A Narrowing Place: Responsive Spirituality

Abstract

Among the many distinct experiences of cancer is the experience of the parent who watches their child become pale and drained of energy in the weeks preceding diagnosis. The journey from there to the oncology ward is one that can be adequately described as increasingly claustrophobic. It is all one-way traffic from flourishing life to the abyss. Perhaps being a parent makes one even more prone to the universal human tendency to find fault with oneself where there is only the blind force of nature at work. Whatever dark alleyway that self-destructive sentiment emerges from to ambush the optimist, it is certainly an effective hiding place from which to cause them to stumble. The child slips inexorably out of the parent’s grasp. The notion of parental protection is no haven. Yet the blindness of nature unwittingly tips the scales. In the narrowest of narrow places, the human organism responds with homeostatic resilience. Whether death is near or far in this place is unknown. In the moment of constriction, however, the child and its parent respond with that most irreducible of passions, the will to live. The human spirit emerges.

When in the depths of theological and philosophical academia, the determinants derived from lived experience seem easy to ignore. Towering edifices of rational thought seem to banish mere experience from authoritative discourse. The pre-frontal cortex feels like it is in command of the emotions. Complex rational explanations for the irrational can seem so assuring. And then, when crisis occurs, the self as body must rapidly change in response to environmental demands. The necessity of emotion throws the self back, in atavistic upheaval, to the roots of spirituality that precede the rational structures of religion.

Some may say that accepting such an experience as authoritative for the construction of world views is a form of romanticism. Perhaps it is to some extent. Yet, it can be argued that even the inadequacies of romanticism are more adequate for experience than the strengths of rationalism. Romanticism at least accommodates the sense of the power of nature in the crisis. Rational theology seeks refuge in the well-worn tracks of idealism, which ultimately lead to decadence. This theological reflection embraces the atavism of spiritual crisis in the face of death. It tracks the spiritual development that occurs in the crumbling of religion and the discovery of the self as a spiritual event in nature.

The last three hundred metres of the Parkrun were presenting Richard with a significant challenge. A slightly built thirteen-year-old, he had thought that the five-kilometre fun run event was well within his grasp. Surprisingly, here he was within sight of the finish line, bent over and delivering the contents of his stomach unceremoniously onto the grass. I encouraged him to stagger across the line and at least get home with the satisfaction of a finish. All of this seemed to me to be nothing unusual. Runners often suffer this fate and Richard would gain stamina as he trained in the coming weeks, I thought. He did not.

Two weeks later, he looked pale and his lethargy was palpable. He complained of pains in his shoulder. I realised he had been mentioning pain in his shoulder for a while; how long? I could not remember. A pang of concern and the stirring of a sense of self-recrimination moved around in my gut. I began to feel that I had not been paying adequate attention. I felt I might have allowed myself to become preoccupied with my own troubles and inadvertently set my parenting on auto-pilot. Why had I not heard him earlier? Was I Jonah, asleep in the bowels of the ship while the storm brewed and began to thunder?

Digestive ailment was the most likely explanation according to the general practitioner. That is, until Richard emerged from the shower a week later exhorting me to “feel this!” I did not need to feel it. I could see it! An ominous lump protruded from his abdomen. That had not been there when the doctor examined him. Whatever it was, it had appeared with a speed that engendered a sense of calamity in me. A clearly worried doctor ordered an ultra-sound examination. We waited for a week for the first appointment. I was Jonah. Staggering bleary-eyed to the top deck as the storm front lifted the surging ocean in a wave that threatened to engulf us.

During that week of waiting, Richard’s world became defined by increasing pain. Sleep evaded him, eating was only occasionally possible. I watched, helicoptering now, the realisation of my own powerlessness growing in me like a virus stunting my capacity to breathe. We did not wait for the ultra-sound results. We drove to the city with the scan on a disk and presented at the Monash hospital emergency department. Within a few frenetic hours, Richard was delivered into the care of the paediatric oncologist. As Christopher Hitchens’ reflections on mortality so lucidly illuminate, one never really hears the word ‘oncologist’ until one is actually referred to such a person (Hitchens 2012). Hitchens’ comment suggests the moment in lived experience that challenges all rationally constructed illusions that one is somehow immune to the threats of natural life (Hitchens 2022). It was a moment in his own experience of cancer diagnosis that crashed through his illusion of insusceptibility to the risks of certain behaviours. We entered a different world, each test taking us deeper into isolation from our former lives and surrounding us with a strange new understanding of ourselves. Imagine walking down a long hallway; the further you walk the closer the walls come to each other. We were entering such a narrowing place. Or maybe we were Jonah: thrown into the raging storm, cast into the deep, there to sink ever deeper, away from the wind and the stars and the night, into the darkness and the crushing pressure of the ocean, to be swallowed by the whale.

I have received the phone call from the paediatric oncology unit. It is time to meet ‘the team’ and discover the final diagnosis. I am utterly reduced. I am a dry leaf in a hot north wind. For the first time in my life, I am filled with the realisation of myself as a body of emotion and feeling. All the rational theological edifices that had seemed so convincing, so ultimately concerning, so adequate to explain the monumental reality of life and death, have drifted away and left me to myself. And I, naked before the necessity of nature, realise my creatureliness. This “creature-feeling” is me, as organism, feeling the absoluteness of my dependence on the processes of nature that are beyond me and therefore beyond my control. Ultimately, I do not determine them, they determine me (Otto 1926). On the processes of nature, I am dependent for my very existence. And those same processes will subsume me, determining completely my beginning and my end. I am silenced by the bare reality that, “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?” (Hitchens 2012). And it feels like this is the first genuinely rational insight I have ever had.

When the illusion that I have command of my own life is in full sway in me, my sense that the world is like a microscope through which the cosmos sees an image of me as its rightful culmination frames my life with meaning. In this framework of meaning, I am unique. The religion I was formed in as a child transcribed this illusion into a theology. I am ‘made in the image of God’; there is a divinely ordained purpose for my life; I am ‘made for relationship with God’; ‘Jesus loves me this I know...’ and so on. No matter how well these illusions are dressed up in theological complexity, when faced with the determinants of experience they appear again as themselves: merely a cry into the void for salvation from nature. As I stand on the threshold of the oncologist’s office, bracing myself for the end of the world, the realisation that all of that is an illusion strikes me with a clarity that can only be derived from coming face to face with the certainty of death. The cosmos, the organic process of life itself, does not even see me. I am part of its processes. And so it is with my son. His life and death are part of the nature of the cosmos as organism. His transitoriness, his finitude, and his inevitable death are necessary for the cosmos to sustain life itself. The death of my son is a necessary homeostatic shift in the whole organic structure. Without it, the whole organic world of life would die indeed. The nature of life is that it renews itself through death (Schweitzer 1936).

Under the influence of this “sudden flash of insight”, (Whitehead 1978) I am thrown back upon the elemental and now atavistic forms of human spirit. There is only feeling; a feeling of absolute dependence (Schleiermacher 2011). I am vibrating with a sense of the numinous, that irreducible felt sense that I am totally dependent on the determining powers of nature. Schleiermacher, it seemed upon later reflection, was right when he wrote

If...word and idea are always originally one, and the term ‘God’ therefore presupposes an idea, then we shall simply say that this idea, which is nothing more than the expression of the feeling of absolute dependence, is the most direct reflection upon it... (Schleiermacher 2011)

The drifting away of all my theological and conceptual apparatus in the face of the suffering and potential loss of my son is nature rebuking my idealism. The word ‘God’ is empty of rational content. It expresses a body of feeling. Feeling is the consciousness of emotion. Emotion is my homeostatic responsiveness to my natural environment (Damasio 2012). My natural environment is one of significant threat. I am in an ever-narrowing place, confined on every side by threats.

Those who accused Schleiermacher of reducing faith to psychology, and thereby delivering a fatal blow to religion, were right in one sense (Tillich 1951). The reality of nature’s reliance on death reveals the religious concern for eternal life to be decadent (Nietzsche [1895] 1954). It actually wills the death of the world. Schleiermacher’s recognition of the feeling of creatureliness as the core of the human spirit, and therefore of faith, may well be the death of religion. The human spirit has always preceded religion, however. Schleiermacher recognised that the human spirit, called mere psychology by his critics, is infinitely more powerful in its atavism at the point of the realisation of creatureliness than religion can ever hope to be. The rational structures and words of religion are empty without it. Faith is not rendered merely psychology by Schleiermacher’s observations. Faith transcends the illusions of religion and embraces the sphere of genuine lived experience where the atavistic and elemental movements of the human spirit become manifest in the most foundational of all psychological phenomena: homeostatic responses (Damasio 2012).

I no longer feel beguiled by the illusions of my religion. I am weeping. I am sobbing; my whole body is shuddering with dread. My son! My boy! Why him?

Why not?

I am sitting in a room with people. The paediatric oncology team. Two of them in particular have my full attention. One is the senior paediatric oncologist, responsible for diagnosing, understanding, and designing treatment responses that are appropriate for each particular instance of disease. I am aware that this person sitting in front of me is a collection of years of concern for human health, years of careful research, and years of practice. The other is the nurse specialist, responsible for the close monitoring of the child who will be assaulted by the treatment. Responsible for ensuring that the treatment does not kill the child, this person is equally formed by years of concern, research, and practice.

These people are, like me, part of the natural world. They, too, are creatures. They too are absolutely dependent. Their power lies in understanding. Understanding how we can respond to the threat implied in the disease. Together we sit and contemplate what is known and what is not yet known. What is known is that Richard’s particular type of cancer is treatable and that children in particular tend to respond well to treatment. That is where the good news ends. We also know that the treatment is one of the most toxic of its kind. The nurse specialist comes into sharp focus. This particular human organism will be the one who will make sure that the treatment does not kill my son.

The oncology team are human creatures like me, like Richard; they are just as vulnerable to failure and death. And the orientation of their spirits is towards life. Perhaps that is a tautology. Spirit is the orientation of the organism towards life. I can hear my old religion decrying hope in these human spirits. “False hope!” it cries from the darker corners of my mind. Corners of my mind that crave the ideology of the divine rescuer in this life or the next. Here in the oncologist’s office, the only tangible hope of rescue shines at me through the light in the eyes of the human organisms who have given their lives to walk with people like us, to stand together, creatures dependent only on the resources that we can muster between us and use to confront the inevitable demand of our own natures, that we all must die; this is the only sense in which there is any content to the notion of divinity.

Richard would live, but the path to hold onto life would wind its way perilously close to the edge of the abyss. At times, the footholds would be almost imperceptible on the face of the cliff that we would inevitably have to traverse. I say ‘we’ even though it would be Richard who would contend with the toxins designed to kill the cancerous cells. Richard, the living organism, would feel the approach of death in himself with every dose of chemotherapy. Richard would drift towards the edge with a seemingly inexorable drive towards death. I would go with him, his life, and his death, linked with mine in ways irreducible to human rationality (Gaita 1999).

As I watched the oncology nurses gently inserting lethal poison into the veins of my son, I felt the panic of finitude again. The small bag of clear fluid was wrapped in the words ‘Intravenous delivery only! Oral delivery will be fatal!’ The nurse quietly explained that this treatment must be followed by an antidote no more than one hour after delivery. My reflex was to cry out to the old divine being, “Save my child from death!” Babies and children dying of cancer surrounded us in the confines of the hermetically sealed children’s cancer ward. There were no divine beings standing ready to deliver them. Time and again the sounds of their dying reached our ears. There was only one kind of intervention that I could put my trust in. Human intervention.

Standing here together on the threshold of death, something in us is provoked. A response. There is movement and change in us. To the complex interoceptive (internal bodily changes) homeostatic senses and the exteroceptive (environmental changes occurring externally to the body) events impacting us in the oncology ward, Richard and I responded. In other words, we were animated in the pursuit of life.

It is intrinsic to my being an organism that I am a homeostatic process. I am the complex interaction of passive power, the power to be changed (exteroceptive), and active power, the power to generate change (interoceptive) (Whitehead 1978). My homeostatic regulation is entirely dependent on my capacity to interact with and respond to my environment. I am part of a system, and as part of the system I can influence that system when I change in relation to the dynamic environments upon which I depend for life. This is what we call the sense of freedom.

What is there apart from the organism in constant flux, always moving in search of the conditions necessary for life? And what is this responsive change in the organism other than emotion exploding into the conscious mind as feeling? In this sense, the provocation was spiritual, if you think about it for a bit. My whole body, this powerful ecologically dependent organism that constitutes the human mind, responded to threat with complex changes that reached out for the conditions that are necessary for flourishing life. One of the meanings of the Latin word spiritus is “to animate”. When faced with the threat of death, the organism animates with complex responses. Science calls this homeostatic regulation. It is the powerful capacity to respond, to change, when the current environment no longer supports life. In this sense, both Richard and I were spiritually provoked by the threat of cancer. The affirmation of life was literally the animation of our organic existence in the face of death. The proximity of life and death to each other in the homeostatic animation of the human organism perhaps finds an analogy in George Eliot’s approximating of despair and hope that we find in her words, “...what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope” (Eliot [1871] 1994). This homeostatic animation is a response that generates power in the organism and both resists and accepts death as its primary function. Life depends on the animating provocation of death. One day I will die. One day Richard will die. It is for this reason alone that we are alive at all.

Like diseased rats fleeing a sewer, (Camus [1947] 2001) the dying cancer cells flood his kidneys to the point of overwhelming them. Another drug, a product of years of human research, is injected to rescue his kidneys from their inevitable collapse under the strain. He is on a knife edge. He loses a kilogram in four days, all of it dead cancer cells literally urinated out of his system. Other cells die in a utilitarian apocalypse. The dynamic skin lining his digestive system dies and begins to strip itself away. From his lips to his anus this vulnerable lining turns to jelly and slowly, painfully leaves him. He cannot eat. His skin is so pale as to seem translucent. He keeps losing weight. He is skeletal. He cannot walk from his bed to the scales in the hallway. He seems wraith-like. He is living and dying concurrently. He screams. His pain fills the hospital ward. His family shudders under its impact. I will not leave him. I will stay with him.

“Dad”. His voice came through the semi darkness like a wisp of mist before dawn. Almost inaudible, he sounded like he was hardly there at all, only a dream, or sigh. I was lying on the hospital bed with him, quiet and close, like we were gradually forming a new symbiotic life form; clinging on; evolving by necessity; adapting or dying. “Would you mind massaging my feet again?” I took hold of his feet, which oddly seemed to be getting bigger in spite of his frightening weight loss, and gently rubbed them with soothing creams. It seemed to ground him in himself, somehow to remind him that he is a living body.

“Dad”, Richard breathed, “I can’t do this. It’s going to tear my body apart”. We were half sitting, half lying, on the toilet floor. He looked so light that it seemed he could float above the tiles, yet he was draped over the toilet bowl as if it were the only thing in the world preventing him from sinking through the floor. I gathered him up, wiping away what his body has discarded in the throes of its response to the poisoning. I held him in my arms and laid him back in the bed. He sighed. It was breath. Animation. I was consumed with love. I was painfully aware that its presence signified the nearness of loss.

Love is felt homeostatic response. It is the organism provoked to pursue life in sympathetic dependence on other organisms (Scheler [1954] 2009). It is the collectively interdependent will to live (Schweitzer 1923). In this sense, it is the most powerful of the passions and so often the foundation of all the other passions. Scratch the surface of hate and you will find the furnace of love generating its power. The word ‘god’ has content in this sense and only in this sense. It signifies the organism’s awareness of itself as absolutely dependent and possessed of the power to generate life together with that upon which it is dependent.

The process in Richard called cancer died. Other processes in him also died. The organism called Richard continues. He remains, a creature absolutely dependent and shaped by experience to feel a profound awareness of his dependence. I am in the world with my son, for now. One day we will die. And when we do, space in the process of organism itself, the process of life, will open up for other organisms to be born, to grow, to suffer, and to die in their turn. I can feel something in response to all of this. I think it is a new felt insight into how precious the whole process is. I think it is called...

...gratitude.

By reflecting in the way that I have, I claim for myself an adequate spirituality emerging from the incapacity of my religion to account for the experience of crisis. I have faced the urgent determinants of emotion that arise in the sudden homeostatic upheaval of the threat of death. I have embraced gratitude for my place in the natural world, and I have let go of the fear induced by the myths of religion.