I started this post in my head a couple of weeks ago, intending it to focus on language. I had a couple of paragraphs and a marvelously appropriate title rolling around in my head for two solid days; I just couldn’t seem to find the time to sit down and type. Then Thursday morning arrived, and, in faculty devotions at the school where I work, we were asked to pray for a family whose children attended our school for many years. The mother is dying of cancer. She’s fought it for a long, long time, but it’s killing her, and it seems as if it won’t be long now.
I sat there in morning devotions, my mind full of those sentences I had composed about beauty and beasts, and this blog post took a different turn, a different tone. Still, I couldn’t carve out enough time and clarity to write. My own family’s struggles with health, though minor in comparison, and my commitments at work occupied all of my coherent hours, so the thoughts brewing away inside me never percolated onto the page.
This morning, checking my email on an unexpected snow day respite, I learned that the middle school son of a former colleague was diagnosed this week with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. There it was again - cancer, tearing into another family, taking what was healthy, full of life and hope, and turning it inside out with corruption. So here I am, at my computer, desperate and determined in my quest for a bit of catharsis and purgation.
Sickness and disease make me sad. Cancer makes me angry. I hate it with a visceral, personal loathing that twists my stomach if I think about it too long. I hate it because it took my grandfather and attacks my friends. I hate it because, since cancer’s first intimate incursion into my heart, I can’t hear the word without thinking of it as a perfect microcosmic metaphor for sin. Like sin, cancer takes what the Creator made beautifully and declared good and causes it to mutate in uncontrolled corruption. Like our insufficient human responses to sin, cancer’s treatments are damaging and painful themselves, doing much harm alongside any good they accomplish. Like sin, once cancer touches our lives, we seem always to be tainted by it - scarred, struggling to overcome, and mindful that cancer, too, prowls this earth like a lion looking for someone to devour. I hate cancer because, like sin, it is a beast that destroys beauty. And sometimes I hate cancer because it reminds me that I don’t hate sin enough.
So, I pray for this mother, interviewing nannies for the children she will leave. I pray for this young man, racing now into a battle for his health when he should be running down a basketball court. I pray for my dear coworker, whose husband, after a decade-long fight with cancer, recently left this world for his Home. I pray. And I make myself sing the hope of the old hymn, “This is my Father’s world. O let me ne’er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet,” even as my heart echos the words of a dear friend, who know worships before the Risen Lamb, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus, come quickly.” Only then will Beauty finally overcome the beast.
