Tag Archives: hope

Hope

Posted on by

0

Today I went to the local hospital to get my blood taken in preparation for my cancer treatment on Thursday. This morning, slightly late as always, I panted down the corridor and noticed the nurse’s face light up as he saw me. As I wracked my memory for his face, he explained “I looked after you – it was nine months ago”. Somewhat bewildered, I followed him into the treatment rooms. 

As I sat down in the chair, I started to guess why he had remembered me. I get bloods taken from my chemo port – a little coin-sized implant that sits below my right collar bone, connecting IVs directly into my jugular vein so that treatments can be pumped easily around my body. It’s a weird little device known mainly to cancer patients. My nurse looked down at me as he peeled back his shirt collar and pointed “I have one of these now too”. 

“Oh shit!” I exclaimed, “I’m so sorry. When did you get the diagnosis?”

Its was four weeks ago. The poor guy who was tasked with taking my blood and flushing my port was absolutely reeling with the shock of having just been told he had a rare form of blood cancer and could join the ranks of the doomed. I could sense the first signs of grief from him; shock, disbelief, anger. It was almost as if he still needed confirmation from someone else that this was really happening, and he was seeking it at each moment his world started slipping away from him in a new way. He showed me his fingernails – somehow turned black from chemo. He pointed out his hair, which had started to turn white. His job, differently to mine, actually requires a lot of physical elements. He said it hurt him to extract the needle from my port, and his supervisor came in to help him trial it one-handed. 

I could tell that it was shaking the other nurses in the department also. Confronting, perhaps, for them, who are so used to dealing with ‘cancer patients’ to find that one of their own – a fellow human, could so easily be relegated to that category. It doesn’t take two nurses to extract blood from a port, but I had three hovering around me for most of my appointment. Perhaps they were trying to discourage my nurse from getting too personal as he spoke with a patient. Perhaps they were simply wanting to do whatever they could to help him as he struggled through his new limitations. Either way, they sat around, subdued, listening, as I shared my story and tried to also hear some of his.

It was a strange moment, really, for the nurse who was treating me to open up, so vulnerably, and so incredibly needy. What he said with his words was nothing to what he said with his eyes. They were so lost, so panicked, so stricken with shock. I recognised the feeling.  

It was a moment where I felt I had the opportunity to share some hope, some advice, to truly sympathise, to fight against the darkness of the prognosis and the suffering that is inadvertently inflicted by the system. I was able to share that I was told I would die years ago, that here I am alive and well, that I have learnt to hope and to fight against hopelessness. I told him I believe in God and that I believe in miracles. “So you are a miracle?”, he asked. I honestly don’t know if I think that is true. Maybe. But even if I’m not, and even if my good results do not continue, I do know that there is always hope. 

“It’s so important to just stay positive”, the nurse at the computer said to me, “that’s what you’ve done”. But it’s not. It’s really not. ‘Just stay positive’ is honestly the most insipid, useless thing you can say to someone. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had tell me that “you just have to stay positive”. I remember when I first got told I would die, a hairdresser told me “my girlfriend was amazing. She just stayed so positive, right up until the time she died”. I was like “Wow – do you realise what you’ve just said?”.

I don’t think it’s about ‘staying positive’. What’s the point of that? Is there some big ‘positivity rubric’ that cancer patients get marked upon? ‘C minus; you’re not taking the news of imminent suffering and death positively enough!’ I think it’s one of the stupidest things that people say.

But positivity is very different to hope. Hope is real. In fact, I believe that Hope is a person – and his name is Jesus. The person of Hope is someone who can hold us, when all else is gone. Hope can hold you when they tell you your cancer has spread. Hope can hold you when they say there’s nothing more they can do. Hope can even hold us through the transition commonly referred to as ‘death’. Hope and grief are not mutually exclusive states. In fact, that is when we most need Hope to wrap his arms around us.

Right now, in my life, Hope is holding me through yet another excruciating and complicated process of working through what my future holds – as the dreams of my heart and the realities of my situation and the injustices of a corrupt world collide, Hope is with me for the journey, whatever direction it goes. 

And Hope, I pray, will come to my nurse from today also. I pray that he will continue to have good results in his body, as I have done, but even more that Hope will come and surround him with a knowledge that there is a force of LIFE, deeper than any cancer, deeper than the evil of this broken world, deeper even than death.

So, when your world falls apart, don’t try to “just stay positive”. Scream. Cry. Lament. Flail about, if you need to, in rage and in panic and in disbelief.

And then, crawl back again into the arms of the One who is Hope – a Hope strong enough to hold us through it all.

Hilary

Posted on by

1

I will hold the Christ-light for you

in the night-time of your fear

I will hold my hand out to you

speak the peace you long to hear

The second last time I saw Hilary she made me tea. She poured the hot water into an elegant white ceramic pot, selected two bone china teacups, and placed them on a tray. Then she suddenly darted into the laundry. She came out with an old hand-towel and two pegs, and proceeded to create the most ridiculous-looking tea-cosy I’d ever seen.

I laughed and she laughed at my laughing, and agreed to pose for a photo with her quizzical creation. I had no idea, at that time, that it would be the last photo I’d ever take of her. 

It was funny because Hilary was the most tea-cosy-like person I knew. Her home was like an extension of her; beautiful, tasteful, comforting, sometimes surprising. It was a home that was comfortable with itself; modest, yet luxurious at the same time. She didn’t have clutter, although the house always felt full. A bowl of deep red cherries always sat temptingly on her white counter in front of the garden window. Bunches of super colourful flowers were everywhere; in her hallway, in the living room and through the house. It was some time before I realised she had found good quality plastic ones – which, of course, was easier than having to get them fresh all the time. Through long years of trial and error, she had discovered the best way to do things. Sometimes through a lot of patience and pain. And prayer, I suppose.

Hilary was the vicar at St James Anglican Church, Pakenham, when I arrived there as a fragile fifteen year old. In her 60s, she seemed like a harmless nice old lady to me when I first met her. She lilted away gently at her sermons in her sing-song Welsh accent. She delivered the liturgy with quietness and humility and grace. Yet she looked you straight in the eye when she handed you the wafer for communion and there was something in the way she said “the body of Christ, given for you” that made me feel like maybe it really was. My Dad says the day she won his respect was the time she led us in the Lord’s Prayer and then stopped, looked at us all and said “I just realised I said that without really meaning it. Do you mind if we all say it again?”

As I got to know her better, I learned that Hilary was a quiet radical. Someone who had worked long and hard to have her own house in order. Someone who actually believed what she said she believed. She became a female vicar in a time when women were discriminated against in church leadership. When she was appointed to St James, I was told that half the church left because she had suffered the pain of divorce in her personal life. She was an Anglican priest and yet she was primarily a woman who was in love with Jesus. She was drawn to where the Spirit of God was moving. About twenty years ago she travelled to Bethel and on missions in South America and encountered the power of the Holy Spirit to speak in tongues, to heal the sick, to cast out demons. She came back to St James to share the ways in which she had discovered God was bigger and more confusing than we’d previously known. And yet she didn’t push it on people. I remember her running optional ‘soaking sessions’ after the traditional services. I remember, as a teenager, watching curiously as the adults lay on the floor between the pews, basking in the transcendent presence of God, while the kids silently helped themselves to the church biscuits.

—-

I visited Hilary’s house many times over the years. In the last few years, I’d go every second Monday for lunch, and enter in to the smell of some keto casserole she’d been cooking for me. I would spend hours with her, crying and praying and drinking tea – nestled up in her warm lounge room or sitting outside on her patio. Her garden was strictly succulents – because they were easier to maintain. But she grew them somewhat obsessively, constantly propagating more in there greenhouse and frequently giving them away. 

The garden was themed white and cream and green, with that one yellow flower that she couldn’t bear to get rid of. It felt calming and homely and beautiful all at the same time. And it was always clean. That was the thing that surprised me most – just how well she managed to keep everything. All of the colourful stone eggs in the bowl perfectly dusted, the cream tiles of her courtyard always swept, the eggshell-blue living-room carpets always fluffy. She was the kind of person who washed her windows – who laundered and dried her curtains every Spring. 

This is why it was hilarious to me that Hilary didn’t have a tea-cosy, but instead used an old towel held together with pegs on her beautiful tea pot. “I will get you a tea cosy!” I declared, quietly resolving to knit her one for Christmas. After all, it would be a fitting, if small, token of the love I had for someone who had been a spiritual mother to me. On that day neither of us had any idea, as we picked up the tray and brought it out into her garden, that her body was fighting cancer, that she had just over six months to live.

—-

The last time I saw Hilary was just before my big operation. My cancer had grown back and they were going to cut out a key section of my bowel, leaving me with a permanent colostomy. I sat in her cream garden chairs and used up her tissues as I wept out my sorrow, my disappointment, my rage, my confusion with God, and my seeming inability to pray. 

She sat there, with me, as she always did. I don’t remember much of what she said. I honestly don’t remember much of what she said over the many years and many hours of crying with her in this way. When I came back from Vietnam as an 18 year old who had lost faith in God. As a 24 year old who was unsure if I was going to be able to go ahead with my wedding. As a 32 year old who had just been told she could have months to live. What I remember is her presence, sitting with me in the pain, seeing me. Feeling my pain and yet not being overcome by it. Hilary had the amazing capacity and uncommon grace, as someone who had been through great pain, to re-enter it, with another – to hold onto them with one hand and to remain holding onto God with the other. When you are in that place, sometimes, you cannot reach out of it, but you can hold the hand of someone else who is willing to reach back in. 

On that last day, which we didn’t know was the last day, she went into her study and came back with a wooden cross. “It’s OK” she said “that you cannot pray”. She had ministered to many people in the season of transition through death and she had a collection of these wooden crosses that felt smooth and comfortable in your hand. The wood, she said, came from olive trees from Jerusalem. The kind that could have been in Gethsemane. She invited me to choose a cross, anointed it with oil and prayed a blessing over it and over me. “When you cannot pray”, she said “hold this, and God will understand.” 

Prayer suddenly felt possible again. I took it with me into the hospital. The nurses put it in a plastic bag so I could take it into theatre. It was sitting next to me on my bedside when I woke up in the ward. 

___

As the days passed in hospital my body became strong again quickly. I regained the ability to get out of bed, to stand, and then to walk. I was doing surprisingly well and feeling a sense of optimism about being able to survive. 

As I prepared to leave the ward to go home, I discovered the man in the room two doors down from me was being discharged also, but he was being sent home to die. With some reluctance but also conviction, I wrote a card and wedged the wooden cross uncomfortably inside the envelope, asking his daughter to deliver it to him if she felt it would be of any comfort. Hilary would approve of this, I figured. The hope of Christ was given to us to give away. And the next time I saw her, I’d ask her for another one.

What I didn’t realise was, at the time that my body was getting stronger and stronger, Hilary’s was beginning to give way. She waited to tell me because she knew it would hit me hard. 

A few weeks after I got home from hospital, when she had already checked with  Mum to be sure I was doing well, she called me to tell me that she had been diagnosed with cancer. She was at peace, she told me, and the Drs believed it was curable. I didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t think about it. Instead, I kept recovering. I got busy. A few months passed and I texted her to say I was thinking of her, knowing that she would invite me to visit when she was well enough. She replied that her chemo was going well and would soon be finished. Life kept hurtling on. I was teaching again, as she had always believed that I would.  

A couple of months later Mum and Dad were over for lunch. They told me she ‘wasn’t doing so well’. It took a week for me to push through the denial and text her about a catch up. A few days later, I got a response from her son saying it was too late. 

And that’s how quickly it happened. That’s how quickly I lost one of the people who have had the most profound impact on my life. Tomorrow is her funeral. 

I never knitted her the tea cosy. I was too focused on my own pain. I never asked for another cross. I was too focused on my own busyness. I never took the chance to say goodbye. I was too much in denial.

And yet, I am not wrecked with regret, with shame, or with despair. I have too many moments of experiencing grace. Somehow, the lightness that Hilary always brought to me in life is palpable even in the moments of her death – her faith and her hope linger on sweetly, even in her memory. 

I am weeping, and I am in shock, and the loss is overwhelming. And yet, a candle flickers somewhere in the night-time of my heart. A peace has been spoken there that does not waver. 

And I am grateful for Hilary -to have known her in this world, to be loved by her, and to love her still. 

Shoots of Green

Posted on by

1

(Written in May 2024)

Each year, I find, it surprises me that the bulbs begin to shoot up, even before the start of winter. My parents come from the Northern Hemisphere, and so much of my understanding of ‘normal’ is therefore displaced from the world I actually live and grew up in. Bulbs are supposed to come up at the end of winter, I always believed. They are the first herald of Spring. But somehow, in our milder Antipodean winters, the dear things seem to get confused and pop up early. 

It is always a shock to notice that the seasons change so methodically- like birthdays- like my menstrual cycle- they keep happening whether we are ready for them or obliviously distracted. I am never quite ready for winter. I fear it – the winter blues- I fear who I become inside of myself in winter. Something inside of me was made for beauty and sunlight, and the cold mornings and the dark nights make it harder to ignore the wounds inside my soul. And so I find myself, like a child (or a teacher!) dreading the end of the summer holidays, kind of trying to ignore it, kind of subconsciously denying that winter is, indeed, coming. 

But, as the years go by, I find myself increasingly ministered to by the bulbs in my garden. And, as I sip my coffee from my prayer bench this morning, I find my eyes overflowing with gratitude for the little spears of green.

I was seven when Grandad passed away from cancer, and was living half a world away. My mum, I remember, was away for weeks. And she was very sad. I was distressed too about one particular question – was Grandad in heaven now? Mum told me that Grandad had not known Jesus during his lifetime. But we serve the God of second chances and ridiculous overflowing grace -the God who told the parable of the workers in the vineyard, who told the thief on the cross that they would be together in paradise. We are loved to pieces by the God of resurrection. Mum told me she had shared this with grandad in the days before he died- in the days where he was no longer able to talk. And, although he hadn’t been able to do much, he had squeezed her hand. 

I remember when Mum came back from Britain, she bought a special brooch of a golden daffodil that she wore on the lapel of her jacket for a long time. Daffodils, she told me, are a symbol of resurrection. We plant the dry dead-looking bulbs deep in the cold earth at the start of autumn, burying them as we bury our mortal bodies at death. And beneath the earth, in the places that we cannot see them, they start to come alive. Slowly, surely, in that place of deepest cold and dark, life is reborn. Until suddenly, sharp ramparts of green spear boldly through the ground, like an army of life assembling. And then the flowers come, trumpeting loudly their resurrection glory- their triumph over Winter – and the herald of Spring. 

I think that one of my first interactions with daffodils was at my grandad’s grave. I remember walking through the graveyard by the Loch where Grandad is buried and standing for a moment before his grave – that place, which my ten year old self had been afraid to approach because of my fear of the sense of desolation. And there were daffodils in bloom. They were great tall rollicking things- a triumphant blast of yellow against the dark grey headstone. And I allowed myself to become enveloped in the glorious yellow-ness of them for a moment that was like a prayer – a prayer where Jesus was talking gently to my heart in words of colour. Death, he was saying, was not the end. In the very place that we think death has won- that is the place of resurrection. 

It turns out that Mum’s brooch was not a coincidence. Daffodils are the symbol of the cancer council, and, as I walk through my own journey with cancer, this could not be more prophetic. Somewhere deep within my heart, twenty four years ago, an encounter with the yellow-ness of daffodils and I believe, also, with the God of hope, fused in me the connection: daffodils and resurrection. And so, even as I think of the sadness of my grandad’s death, the anxiety of the approaching dark and cold, the unknowns of my own journey with cancer, a part of my heart is brimming with the hope of resurrection. And as I look delightedly around me I find, in His grace, God has sent me daffodils-  even before the start of winter.

Waiting for the Dawn

Posted on by

2

The thing is, I’ve never really lived in a world without the sun. True, I have definitely lived (and am living in) a time of night. The sun is not showing its face. The earth is cold. I cannot see what is happening. I am rendered powerless. And sometimes I cry and lament and grieve the sun that I remember. Sometimes I wonder if it is – or ever was – real. All I can touch is cold and dark and shrouded, all I hope for is lost in blackness, my horizon disappeared. Every minute I turn my face towards the East, hoping, watching, waiting. Darkness seems to assault me again and again. And again. 

Surely, I say to myself, it was just a dream! Those who hope in the sun are delusional. Can they not see the blackness around them? Are they not willing to acknowledge that their world has shrunk down to the tiny radius around them – the wonders of the day have been lost, and, no matter how hard we try or hope or even believe, we cannot seem to make it come.

And many of us have now given up on the hope of day. It has been too long. No one we know has ever seen a sunrise. It is but a fairytale we tell to children. In the long, cold, darkness, we have learnt to make our own small versions of the sun – lighting candles, and even campfires. We huddle around them like moths, singing songs of worship to the candlelight, YOLOing like cicadas who know we will not live to see the dawn. These, we guard, because our lives depend upon them. Until some cold wind comes and extinguishes them. 

And sometimes in the darkness I find myself able to sing songs about the sun. Sometimes I talk to others who believe that the dawn is coming, who believe in the existence of day. Some of these are those who are holding candles and some, like me, have lost them. Some have even cast them aside willingly, in preparation and expectation of living by daylight. Sometimes, I hold hands with them, joining my trembling heart to their stronger ones, and I recite verses that promise the end of the darkness, as salty rivers run down my cheek and neck. Sometimes, something inside of me inexplicably lights up and I feel, somehow, that I am bathed in sunlight.

And then sometimes I wake from this reverie, overwhelmed by the reality of the darkness, stunned by the pain of it, and I fall to the ground in despair. I declare that the sun has never been. I have hoped and prayed and sung about the dawn, and it has not come. The darkness has only encroached farther, become even darker. And, screaming visceral shrieks of fury and betrayal, I claw at the carpet and weep bitterly. And I curse the sun.

And yet, the thing is, I’ve never really lived in a world without the sun. As I am hoping, singing, praying, weeping -even cursing – the sun itself is the centrifugal force upon which my whole world turns. I cannot see it. I cannot sense it, but sometimes, I am willing admit that it is there, creating a gravitational pull that keeps this whole planet in orbit. Despite the coldness of the night, despite the waves of abandonment that crash over me, it is the sun that keeps the ground from freezing over. Although hidden from my view, a part of me is willing to believe it burns continuously, giving energy to every plant and underwater organism that creates oxygen that allows me to breathe. And my lungs, whether they are singing or whether they are screaming, are swallowing air that has been made possible by the sun.

And my hope, my belief, my cajoling, my despair does not affect the way the sun moves, does not change it – because it is not dependant upon me.  How humbling, how painful, how freeing to realise this! As much as I love or I hate it, as much as I protest or scream, whether or not I can see it, the sun has been and will be the source of all the life I’ve ever known. And, sometimes, I allow myself to be brought to my knees. I admit that I am not the source, that the sun is the centre. I acknowledge that, although my candle is gone, although I cannot see the path ahead, that the ground all around me is not frozen, that the air I breathe continues to support life in my lungs, that it is possible that a sunrise, which I have never seen, and do not control, is coming. 

And I place my hands in the hands of others who also wait with hope for the end of the darkness. And we turn our heads towards the inky blackness of the East. And we wait for the dawn.