The Power of Suffering

Paradoxical though it may seem, the title of this week’s blog entry/reflection has a truth to it that goes beyond sense.  When it comes to matters of faith, indeed, most attempts at explanations are ‘senseless’ to a certain degree, though not without being rational.  Suffering, or going through something akin to Christ’s Passion, and dying – can they really be things that are powerful?  We have to almost put on a new mind to try to fathom what our faith is teaching us in order to see how these weak, debilitating and physically enfeebling moments of our lives are ‘powerful’ in a world that demands and expects some form of physical strength and power and authority in order to be a force to be reckoned with and given respect to.  Indeed, a ‘new mind’ is required for one to really enter into the realm of faith, as that is what ‘metanoia’ or a ‘changed mind’ really means.  True faith requires true metanoia – a mind change.

My physical experience this time round in hospital had been an eye opener in more ways than one.  My body’s reactions to the sixth interthrecal spinal injection that sent a dose of cytotoxins to my brain fluid caused much lethargy and listlessness such that I had to just lie in bed for days on end.  One doesn’t feel very much that one is doing anything productive with one’s life when all one can do is lie there and wait for the day to be over, and for the nagging ache at the back of the head to subside, coupled with bouts of nausea and dizziness.  I have come to realize that this is especially so for one who has made it a point to be productive and useful in one’s waking moments. 

This made me ponder if, and how, this lying in a hospital bed can be anything that bore any semblance to being something that was powerful.  Our faith is something that is paradoxical at many levels, and here I was facing the paradox for almost a week.  It gave me lots of food for thought and it was clear where the basis for this paradox of power.  It is in the very being of God himself. 

The early Greek Fathers of the Church in the eighth century used the term “perichoresis” to express the relationship of the Triune God and how the three person of the Holy Trinity relate to one another.  There is an intense giving and loving that ceaselessly co-penetrates the persons of the Trinity, and their relationship, and at the heart of it is something that can only be humanly described as intimacy at its purest form. 

What is intimacy, but a total giving and which necessarily includes a total dying.  Real intimacy is intimacy that has to mirror God’s intimacy in his very Being.  Think of it this way – what is the most intense, most generous and most loving act of intimacy that human beings can ever participate in?  It is in the marital, conjugal union of husband and wife.  There is a great sacrifice that is given in that one is giving oneself totally to the other, without condition.  It is at that near participation in divine living that gives the Church the basis for her teaching that any form of contraception is a sinful act.  Seen in this light, contraception is a sign of being conditional, and it is a giving that is limited.  It doesn’t mirror the divine way of loving that we are made for.  We have ‘missed the mark’ of holy living.  But it is when one is totally giving, giving of one’s whole body AND self, that one becomes able to cooperate with God in receiving the possibility of a new life in the child within the conjugal marital union.  With dying (of self), there comes the possibility of a new gift of life.  I have often told married couples that the marital bed is really an altar of sacrifice, and I get strange looks. 

Parables abound about the link between dying and rising, the need to die (of the seed) before the new germination of life can begin, and of course, the greatest witness to this is Christ’s own dying and resurrection, which we are called not just to believe in but to also participate in. 

St Paul’s quote from 2 Cor 12:9 where he stresses that his strength is made perfect in weakness is something that Paul must have intuited way before the later Greek Fathers came up with anything like perichoresis.  

Granted, it is strange and almost difficult to theologize and spiritualize when one is in the pit of a seeming vacant suffering in a hospital bed.  One usually only thinks of one’s uselessness and one’s powerlessness.  On most of the ‘bad’ days, I did just that.  But when that happened, I’ve come to realize that I’d only centered and focused on my own singular pain, boredom and seemingly uselessness.  To want to expand my sufferings and see them as having a unique power to transform not just me, but a world waiting for a paradoxical one required me to step out of myself.  That itself is a dying that is so hard to do when often all you want to do is nothing.  I surmise that this is something mystical that tugs at the heartstrings of anyone facing any kind of real dying, and that it is the something that is so close to the heart of the love that the Triune God has for each other in the persons of the Holy Trinity. 

We can only try to mirror that as much as we can while we are alive, and pray that we can join in that perichoretic dance when we finally die.

Why I love the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

One of the greatest challenges that any preacher faces is to make that connection between the celebrations of the Liturgy with the very lives of the people who gather around the church sanctuary in the act of liturgical worship.  He leads the people in the act of prayer and worship, and in the breaking of the Word, leads them to see the great hope that lies before them as they also at the same time lead their daily, seemingly mundane and routine lives.  Right worship is never two things – an act of entertainment that gives some sort of ‘escape’ like going to a million-dollar production concert where we lose ourselves for a couple of hours, nor an escapism from our lives of daily chores, work and family living.

The Ascension of the Lord which we celebrate as Church today can give us one of those images where we physically focus on the actual moving or going up of the body of Christ, standing atop a hill in Palestine some slightly more than 2000 years ago, and just being lifted off into the clouds and going further and further up.  That is the scriptural way of saying that something beyond the physical has happened.  It is a ‘meta’physical way of being that Christ has now entered into.  He is no longer bound by space and time, and goes beyond.  Not a physical beyond – a spiritual beyond where he is now so fully joined with the Father and the Holy Spirit. 

“Well this is good for him”, you may say.  Yes it is, but this is also supremely good for us.  You see, we do not, through our baptism, ever exist only for ourselves.  We exist in Christ now.  It means necessarily that what is good for Christ is also good for us.  We have the great hope that we too will enter into this same Divine dimension of being that goes beyond space, and beyond time, to live in the life of God himself so fully. 

This also means that Christ has given us all a great commission by his leaving.  And I think this has not been emphasized too much in the liturgical preaching of this Solemnity, and it is a pity.  Have you ever seen leaders who are just so reluctant to leave their seats and positions of power just because of insecurity and fears that someone else would take their place?  And don’t just look at political leaders because they are just too numerous to name.  We see them all around us – leaders of companies, those “A” stars in Hollywood, university professors, and yes, even the doyens of large (or small) families who demand the servitude of their younger family members in some demanding and superior, know-it-all way.  What this does to the younger generation is that it often handicaps them from growing and stretching themselves in their own leadership skills that are left sadly undeveloped and inhibited and stunted. 

But good and mature leaders do the opposite.  They not only groom and spot talent that is developing, but also help them to develop.  Beyond good and mature leaders, excellent leaders actually make way (physically) for the space for their successors to take their place and to continue the work that they did in ways that perhaps they did not, our could not in their time and in their way. 

One dimension of the celebration of the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord is this very dimension of Church.  The Lord Jesus left that precious space for us to take over, so that so many other ways of being Christ can be opened up for the world awaiting for his presence.  If he had still been here, do you think that there would be the dynamic ways that people like the Father of the Church, the wonderful Popes who shaped our ways of thinking and worshipping, and brave and courageous saints who gave their very lives for the faith would have existed?  Christ’s leaving us paved the way for great creativity and thinking that gives us the dynamism to lead our present daily Christian lives in ways that are open to us.  We would be greatly stunted in our Christian and Human living if Christ had not left the 'world' to us.  Of course, the great courage that he gave us culminated when he gave us his very Spirit on Pentecost which we will celebrate a little later on.

It also means that even the smallest and unseen ways of Christian living can become means whereby I can participate in the very life of Christ because he gives me the hope that this life has a ‘beyond’ that I can always have hope in.  It makes my lying in a hospital bed recovering now much better from my chemo reactions something which is not meaningless, but can actually empower others with hope as I write something about it in this blog!  Well, some priests have the privilege of a stone or wooded ambo to preach from.  Me?  Mine is a hospital bed, confined in a concrete room.  But there is great hope beyond.  That is what Christ’s Ascension gives to me today.  That is why I love this Solemnity.

Have a blessed and most holy celebration of your very own hope of being Christian in a ascended way today!  God love you!

No post this week

This week's entry is held over.  This round of chemotherapy has been particularly tough and challenging.

Emptying ourselves to be filled

I have been re-admitted into the Singapore General Hospital for my third round of chemotherapy, to allow the harsh cytotoxin chemicals to ravage my body so that the leukemia cells have very little chance to develop and grow.  It is, in a way, a necessary evil, which I take with a certain willingness and an abiding silence.  I am not quite sure, though, if this is totally due to my faith in God’s providence and omnipresence, or that I am just going through the motion as a chemo patient.  On my best days, it the former would predominate.  And I guess, on the bad days, when the nausea, the aches and the inability to eat anything set in, the latter seems to have the upper hand.  Thus seems to be the reality.

When my suitable stem cell donor is located (the authorities are currently getting one possible donor’s blood sample from Canada to do higher resolution typing for me), the next step for me is to receive a high dose of conditioning chemotherapy which is chemotherapy drugs in much higher doses and toxicity than what I have been receiving in past treatments.  This does a few things – It will weaken my own immune system so that the donor stem cells have a chance to grow in my bone marrow.  At that point in time, my own immune system will be either non existent or very much weakened and compromised, opening me up to the possibility of a whole host of infections and diseases.  I will also be given high-energy rays of Radiotherapy to destroy cancer cells and this will be applied to my whole body.  These two preparatory treatments are required to empty my body for the reception of the donor’s stem cells so that his healthy cells can be grafted well into my marrow without much resistance that can naturally come when the body detects an ‘invasion’ of something that is foreign to it. 

The first thirty days after the transplant will be the most crucial where my body will naturally fight this ‘invader’ and the reactions have been known to be quite severe – diarrhoea for up to 30 times a day, rash outbreaks all over the body, incessant nausea, and of course, tremendous weight loss.  Patients have been known to die from the inability to survive this severe but necessary period of the treatment. I was told by a doctor in a tongue-in-cheek way that being a stem cell recipient is the best weight loss programme that one can ever go through – it’s almost a guarantee that one will lose between 8-10 kgs in the process.  That’s 18 to 22 pounds to my American non-metric friends.  That’s something to look forward to!

Why am I so detailed in giving my readers an idea of what I am about to go through?  It’s not that I am soliciting for sympathy or more prayers (although that won’t hurt, would it?).  It’s because it has something that is very much connected to our Christian living.  Let me explain.

There is a very important aspect of our Christian life that entails the process of kenosis.  That word is of Greek origin.  “Kenos” means empty, hence the word Cenotaph, which is a derivation of Keno + taphios, meaning tomb.  Incidentally, our own Cenotaph in Singapore which is a monument erected in honour of the war dead during the First World War was horribly defaced sometime last week by a cowardly vandal who spray pained the word “Democracy” in large letters on the monument itself.  He not only disrespected and dishonoured the lives of  the war dead, but also disregarded the pain and suffering of the members of their families who lost their loved ones in the war effort.  In my opinion, there was instead a sad evidence of an emptiness in the vandal – an emptiness of the heart and a worse vacumn of the mind.  He did not just vandalise a monument.  He also vandalized his very self in the process.

The defaced Cenotaph which has since been cleaned

Returning to my reflection of the necessary kenosis of the Christian who is truly interested in being a disciple of Christ, this is mentioned in Phil. 2:7, where we are told that Christ emptied himself.  If Christ who is God, emptied himself in order for the Father’s will to be done in such a radical way, it shows by necessity then that anyone following Christ also needs to undergo some form of emptying.  This is one of the most challenging and difficult things for any Christian worth his baptism.  That dying of the self is symbolically undergone when the Elect gets submerged into the baptismal font (which is why a mere trickling of three drops of water from a pretty shell or an ornate water vessel doesn’t quite bring across the message that there is dying going on here!).  Liturgically and sacramentally, the larger and more obvious the sign and symbol, the clearer the catechesis and reality will be.

From that moment on, each step of our Christian life will ask of us whether we are in fact dying to the self so that Christ can be implanted deeper and deeper into our spiritual marrows.  If our lives are just too full of ourselves, our plans, our ideas, our motivations, our fears and our desires, how much ‘space’ is there in our lives for God to really get in and form that necessary union with us, where we can say as Jesus said “the Father and I are one”?  We need to live such that “Jesus and I are one”, such that when people look at our lives, our acts and the way that we carry ourselves begin to say something like “I find it a strange comfort that when I look at the way Joe lives, it is Joe, but at the same time I also do see Jesus – it’s a wonderful combination”.  When we live like that, kenosis happens.

But for true kenosis to happen, something has to be ‘kenotosised’ (I made up that word).  Something in us has to be truly empty, like the way that the conditioning chemotherapy and whole body radiotherapy is going to empty part of my body to receive the donor’s stem cell to let it do what it needs to do for me to get to the point of remission.

Yet, we find so many ways to fight this kenosis – “it’s too hard”, “yes, but not yet Father!  Let me enjoy life first”, or “why do you make Christianity sound so difficult?”  I think that St Augustine must have thought these thoughts before is conversion. 

The decorated wall of my hospital room facing my bed

I append a photograph of my decorated wall in my hospital room, which is always a head-turner for any nurse or doctor who comes in to tend to my medical needs.  As you can see, it is filled with cards and posters, some hand made, some even too heavy to be pasted on the wall!  They come from all over the world!  The message for a great majority of them is “Get Well Soon, Father”, which is understandable for anyone suffering any form of illness and requires medical care. I am very grateful for this tremendous display of love, care and deep concern.  I have ministered to many of these people in the past, and the ones which really amaze and touch me are that a lot of them come from people whom I have not met, as I have not been to their parish to serve them in my tenure as a priest! 

But it was in my deep prayer that something was revealed to me.  It is not just I who am ill and need to get well.  Each of us, and each of these wonderful people who wrote these words of love and care are also in great need to ‘get well soon’, as long as they have found it a great challenge to undergo the task of self-emptying and kenosis.  If we are so full of ourselves and our rigid ways of dictating to God how he should be and how he should work in our lives, we are all of us, to put it in a nutshell, pretty sick, and we do that to God at some point in our lives, don’t we?  Kenosis necessarily changes that, but when God becomes fully transplanted in our lives, we walk, talk, and live in a very different way. 

But when we don’t, and fight it all the time, not only does God have very little space in the marrows or our souls, he will also have very little space in the morrows of our lives as well.  Just being nominal Christians at best, we could end up being mere Christian Cenotaophs, walking around like empty tombs that have no real Christian substance, or worse, have defaced and vandalized them with our very lives. 

One of the common phrases that we hear uttered by leaders and the ‘movers and shakers’ of industry is that something has become a ‘game changer’.  What this essentially means is that the way that people broach this event, this issue or this matter has to radically change.  It now ‘changes’ how one lives, how one thinks, and one’s entire attitude.  Well, have we ever thought that when Jesus came to reveal God the Father in such a radical way, that he too has been a ‘game changer’ for us?  He changed life’s ‘game’ 2000 years ago. 

Are we still playing the same old game in the ways that we live our lives?  Or are we truly interested in a game change?  The true Christian life is THE game changer.  We need to empty what needs emptying to be filled with who needs to fill us.