Cancer in Advent
Sunday, November 27, 2022
I work most days in front of a large screen. The screen's resolution, saturation, and brilliance allow me to display paintings that sometimes look even better than they do in museums or churches. Advent began last Sunday, the first day of the church’s year in the western Christian liturgical calendar. I changed the painting on my screen to mark the hope of the new season.
For months, I had looked at the painting above, Bruegel's The Triumph of Death. Morbid? Yes, but I didn't hang it on my screen because I was depressed. Kathi and I had gotten evidence that my cancer had recurred, for the second time. I wanted to remember that death has set a time for me.
Cancer is cunning: you are healthy and stable for a time and then quickly wither and die. Oropharyngeal cancer kills this way. A throat tumour makes you suffer, but you’ll live. Until it spreads to the lungs and brain. Brain metastases kill quickly: your life expectancy from their diagnosis is 3.5 months.
The Triumph of Death reminded me that life is an emergency: every second matters. We shouldn't need cancer to see this. In Thesis VIII on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin argued that the world is a perpetual crisis.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this.
The normal state is to be blind to this. Auden wrote a poem about another Bruegel painting, The Fall of Icarus. Icarus is the small figure causing a splash in the lower right corner.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along...
In Bruegel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
I call on cancer to open my eyes: the emergency is always here. Perhaps not today for you, but for you soon, and always for someone you do not see. Benjamin wrote how the oppressed see this more clearly than the elite. In Thesis IX, Benjamin imagines an angel standing in the present, looking back at history:
Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, [the angel] sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.
I wanted to be sure I fully acknowledged my state and your state: alive but likely near death. I didn't want to be sad. Life still offers joy, and I wanted to make those joys impervious to fear because I had already accounted for death.
I studied The Triumph of Death to purge myself of false hope.
So why did I change the painting? It wasn't because these thoughts are inappropriate for Advent. From a sermon by Fleming Rutledge:
Advent [is] the time of contrasts and opposites: darkness and light, good and evil, past and future, now and not-yet.
Advent is a time of refugee families in flight. It's no accident that Advent happens in winter. It's about light in the darkness; you have missed the point if you do not see the darkness. From Auden's Christmas Oratorio,
...winter completes an age,
The eyes huddle like cattle, doubt
Seeps into the pores and power
Ebbs from the heavy signet ring;
The prophet's lantern is out
And gone the boundary stone,
Cold the heart and cold the stove,
Ice condenses on the bone,
Winter completes an age.
And yet, the point of being purged of false hope is to be open to true hope, to see hope within the dark. I changed the painting to Botticelli’s Annunciation to affirm that hope.
The painting depicts the imparting of grace, love of and from God. You won’t experience this if you are attached to something lesser.
True hope is the affirmation of the good in the face of the facts. Grace comes to you from without, through a connection with another. It is sudden and overwhelming; if you are fortunate, you yield to it, and some of it stays with you. I believe there is a future in which we -- the human community -- can escape the emergency. Hope is the passionate experience of this possibility; love in the darkness. Nothing more and nothing less.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and insights so beautifully.
What a lovely multimedia article! Thank you for sharing this reflection of hope.