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Summer morning clouds

I do not speak of God in this cancer journal because I know the word is problematic for a lot of readers—as it is for me. Yet I have to admit that reading the words of others, who have given a lot more thought to this subject than I, has helped me come to terms with my mortality and the cancer itself.

A little background: I was brought up in a conservative branch of American Lutheranism I have long characterized as 95% law and 5% gospel. It fostered in me an image of the Almighty as not just a bearded old man in the clouds, but a nearly featureless block of clear ice, aloof and floating in the stratosphere.

I understand that this is as much from biblical teachings absorbed in eight years of parochial school (“I the Lord thy God am a jealous God…”), as a projection of my own excesses of hubris and judgmental disconnection from most of my fellow beings. I even persuaded myself that I was so superior in my perfectionist brand of faith that I planned to go into the ministry myself. Thank God, though I waited for it, I never felt the call.

What saved me and the many parishioners I would surely have misled was my liking for literature. I enjoyed novels and making up stories of my own. Today those stories would have been classed as Christian fiction because their intent was not only to be wholesome but to proselytize. I recall one plot that involved men from Earth rocketing to another planet for an adventure that included missionary work and converting aliens.

More morning clouds

Eventually, and I won’t admit how long this took, my reading took me beyond the realm of my own self-imposed limits. It happened with Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim, which evoked in me compassion for a “fallen” man that collided with my black and white, legalistic morality.

Because it can reveal so much more of characters’ inner lives than we ever know about actual people, no matter how intimately we think we know them, literature weakens our hold on certainty and challenges our blinkered notions of right and wrong. It does what religious doctrines fear will happen—it raises doubts. So Conrad cracked the shell, and what leaked in was a growing belief that to know all is to forgive all.

This did not alter that ethereal ice-field image of God, though it did not prevent me from reading others whose writings involved struggles with their own doubts. Among those, I especially recall Henri Nouwen and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Being of German descent, I was absorbed by Bonhoeffer as he articulated the cost of discipleship while all around him the Nazis demolished a centuries-old culture which professed a faith based on Christian charity. I even wrote a play dramatizing Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers From Prison, which were gathered and published after his execution by the Gestapo. 

Morning walk, clouds over San Jacinto

I’m wandering way afield here, but there’s a lot to unpack from a dusty, 70-year-old footlocker with a baptismal certificate from a German-speaking country church somewhere at the bottom. But I’m hoping that this accounts in some way for the clouds of unknowing and ambiguity around any allusion on these pages to a three-letter word spelled God.

For today I entertain notions of a Supreme Being that contribute to a sense of inner calm that medical science tells me will counter growth of the tumor in my brain. For one thing, I meditate, a practice I don’t recall ever hearing of in the writings of Martin Luther. But melting away is that icebound figure in the misty vapors above, even as the cold fearful reserve in myself begins to yield to a little understood but welcome notion of grace, uncompromised love, and compassion for all who suffer, which in this Dark Age embraces just about all of us. You only have to look at the headlines.

I’m coming to believe that if you reverse engineer the Creator who is said to have made humankind in his own image, you’ll find Someone who suffers continuously and mightily along with the rest of humanity. Not only that, but all of what is called creation. 

I’m not about to say this image is more than a fabrication that reassures me or puts me at ease about my mortality. To be perfectly honest, it’s not at all how I would have arranged things. But it offers a perspective that is an answer to doubt and keeps me keeping on. And for the moment, that’s good enough.

Previously: Useful