Gethsemane Moments

I call them, “Gethsemane moments”: when I find myself wanting to pray, “Lord, if it be your will, let this cup pass from me."  

I have not had many such moments (really, only one--and  that was yesterday). I suspect I will have more as I draw nearer and nearer to surgery…and the pathology reports. I do hope my loved ones hear that my margins are clear, that there is no evidence of cancer in my lymph system; but we will not know till then, and they before me. I am praying for those who will hear the news, one way or the other, while I am in recovery—praying that they will have courage to face whatever news comes their way.

In fact, my prayer for myself is much the same: that I will have courage. Or, because I feel I do have it, at least a little, that I will maintain courage. I think of Job, how he said to his wife, “Shall we accept the good from the hand of the Lord and not the bad?”

Or, as Jesus concluded his Gethsemane prayer, "Not my will be thy will be done."

While I do not believe (at all) that God gave me prostate cancer, I will receive the moment as a gift anyway: in hopes I can prove or make good my long-held faith; as a chance to speak of the trust that is indeed at the heart of Christian life and discipleship; to emulate, as best I can, both Jesus and Paul.

Jesus rose from his agonized garden prayers to face his accusers, his judges, his executioners.

Paul, even in prison, maintained his integrity, his integrated life: “for me, to live is Christ, to die is gain.” He prayed that he would “never lose courage, never be ashamed, but now as always that Christ would be honored in (his) body, whether by (his) life or his death.”

The Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner must have had both Jesus and Paul in mind when he wrote that, if we see life “as dependent, and radically, upon God,” then “mortal existence is, for better or worse, charged with a compelling call to trust.”

Jesus trusted. Paul trusted. So did so many others who have entered the valley of the shadow of death and feared no evil. In fact, I am not afraid…

Well, let me modify that. I am afraid…of dying. Not of being dead. Those are two really different things. I trust, believe, am persuaded that the moment after the moment of my death, whenever that occurs, will find me in the presence of the One I have loved and preached and tried to emulate the most of my life. I long for the moment. I really do.

It is the moment of death itself that gives me pause. Not knowing how it will come. Or when. Whether my passing will be easy or fraught with…whatever. I do fear that moment, but I do not fear a thing beyond that moment.

Much as I do not fear the surgery itself (though I do dread the needles, the IVs, the tubes and catheter), nor again the recovery from it, though I know it will not be a beatific process.I do not long for the pain. But I do hope for a good result.

And so I am trusting.

Remembering my life is not my own anyway.

As Radner says, “If we are alive at all, (we are) alive in such a way that our lives are ever-colored by their ending because, at root, they are not ours…” Again, “mortality is at least fundamentally about… existing in a way we cannot maintain of our own.” And so, he concludes, “that which grants us existence is always more giver than destroyer.

Over the next few entries (and in the last couple of sermons I preach at my church before my July 8 surgery), I am going to have as a text and subtext Philippians 1:19-20, and “dying faithfully and well.” We rarely talk about death, except in terms of ways to avoid it. I want to think about how to embrace it, or at least let it compel me toward deeper trust and assurance as I travel this road that is not of my choosing... but one I must accept or be only angry, bitter and fearful.  

 

When I was in college, one of my late professors, Mike Awalt, preached a sermon for Holy Week when he said, speaking of Jesus as an example, that one could not discover the fullness of life or its meaning without acknowledging, accepting, embracing one’s mortality. But when we do that, we find within the delimited parameters occasion to receive life as a gift, to share life with others, and to find the abundance that comes from radical trust.  

 

One more thing: which is to say, one more prayer: for those whose cancer's are not nearly so manageable as mine, and for their loved ones as they walk with them quickly into the valley.