Good morning. I recently came across a new term - ‘chronically terminal’. Janis Chen, has stage four lung cancer and writing in the Guardian, she describes how every day is a struggle to go on. She lives in what she calls ‘The long middle’, the period between first diagnosis and the time when she will finally pass from this life; a time that is ‘chronically terminal’. But still a time for living, of living as best she can. As 3.5 million people in the UK live with cancer and there are 420,000 new cases a year, many will resonate with her situation.
In this beautifully written piece she describes the effect of illness on people’s religious belief or lack of belief. She said that she found herself back in church on Sundays. ‘Faith furnished me with a different architecture for endurance: it offered a vocabulary of hope’. But she also notes that a member of her support group who previously had a faith totally lost it as a result of the illness. They could not understand why it had happened to them. ‘To some, the diagnosis is a clarifying fire that burns away the trivial, leaving a refined spiritual core. To others, it is an acid dissolving everything they once held.’
What the illness has done for her more than anything else has sharpened her discernment. As she put it:
It leaves only the essential, revealing that meaning resides entirely in the quality of our attention. To walk through a park, to watch the sunlight catch a river or to register the laughter of children against the thrum of a passing bus is to realise these are no longer background noise; they are the destination.
Particularly at this time of year with trees budding and blossom coming out what she writes seems particularly pertinent and it brought to mind a famous interview between Melvyn Bragg and the playwright Dennis Potter as he was dying. Dennis Potter said that when he looked out of the window he did not just say ‘Oh that’s nice blossom’.
I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous.
It is this living in the moment that the discipline of mindfulness is trying to achieve, whatever stage of life we are at. Father Pierre de Caussade, in the first half of the 18th century, wrote about it and called it ‘the Sacrament of the present moment’. For him however it was not just about experiencing the present more intensely, but being open and receptive to what might be being asked of us in that moment-in every now there was, he taught, a providence to be discerned and responded to.
Colombia