God's Will and the Wisdom of Cancer

It’s a question you might hear in Cancer Land. It might be sobbed or yelled or most often whispered.

Is a cancer diagnosis God’s will? How do we know what’s God’s will is?

Part of the wisdom in Alcoholics Anonymous says that, “God’s will is what is.” That cryptic comment is often expanded by this injunction to see God’s will: “Leave your house in the morning and start walking, when you hit a wall turn left. Keep going and when you hit a wall, turn left.”

Another way of discerning God’s will that I like and that I try to remember is this: “Get up each day and leave your house. When you come to a door that opens easily go through it and when you come to a door that doesn’t open or that you might shove or lean your shoulder against, don’t go through that one.”

I like that last description because I have shoved my way through so many doors (relationships, jobs, hairstyles) that I regretted later, when the saner, healthier (God’s will) (relationship, job, hairstyle) was just over there.

But cancer is hard to discern this way. It’s a very hard door. Does shoving against cancer mean fighting it like mad with every surgery, treatment and chemical? Or are the traditional protocols the “easy” and acceptable way? Is it harder to say no to chemo or surgery or opinions?

Can cancer be a curative as well as cured? Can it be a door to go through of itself? Marion Woodman in her cancer journal, “Bone” shows how cancer became her therapist and a healer of other injuries in her life. Is that doing it the hard way as well? Or is that secondary healing and secondary gain some of God’s will too?

Where is God in Cancer?

This has been on my mind this week. How do you find God in cancer? Yes, we die and cancer is one of the mechanisms, but living in between the diagnosis and the death there are a lot of choices. It seems that there is a continuum with “offer it up” and long-suffering on one end and “there is a no God and fatalism (and a different kind of suffering maybe) on the other end. But maybe there is a surrender --with action --in the middle. That would not look the same for two patients or two caregivers.

Where, for each of us, is how we treat cancer, accept treatment, refuse treatments, or fight it? If God’s will is what is then is fighting cancer fighting God’s will? How do we practice acceptance when it means accepting cancer and death?

Beyond Faith. Where is God in Cancer?

Does God cause cancer? Prevent it? Choose who gets it? Will he cure it? Cure it for some people? Our view of God is revealed in our prayers: God as punisher, as father, as parent or as Santa. In prayer do we ask for magic? Special consideration? Or do we ask for strength to cope with what is? Perhaps we petition for someone else’s cure? Do we believe that some people should have --or not have --difficult things, like cancer, to deal with?

A common first response to a diagnosis of cancer is, “Why Me?” Some people stay there and others move on to, “Why not me?” Implied in this is a sense of God or Higher Being or Mover in our lives or the universe.

Cancer often leads to these big questions. And that sends us looking for resources, experts, and theology. Now, a new book “Beyond Faith” looks at an intelligent person’s belief in God. The book by former trial lawyer, William Penick, deposes God in a thoughtfully imagined interview—yes, with God, and shows with humor and insight into human nature, how we create God.

Thy Will Be Done

In my class last night a woman told a story about when her first baby died and her mother—after seeing her suffer—came to her and gently said, “You have been saying the Lord’s prayer for many years. The part about “thy will be done” is for real. It includes even this.”

I sat there and heard that and thought, “Oh, shit.”

Do I mean it? About my life? My relationship with John? His cancer? All of it?