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.