When the Homily is about Immunology

When the healing doesn’t come…where’s hope?

Still waiting to read what will become of Ivan’s argument from suffering in The Brothers. Meanwhile I think of where my mind would be if my wife or child were suffering and dying from a terrible disease from which it seems no amount of prayer will dissuade the Almighty from the course onto which we’ve been blown. What do you do with the pain? How do you bear it?

I hope you are not expecting answers, dear reader.

Somehow, I was subscribed to a magazine entitled Outside which is essentially published for the really hardcore climber, hiker, biker, or whatever one might do outside away from concrete. I hardly read it at all, but will occasionally when strapped for material thumb through it. The most recent issue offered the following article as titled on the cover: The Amputee Climber: How Far Would YOU Go to Survive? Certainly worth a look, I deemed.

Finding the actual page in the magazine though, I found that the real title of the piece was The HARD Way. Hmmmm…

Of course the author centers his writing around the story of Aron Ralston who after five days of having had his hand pinned by a large boulder in a remote region of Utah decided that his only hope was to break his arm bones (apparently by simply bending around and using his body weight) and then sawing through his arm with the dull blade of his generic leatherman tool. He was then able to walk some five miles to rescue, and as the story puts it: “he walked unaided off the helicopter to a waiting gurney team.” Wow.

The article shifts at this point to talk about something called a “survivor personality” and one expert is quoted as saying the following about “survivor” traits: When something horrible happens, they immediately accept the situation for what it is and consciously decide that they will do everything in their power to get through it. The writer of the article offers further commentary: …they have the ability to rationally accept dreadful circumstances without becoming angry or passive, two common responses to extreme stress.

This intrigued me because I seem to remember that the word humility has a certain notion, inherent in its meaning, of acceptance – particularly of situations I gather. It sort of makes me think that the defeatist (the opposite of a “survivor”?) would always enter into desperate situations with the question: WHY ME?!?!?!?! Whereas the survivor doesn’t waste time or energy asking such self-centered questions…of course, surviving is a self-centered act in and of itself – but I am tending to think of a more pressing sort of survival.

At the end of the story, the author provides numerous real life examples that parallel the experience of Ralston, as if to say: it happens more often than you think! Who can doubt such a thing? I am surrounded by suffering everyday…I see it in the eyes of the patients here at the Cancer Care facility. Most of them look to be survivors to me…but I suppose in the end do we have a choice? When the bones won’t break or we don’t have a leatherman tool to sever the appendage that binds us to our tomb, what then?

I imagine we look the tomb in the eye and enter in, with the prayer: “Remember me O Lord in your Kingdom”, trying hard not to ask: “Why me?” but rather: “Why the hell not me?” Those left behind hopefully pray for us who are at last resting. I don’t know what to do yet with the suffering that might escort us to the mouth of the tomb.

Ralston relates his powerful emotions at the very the moment when he’d severed his hand: All the desires, joys, and euphorias of a future life came rushing into me.

May it be so also at our death.

In this (hope of a future life), do we sense any redemption of suffering? Does suffering drive us closer to Him, knowing that it is only in Him that we can escape the darkness and death of this world? I feel this to be the case in what little suffering I have experienced…is it multiplied accordingly? Thinking, thinking, thinking….all the while knowing that the Fathers would advise praying, praying, praying.