day-assume the form of sacraments. "When my wife made me a hamburger the other day." says Broyard, "I thought it was the most fabulous hamburger in the history of the world." Every new day is a gift. "When you are terminally ill," writes Carmody of his own experience with bone marrow cancer, "the morning star is precious. Seeing it, you realize that you have made it through another night, that the darkness has not yet conquered you."

Ironically, looming death, the "real deadline" that speeds up time and generates the urgent need to extract all possibilities from the remaining moments, also slows down time and produces patience. "I'll use everything I can while I wait… comments Broyard. "Illness is primarily a drama, and it should be possible to enjoy it as well as to suffer it." For Reynolds Price, the spinal cancer that has resulted in paraplegia, "has forced a degree of patience on me":

Shortly after my own paralysis, I heard two of Franklin Roosevelt's sons say that the primary change in their father, after polio struck him in mid-life and grounded him firmly, was an increased patience and a willingness to listen…. As I survived the black frustration of so many new forms of powerlessness, I partly learned to sit and attend, to watch and taste whatever or whomever seemed likely or needy, far more closely than I had in five decades. The pool of human evidence that lies beneath my writing and teaching, if nothing more, has grown in the wake of that big change.

If the urgency of suffering and of impending death produces enduring patience, it also strengthens the sense of self and the grip on life. "I died," writes the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott in the opening sentence of his autobiography. "Let me see," he continues, "What was happening when I died? My prayer had been answered. I was alive when I died."

For Reynolds Price, it was Deuteronomy's offer and command to "choose life" instead of death that guided his decisions, that stiffened his own resolve to be alive when he died. "Never give death a serious hearing," he advises, "till its ripeness forces your final attention and dignified nod."

In these three books, there is no easy embrace of death of the sort described in Kübler-Ross. Death is no gentle friend, no "final stage of life" welcomed with a smile. Broyard tells approvingly of the fifteen year-old boy, in the last moments before his death from muscular dystrophy, requesting that his father arrange him in the hospital bed in

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"an impudent position." Carmody tried to embrace St. Francis' vision of Sister Death as a minister of God's love, but found it finally not completely satisfying. "I take greater comfort in the eucharist," he said, "By eating Christ's flesh and drinking his blood I … find myself taken over by his divine life."

All three sufferers describe their hunger for what Price calls "the oldest natural code of all-mere human connection, the simple looks and words that award a suffering creature his or her dignity." Postcards, greeting cards even of the sentimental sort, telephone calls, prayers-the modest good works of "generous people … true practical saints"-are all vessels of comfort and grace, counted of far more value by those who receive them than those who perform them can possibly know. Especially treasured are those who gather around the sufferer to listen. "The world is full of babblers," states Carmody. "Rare are those who listen from the heart and offer you a fullness of silence." Physicians particularly should understand, claims Broyard, the patient's need to talk and be heard. "I would … like a doctor who enjoyed me. I want to be a good story for him…." Moreover,

All cures are partly "talking cures" ' in Freud's phrase. Every patient needs mouth to mouth resuscitation…. [T]he doctor ought to bleed the patient of talk, of the consciousness of his illness, as earlier physicians used to bleed their patients to let out heat or dangerous humors.

Some of the "practical saints" turn out to be ministers. A priest, wandering from hospital room to hospital room and playing a pastoral hunch, asks Carmody if he would like to be anointed. "Although it began almost shamefully casually," Carmody reports, "this anointing proved to be the most moving moment in my month's stay in the hospital. Indeed, it has lodged itself among the half-dozen most moving religious experiences of my entire life." A local Methodist minister, summoned to Price's bedside, serves communion, and

… in the slow eating that one morning, I experienced again the almost overwhelming force which has always felt to me like God's presence…. No prior taste in my old life had meant as much as this new chance at a washed and clarified view of my fate-and from the hands of a strange young minister….

Suffering, endurance, character, even faith-but what of hope, that most fragile of virtues? Broyard, not conventionally religious, nevertheless saw a holy glimmer near the end. "It would seem," he said, "that life is hardly worth all the anxiety, the frustration, and the inevitable humiliation unless there is a hope of glory." Carmody, perhaps, puts it strongest. He who confessed that "when you are terminally ill, the morning star is precious. Seeing it, you realize that you have made it through another night. . . . " ended his memoir of suffering with a confession of hope:

[Jesus Christ] is the morning star, and the champion who rises out from heaven. He has stain death, crushed the prior strong man and retaken the house made of dawn. He is more than any poetry, least of all mine. So I find

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myself saying, "Maranatha." I murmur, in good times and bad, "Come God my death."

The path from suffering to hope is tortuous and dimly lit. All the more reason to be grateful for these trustworthy guides who tell us the truth, even the God's truth, and show us the way as we all wait for the morning star.