Cover

Title

Dedication

for any spirit

suddenly awakened

to how deep its life

how short its stay

Upon Seeking Tu Fu as a Guide

UPON SEEKING TU FU AS A GUIDE

And so I asked him, how is it God is everywhere and nowhere? He circled me like a self I couldn’t reach, “Because humans refuse to live their lives.” I was confused. He continued, “You hover rather than enter.” I was still confused. He spoke in my ear, “God is only visible within your moment entered like a burning lake.” I grew frightened. He laughed, “Even now, you peer at me as if what you see and hear are not a part of you.” I grew angry. He ignored me, “You peer at the edge of your life, so frantic to know, so unwilling to believe.” Indeed, I was frantic. He was in my face, “And now that you have cancer, you ask to be spared.” I grew depressed. He took my shoulders, “For God’s sake! Enter your own life! Enter!”

To My Reader

TO MY READER

One of the great transforming passages in my life was having cancer in my mid-thirties. This experience unraveled the way I see the world. It scoured my lens of perception, landing me in a deeper sense of living. There are certain experiences that reform us, as if God’s a tireless blacksmith who, against our pleading, forges the metal in us, though it takes years for our heart and mind to cool from the pounding. My journey with cancer was how I was forged.

One of the mysteries of being human is that healing is a process that never ends. Transformation, even from a single event, can continue for Eternity. And so, I continue to be transformed by my journey with cancer, which began with my struggle through three years of illness and alarm from 1987 to 1990. All those years ago, that struggle brought me close to death. Today, I remain committed to surfacing the lessons of transformation as they continue to shape the lens that life has given me. The transformative events may differ for each of us, but every soul will face a life-changing threshold that will keep shaping who we are for the rest of our life.

I felt compelled to expand this book because almost dying and having cancer cracked my life open and continues to deepen who I am. I felt compelled to rework and further unfold these life lessons as my understanding keeps evolving. I felt uplifted to add new lessons from the growing perspective of decades. And so, this book gathers twenty-eight years of my writing and teaching about suffering, healing, and wholeness.

It’s important to admit that I’m not the same person at sixty-four as when first diagnosed at thirty-six. In my thirties, I was a driven artist, obedient to a relentless muse, while addicted to working in the world for approval. I was a dedicated and loyal friend but mostly inflamed with a vision I couldn’t quite articulate. My understanding of life was way ahead of my ability to live life. So cancer stopped me, humbled me, frightened me, threw me off course, turned me upside down and inside out. I was suddenly on God’s anvil, being hammered and reshaped. And everything that had worked to that point—my dedication, my attention to detail, my perseverance, my certainty in my muse—all of that was shattered and of no use. I was terrified and lost.

During that time, I endured a horribly botched first chemo treatment in New York City that left me squatting on the floor of a Holiday Inn with my former wife Ann and my dear old friend Paul. It was three weeks after having a rib removed from my back, and I was throwing up every twenty minutes till I began to cough up blood. It was at that moment in the weak grey before dawn that Ann, in her fear and pain, cried out, “Where is God?” Slouched in a corner, I somehow whispered, “Here, right here.” I don’t know where such an understanding came from. In truth, all the books I’ve written over the years and all the teaching circles I’ve convened have been an endless attempt to understand what came to me in that moment. This book tries to gather some of what I’ve learned along the way.

As coal is pressed into a diamond, experience presses us into the clear jewel that we are. Difficult as this is, this is the hard-earned way that wisdom appears in the world. And though what’s unearthed here comes from the heat of my journey, the lessons are for everyday living. It’s a law of spiritual nature: that the press of crisis, illness, heartbreak, and grief make visible what’s essential to live. Somehow, our life-giving lessons are more easily seen through the press of difficulty. So much of what we learn and pass on is the residue of more heated times. This is how we preserve what matters. This is how we create medicine out of our suffering.

THE JOURNEY

When my former wife and I were both stricken with cancer, the months became a labyrinth. In May of ’87, Ann was diagnosed as having cervical cancer in situ. This led to her having a conization in June and a hysterectomy that August. While she was healing, I had a mysterious lump forming on my head, which turned out to be growing underneath the skull as well. It grew to the size of half a grapefruit. And so, mere days after her surgery, I entered the hospital, moving through a gauntlet of tests, including an open biopsy, which diagnosed this strange lesion as a lymphoma lodged between my brain and skull. It was eating through the bone.

During this time, I was unable to find my bearings, had no sense of center, and was unsure about everything. But in the center of my terror, there was a small voice stirring, emanating, and building from under all my trouble. It didn’t speak in words, and I was unaccustomed to listening for it or to it. I know now it came from the core of all life and all time and began to assert itself through the bottom of my personality, the way sunlight passes through a crack in a barn. This was my first feeling of the touchstone of grace that would grow and lessen my terror over time.

As I struggled between my fear of procedures and surgeries and my attempts to listen for that touchstone of grace growing inside me, I began to be visited in dream by the great Chinese poet Tu Fu, a loving, authentic spirit from the Tang Dynasty who spoke plainly about the pains and wonders of living. This was my first experience of forces we could call guides. No one can prove their existence. But as fish can feel the current move them along, we can feel the current of life move us along. During times of suffering, we’re invited to listen more deeply for the current of life, no matter how it appears. It may come as a memory of your beloved grandmother long gone or in the voice of a Chinese poet from the 700s. When suffering, we’re challenged to accept help however it appears.

By October, after months of desperation, and prayer, and visualization, and the appearance of guides, and fighting with and against doctors, the tumor—both below the skull and above—vanished, avoiding major brain surgery, whole-head radiation, and spinal chemotherapy.

The doctors could not explain it, and our friends and family helped us limp back to life, a struggle in itself, which we were shaping strongly until a year later, in November of ’88, a spot on my eighth rib began to grow. We were crushed.

By the following January, a lump protruded on my back. In February of ’89, I underwent thoracic surgery to remove that rib and its adjacent muscles. The cells in that rib were clearly malignant, and so, barely repaired, I embarked on four months of chemotherapy. Today, as of my last checkup, I am well and forever changed.

I had, quite frankly, found death at my shoulder earlier than most. Yet I had also been touched by a relentless, mysterious grace, which surfaced briefly to restore me. Now, I find myself tied to a fathomless place where I had not dared to voyage. I call that reservoir God, though you may call it something else.

Though my story is framed around a particular crisis, I believe that all forms of crisis somehow raise a common instinct to survive, and with that a common set of tools—such as risk, trust, compassion, and surrender—becomes available to all. And coming this far, it seems clear that being a survivor is embracing the will to live, and whether that embrace lasts for years or months or days or even hours, whoever embraces life is a survivor.

Sooner or later, we’re asked to be honest with our fears and hopes, to render, through our experience, the irreducible mystery of life in which we all swim. After all this way, I know that I am weak and strong, stubborn and determined, afraid and brave, giving and demanding, resilient and stalled, confused and clear—sometimes all at once. I know now that going on without denying any aspect of the human drama is what strength is all about.

We’d been on fire and almost burned to death, only to be tossed more deeply into the ocean of life, where we almost drowned. Now, we were cast ashore, to start over and find our way, which was a difficult blessing all by itself, one we ultimately couldn’t do together.

It was four years later that Ann and I divorced. It was no one’s fault. When a large stone falls into a lake, the water around it is sent in all directions away from the point of impact. Events like cancer are such large stones crashing from nowhere into the water of our lives. If you happen to be on the same side of the point of impact, you might be propelled in a similar direction. But sometimes, as with Ann and I, the cancer landed right between us and we were propelled in opposite directions into the rest of our lives. From all these years later, it’s humbling to realize the power and aftershock of cancer or any life-changing experience. While no longer in close contact, we helped save each other’s lives. And so, all there is to say is thank you, even to the unspeakable thing that crashed into our lives.

A STORY THAT CONTINUES TO BE WRITTEN

During the heat and fire of this journey, I wrote in a journal. I wasn’t trying to create art or craft anything. I was reduced to a life of expression that was helping me to live. While struggling to be here, I never thought of putting any of this into a book. It was a few years later, while drifting back into the stream of life, that I felt a need to bear witness to the journey I’d been through and to give voice to the common experience I’d been exposed to. What I’d endured was the journey that everyone endures, in different circumstances and with different names.

In 1994, I self-published a small fifty-seven-page edition of this book under the title Acre of Light: Living with Cancer. That early edition quickly sold out. Two years later, Ithaca House Books, a small press in upstate New York, offered to publish a second edition. Later that same year, Parabola published the first audio version of the book, under the title Inside the Miracle: Enduring Illness, Approaching Wholeness. The master tape took a week to record on reel-to-reel in a studio near Lincoln Center in New York City. It resulted in two intimate audiocassettes, which Publishers Weekly named as one of the best audiotapes of the year.

We originally recorded the Parabola edition to make it available to those who could no longer read in the roughness of their journey. We were humbled to learn that the book and the audio program had a far greater reach. The lessons surfaced by the acuteness of being ill proved useful to everyone in the bump and flare of their ordinary days. This is why I’ve changed the subtitle in this edition from Enduring Illness to Enduring Suffering. Because, ill or not, everyone experiences suffering of some kind that we each have to endure. The stories and lessons here are for everyone.

Those original editions, published twenty-one years ago, have long since gone out of print. And I’m deeply glad that this work is available again in this expanded form. So what you have in your hands is a thematically integrated work that draws from three sources that span almost three decades of writing: the original poems and prose from Inside the Miracle (1994, 1996, now out of print); ten relevant essays from my collected personal essays, Unlearning Back to God (2006, now out of print); and thirty-nine new poems and prose pieces not yet published. While I’ve put all this together in the arc of a life’s journey, the book is not chronological, but follows an inward evolution. I’ve also let each piece remain in the present tense and mood of when I wrote it, to preserve the immediacy of the experience.

A STORY THAT CONTINUES TO BE LIVED

We are each in a lifetime conversation with suffering and care that, in time, will open us to our strengths and gifts. We are meant, it seems, to come apart and come together, so we can discover who we are at the core. We are meant, it seems, to be rearranged by what we go through and held up to that process by those who care. We are meant to accept suffering and care as our teachers, our mentors, as the tools used by time to shape us into what matters.

And while we each want a map for how to live our lives, your map won’t help me and my map won’t guide you. Only inhabiting our personhood can reveal our map to us. All we can do is encourage each other to enliven our personal authenticity, which will lead us to discover and decipher our own way. So sharing the raw truth of my journey is only meant as an encouragement, not as a guide. Ultimately, we each are meant to gather meaning through relationship: with ourselves, each other, and with suffering and care.

Through the years, we are ever changed and changing. Even as I write this, the teachers of suffering and care are shaping me further. During the last year, I lost my father at ninety-three, a man I loved who I was estranged from along the way and close to at the end. And after thirteen years, my wife Susan and I lost our beloved dog-child Mira, a yellow lab whose immediate and unfaltering love taught us much. These deep losses have thrown me into my latest conversation with suffering and care, through which I continue to grow more salient and tender. So, even though I thought this book was done, I felt compelled to include lessons from these losses. If any of these stories touch your story, it’s because the particular sufferings and care we each encounter place us in the story of all suffering and care. And in that sea lives our resilience.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This book itself is a journey, not offered in a straight line but quite circuitous—because that is how life is. Though events happen sequentially through the years, their impact gathers and merges inwardly. This is the inner rhythm of healing that leads to wholeness. My healing journey keeps reverberating forward, backward, sideways, and back to the beginning, always different but at heart the same. The journey of this book tries to introduce you to this mysterious process.

So the book does not need to be read in order. You can feel free to move about the chapters and poems, to linger with what touches or challenges you, to stay in conversation with whatever lights your heart. I encourage you to clear a path to your own sense of meaning. Toward that end, I invite you to keep a journal. You may, when moved, find it helpful to take a break, go for a walk, to enter your journal, or discuss a story or feeling that has arisen with a friend.

Often, when speaking of the all-encompassing Mystery of the Universe and the Oneness of Things, I capitalize the largest energies of life that can only be pointed to. When I refer to the Whole of Life or the Spirit that informs our lives, I am honoring at once the ineffable forces that are particular for each of us and yet common to all of us.

This book is also a weaving of prose and poetry. So let me say a word about the nature of poetry. Poetry is the unexpected utterance of the soul. Such deep utterances are teachers that help us make the journey from our head to our heart. For me, the poems arrive with their wisdom. I retrieve them, more than create them, and they become my guides. What they have to say becomes my inner curriculum and, by staying in conversation with the poems, I learn and grow. Whether you write or not, this way of learning is available to us all, as we meet and learn from the moments of our lives. Whether familiar with poetry or not, I invite you to receive the poems as you would a friend who’s eager to share intimately. Let the feeling reach you first. For the purpose of a poem is to awaken your own feeling.

Throughout the book, you will also encounter Questions to Walk With. These are journal questions, invitations to be in conversation with yourself, and table questions, invitations to be in conversation with a friend or loved one—each as a way to personalize the common passages in life, and to explore where the lessons and challenges live in you. Please, use and develop the questions you’re drawn to; change them and share them as you’re moved.

Let me also say a few words about journaling. In exploring these questions, try not to select what to write about. Instead, try to open your heart and mind, by meditating on the question in silence for a minute or two, and see what wants your heart’s attention. Once writing, don’t censor what arises. These expressions are for you. It’s more important to be honest with yourself than to hold back because someone else might see what you write. Don’t worry about being organized or making sense, or even if you write in full sentences. Let your heart and deeper mind be your guide. And please remember, these exercises are experiments in authenticity. There is no right or wrong way to do this, no normal amount of time each takes, and no one way to surface what you feel.

We’re now at the threshold of the one journey we all share. As we enter, it’s my hope that the trail of this lifetime conversation with suffering and care will open you to the fullness of your own humanity. With a steadfast belief in our aliveness, I hope what’s here will help you meet the transformation that waits in however you’re being forged.

Enduring Suffering

ENDURING SUFFERING

In life one plays the hand one is dealt to the best of one’s ability. Those who insist on playing, not the hand they were given, but the one they insist they should have been dealt—these are life’s failures. We are not asked if we will play. That is not an option. Play we must. The option is how.

ANTHONY DE MELLO

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