Whether walking a loved one into surgery or investigating the spiritual formation of teachers, we need both solitude and community to enliven our compassion. For only both paths—inner and outer—can yield the miracle of the Whole.

Yet how do we access the flow and miracle of the Whole? How can we when broken, open ourselves to all that is not broken? It all begins with faith—faith in everything larger than the singular self. It helps here to remember that faith is inextricably linked to care.

As the theologian Paul Tillich contends:

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned, an act of the total personality. It is the most centered act of the human mind.

Ultimately, faith is no more than the willingness and bravery to be ultimately concerned, fueling that fire of concern with everything that matters. The mystery is that taking the risk to be so ultimately concerned in itself makes us more whole. And what is compassion, but being ultimately concerned about something other than ourselves?

In actuality, miracle is the process of ultimate concern, and one aspect of miracle is what happens when love makes us cross over into the sharing of each other’s pain.

So here I am, like you: not healed, but healing; not sure, but gaining in confidence; no longer a bother to others, but still troubled; full of wonder when not in pain. Here I am, thrilled and raw at the prospect of waking one more time. I stand before you, humbled, a Lazarus of sorts, and I don’t pretend to know half of what has happened to me.

What I do know is that cancer in its acuteness pierced me into open living, and I’ve been working ever since to sanctify that open port without crisis as its trigger. But can this be done without crisis pushing us off the ledge? That’s the question now, years from the leap: how to keep leaping from a desire to be real so as not to be shoved by an ever-lurking crisis.

Oh how do I give you where I’ve been? How do I open my palms and say, see how pain has simplified the air, see how struggle has boiled down to joy? They say that birds dream in the nest and whatever they see makes them wake and sing. How late must it be for me to whisper that our nest is our suffering? How quiet for me to offer that living is in the vastness that experience opens. How utterly rearranged must we be to realize that loving is the courage to hold each other as we break and worship what unfolds.

Willfulness

WILLFULNESS

(For Nur)

To inhale

enough of the world

when you’re told

you have cancer

so the dark fruit

never seems larger

than your orbit.

To do what you

have never done

to stay in the

current of life.

To fly 1,000 miles

to meet someone

you dreamt

might help.