“Is It Roast Lamb for Dinner?” Reflections on Love, Loss and a Living God

Abstract

This essay is a personal response to the questions that arose to confront my Christian faith as I attempted to navigate a way forward amidst the impact and consequences of a cancer diagnosis for, firstly, my sister and then my husband. It is a navigation that is still, and in some respects will always be, ongoing, but in reflecting on how the ‘wrong’ questions might be replaced by the ‘right’ ones, this essay seeks to retain hope as a guiding principle to light the way ahead.

1. Introduction

A few months after my sister died from the cancer that had been diagnosed a year ago, her seven-year-old daughter’s voice rang out from the back seat of the car with the question, “Mummy was cremated, wasn’t she?” The answer was a simple affirmative, but the ensuing silence was weighted with anxious anticipation about the potentially challenging questions that might follow. When the next question finally came it was, however, unexpected as she simply made an inquiry about the traditional Sunday meal that her grandmother would be cooking. Her question reflected a very different perspective from that of my adult mind. It would, however, offer a significant insight into how we might move forward with hope after what had, at times, seemed to be a hopeless experience.

Three months earlier, I had been woken in the early hours of the morning by a cry for help from my sister’s bedroom. Discovering that the power had gone out, I stumbled through the darkness, anxious to reach my sister before her cries woke her sleeping children. Without electricity, her air pressure mattress was quickly deflating, and the temperature in the North Yorkshire stone cottage was also dropping rapidly. Wrapping her fragile body in blankets, I climbed into bed beside her, and sitting up on the now hard and unforgiving bed frame, we looked out through the window at a clear, star-speckled night sky. It was two days after Christmas and the moonlight revealed a winter garden blanketed in deep snow. The profound sense of silence was broken when my sister asked me what there was to look forward to now that the Christmas celebrations were over. Despite her deteriorating condition, she never gave up hope of recovery, encouraged by accounts of miraculous healing and the prayers of many, both locally and around the world. But she was to die ten days later.

As her seven- and ten-year-old daughters’ godmother, hearing their nightly prayers for her to be able to play with them again while observing her daily decline, I was confronted with the issue of how or if, against her wishes, I should prepare them for her death. This was because of my growing fear that encouraging a confidence that God would answer their prayers directly might only result in the destruction of their future ability to believe in or trust this approach to Christian faith; an approach with the expectation that our prayers will receive the literal response that we are hoping for. It was a fear that would eventually find validation in my father’s grief when he would repeatedly ask me how he could worship a god who had not only ignored the prayers of so many but also had, as the creator of all, therefore, ‘created’ cancer and consequently ‘killed’ his daughter. Before her death, it was, however, a fear that battled with the conflicting fear that I did not have enough personal faith in and was, therefore, limiting the potential for a miraculous intervention from a loving God. Realism and idealism appeared to be at war, and I struggled to locate God on either side of the conflict.

2. Searching for Hope: The Wrong Questions

After receiving the news of my sister’s sudden diagnosis and devastating prognosis of only approximately three to four months’ life expectancy, my immediate response was to consider what I could do to support her. On a practical level, as I was nearly twelve thousand miles away in my home in New Zealand, my options initially appeared to be limited. From a Christian perspective, prayer and the promise of comfort and hope emerging from biblical accounts of miraculous healing in the Gospels and the Old Testament response to Hezekiah’s anguish and impassioned prayer in the face of death in 2 Kings 20 were, therefore, an especially vital recourse. The questions that immediately surfaced, however, concerned how much time I should allocate to prayer and whether fasting was appropriate (Ezra 8:21–23). From an intercessory perspective, what and how much was needed from myself and how many others in order for God to intervene? How could or should I demonstrate my trust or faith in the efficacy of prayer? I desperately needed to know what I could do, but also how I could alleviate the concern that I might fail to do enough. Would I have enough faith to believe that, contrary to medical opinion, a miracle would occur? How should I interpret the Gospel accounts in which healing appears to be directly related to faith as Jesus tells the centurion and then the blind men, “Let it be done to for you according to your faith” and “According to your faith let it be done to you” (Matthew 8:13 and 9:29); tells the Canaanite woman, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish” (Matthew 15:28); tells the father, “All things can be done for the ones who believe” (Mark 9:23); tells Bartimaeus, “Your faith has healed you” (Mark 10:52); and tells the leper, “Your faith has made you well” (Luke 17:19)?1

How could I find the right balance between the actions of the busy, practical Martha and the attentive, listening Mary in Luke 10:38–42? There was, however, another deeply embedded fear generated by an acknowledgement of the extensive physical and psychological pain and suffering that has been ongoing throughout human history; a state that I was afraid might indicate that God may not be able, or perhaps for some unfathomable reason would choose not to intervene in the hoped-for way in what appeared to be a vast majority of cases. How could I, therefore, find and be able to offer hope that was authentic and life-enhancing rather than deceptive and destructive in leading only to disappointment and despair?

It would be some time before I realised that this would be hope that was not dependent on definitive answers to my fear-driven questions. It would instead emerge when I could learn to relinquish both the questions and the desire for a security based on a sense of control and manipulable order; a security that is neither biblical nor part of the natural world as we and other creatures experience it. The questions generated by fear could then be replaced by the more significant question of how a greater sensibility and subsequent response to the needs of a specific situation can be developed. This is because the many manifestations of cancer are all unique in the sense of the differing circumstances of the individuals concerned. Being able to respond in a practical way to the often challenging needs of these circumstances may, therefore, in some respects, be more important as a focus for prayer than the much hoped-for outcome. The poor prognosis and lack of hope offered by conventional medicine led my sister to an alternative path and a rejection of the limited support offered by the medical profession. Four years later, my husband’s cancer diagnosis would lead him on a very different path, with chemotherapy, both autologous and allogeneic stem cell transplants and the possibility of an overseas drug trial providing opportunities for treatment and hope for recovery.

The impact of both these paths and the support required for their navigation were, at times, very challenging, with periods of hope and encouragement along with times of devastating disappointment. Sadly, the outcome in both cases was not what had been hoped and prayed for. My sister was able to extend her life for eight months longer than originally predicted by following a demanding, and sometimes extreme, alternative treatment regime. My husband had eight years in remission before his cancer returned a month after what was supposed to be his final check-up and “all-clear.” This was a particularly cruel blow and challenge to the positive environment that we were trying to maintain, which was also essential for my sister. In both cases, we were frequently challenged by the relentlessly unpredictable and invasive nature of cancer and its consequent ability to overshadow everything. In the next few years, my husband underwent two extreme medical treatments, as well as triple bypass surgery. He was finally offered a place on a drug trial that was, however, suddenly put on hold a week before we were due to relocate overseas. His deteriorating health meant that this opportunity was lost, but he died in his hometown amidst family and friends instead of in the isolation of a strange country, for which I will always be thankful. Gratitude was, though, an often elusive and exhausting state to maintain as it appeared to be at odds with the reality of a diminishing sense of control or choice. This was a reality that seemed to call instead for lament as an outlet for the many negative emotions of frustration, anger, fear and anguish that living with cancer can generate. Lament finds validation in the words of the biblical psalmists, but it appears, at least in my experience, to be rarely offered in contemporary Christian church communities where the emphasis is on praise and thanksgiving.

3. A Space for Lament

• How long, O Lord? Will you forget

• me forever?

• How long will you hide your face

• from me?

• How long must I bear pain in my

• soul,

• and have sorrow in my heart all

• day long? Psalm 13:1–2

A few weeks before my sister’s last Christmas, I lay awake in the early hours of the morning, unable to sleep due to a persistent cough that was the legacy of a heavy cold. I was worried that I would pass this on to my sister, but fortunately, this did not occur. The relief about this was profound but soon replaced by the worry about how, when feeling so unwell and exhausted, I could continue to look after her and carry out the meticulous plans that she had made for the Christmas festivities. Her deteriorating condition seemed to indicate that there might not be the healing miracle that we were praying for, and this new challenge to my ability to care for her and support my brother-in-law and nieces made God seem very distant, if not unreachable, at a time of great need. The words of Psalm 60:1, “O God, you have rejected us, broken our defenses,” felt more appropriate than the Gospel promises amidst the increasing struggle to meet the needs of the person with cancer without neglecting the needs of those experiencing the deterioration and potential loss of a loved one.

Reflecting on this time, I can now understand what I believe to be a vital need for a space for lament in which prayer is able to function as a conduit for fears and concerns that cannot otherwise be voiced.2 In this way, it can become a channel through which to release the anger, frustration and despair that can take a limpet-like hold on our lives, resulting in corrosive bitterness, resentment and withdrawal. The way can then open for the inflowing of grace as an outer source of strength, courage, resiliency and endurance3 and the possibility of praise and thanksgiving returns. This understanding did not, however, come from within my local church where, after my sister’s death, a healing ministry booklet produced by an international evangelical organisation informed me that if I did not endorse a literal interpretation of biblical promises of physical healing, I might fall into one of three categories. The first would label me a cessationist who believed that the gifts of the Spirit ceased at the end of the apostolic age. The second described me as having fallen prey to the influence of the current secular spirit of the age, and the third offered the unpalatable suggestion that I was somehow in opposition to the Gospel. In rejecting the first and last options, I was left as a victim of a contemporary secular spirit, but this seemed to be a far too simplistic dismissal of my concerns. It was not a secular, scientific approach to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer that had led to my hermeneutical conflict. It was rather my personal experience and observation of others struggling in similar situations which seemed to be so at odds with my experience of Christian teaching about faith and healing. It would eventually occur to me that it might, however, be this form of teaching and manifestation of Christian faith that had itself succumbed to a contemporary secular spirit; a spirit advocating an often aggressive positivity that presents an illusion of control but also the potential delusion that, in Susan Cain’s words, “things are supposed to be whole; that real life is when things are going well; that disappointment [and] illness…are detours from the main road” (Cain 2022).

Cain is not writing from a Christian perspective, but her words are a reminder that this is a delusion that appears to be antithetical to biblical narrative in which pain and suffering abound in human life after the first biblical humans are forced to leave their paradisiacal home when “the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). The narratives that follow this departure continue to expose the fragility and impermanence of human life. This is what Harold Kushner describes as “the inevitable consequences of our being human and being mortal in a world of inflexible natural laws” (Kushner 2002). Despite the Gospel accounts of miraculous healing, the lives of the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament disciples, the letters of Paul and the anguished cry of Jesus on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34), all reveal periods of pain, suffering and an accompanying fear in facing what may appear to be insurmountable challenges. Suffering is also a central theme in the book of Job as well as in many of the Psalms so allowing a space for lament when such challenges arise appears, therefore, to be an action that might be essential. This enables the wrong questions to be discarded and replaced by questions that are able to lead to a transformational understanding of the meaning of Christian hope.

4. Finding Hope Through Grace: The Right Questions

• So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.
• Today’s trouble is enough for today. Matthew 6:34

If, as Kushner suggests and the biblical narrative appears to endorse, we are not promised a life free from pain and disappointment, these questions may primarily concern how we can find strength and resilience. This is to withstand the challenges we might face without becoming or creating victims as a result of setbacks and disappointment. How we can “draw upon a source outside ourselves” for the strength and courage needed to endure life’s tragedies and unfairness (Kushner 2002). How we can understand God as such a source without inadvertently defining God as either a genie in a bottle able to grant wishes at the command of a mortal being or a capricious deity who, after the required amount of attention and sacrifice, might consider a favourable response to prayer. How we might then be able to interpret the concept of Christian hope in a way that has meaning for those who are suffering, either directly or indirectly, from the impact of an invasive and often unpredictable disease; a way that is not marked by a debilitating burden of fear and failure with the potential to result only in the bitterness and anguished withdrawal that can accompany a broken spirit.

I now believe that, despite our often desperate search for knowledge and reassurance about the certainty of our future well-being, Christian hope is found within the biblical call to live as much as possible in the present. Our lack of knowledge about and uncertainty concerning our future can be a potential blessing. It frees us to focus on immediate needs and experience the impact of grace as a natural outflowing in response to prayer; grace that, by definition, is not dependent on specific actions or words to enable us to anticipate and respond to need. For me, this was grace that, through the support of others, gave me the strength to maintain a practical role that would enable my sister to stay at home amongst her family in the last months of her life. It was grace that helped me to accept that I could not and did not have to meet all her needs and that others would sometimes have small but important roles to play; roles played by the visiting friend who, when my sister had to spend time in hospital, suggested that she write journals for her daughters, and by the cleaner on a late night shift who found time to talk to her and bought her a book that they thought might be helpful. Kushner cites a 19th-century Hasidic rabbi to make the thought-provoking suggestion that when God inspires people to act, they become “God’s language” (Kushner 2002), and I believe that it was grace that enabled me to witness this “language” in action.

It was also grace that helped me to understand that my sister did not want to talk about the future and that the conversations I anticipated, and in some respects even hoped for, would not happen; to understand that her experience of cancer sometimes took her to a place that I could not accompany her to as it was a place where she did not need or want me to be. I think that this was, in part, because she wanted to protect me as she knew that the future was unknown and may not be what we were so desperately hoping for. She, therefore, chose to focus on the present by cherishing every day. She could never be reconciled to a premature death and had no wish or, I believe, need to discuss how life might go on without her. There was no reassurance or comfort that I could or needed to offer about the future welfare of her beloved family. She knew that they would always be loved and supported by family and friends. This was knowledge that I believe was also the result of grace, as in her final weeks, she described a dream in which she was looking down on her daughters at play in a garden that was alight with love and laughter. It was an image that gave her a reassurance that no words could have achieved and remains, for me, a powerful example of Christian grace at work.

In this respect, hope appears to be potentially dependent on only one “right” underlying question: How can God’s loving grace be enabled to provide the resources of strength, courage and resiliency that are needed to combat the negative impact of a disease such as cancer? This is as resources that are fuelled by love and reflect the nature of a living God in whose image we are made (Kushner 2002).

5. Roast Lamb for Dinner

I will never know how a seven-year-old’s mind made the leap from a question about her mother’s cremation to a roast dinner, but I do not believe that analysis is necessary. The assumptions of my adult mind appeared to add only unnecessary complications. After my sister’s death, there were no conditions set about questions that could be asked or emotions that might be shown other than emphasising that we may all feel different emotions at different times and that there was no right or wrong time to feel happy, sad or angry regardless of how others might seem. The impact of her death was, of course, profound, not only for her children and husband but also for my parents, me, her extended family and friends. In differing degrees and varying forms, there will always be a sense of loss, but grace made moving forward possible. Nora McInerny makes an important distinction between “moving on” from grief and the potentially more helpful “moving forward” with grief” (Cain 2022). This is a way forward that, for me, emerged from the innocence and simplicity of my niece’s questions and was able to acknowledge grief as a part of life while focusing on love rather than loss. The reassurance that she appeared to be seeking did not lie in the details of her mother’s cremation but in a simple affirmative about the continuity and subsequent security of a familiar Sunday meal. It was a meal that would continue to function as an important point of stability at a time of turmoil and change and eventually become part of a healing process. This was by providing an opportunity for laughter and fellowship as my brother-in-law and mother took turns with the weekly preparation and developed what I am assured was a friendly rivalry for the title of best roasted parsnips or lightest apple pie pastry. It would, therefore, be part of a moving forward that would allow space to grieve but, in also providing space for celebration, could honour the courage and hope that was manifest in my sister’s life. This was hope that was not restricted to a specific outcome so that, when this outcome did not occur, it was hope that was only dimmed but not extinguished. It is, therefore, a living hope that, throughout the last twenty years, has been ongoing and continues to be manifest in the compassionate and loving nature of her daughters as they embrace the experience and opportunities of adult life with optimism.

A living God who is present amidst the turmoil of life can, therefore, offer an outlet for lament in the outpouring of grief and a response in the outpouring of loving grace as a source of both courage and the hope that a sense of love rather than loss will be the prevailing emotion in enabling life to move forward. Our hopes for my sister’s recovery were, in one significant respect, cruelly dashed, as were our hopes for my husband’s recovery. I will always struggle to reconcile this with what appear to be biblically based promises of healing. I do not know why some undergo miraculous recovery while others do not, but I do know that I have a choice about how I respond to such challenges. Honouring my sister’s courage and my husband’s bravery has, for my family, meant finding the strength to embrace the gift of life that they both valued so highly. I believe that the love of a living God manifest through the kindness and loving care of not only family and friends but also strangers has made this possible. Hope, despite the pain of loss and uncertainty about the future, remains, and for this, I will always be grateful.

Writing this from the personal perspective of a sister, wife, aunt, mother, and daughter has been a difficult and often painful process, but I believe that biblical theology must be done amidst the turmoil of life, with an approach to biblical interpretation that acknowledges the hard questions that subsequently emerge. This is because I believe that the biblical writers accommodate both the turmoil and the questions when their texts are read in the context of the whole Bible rather than independently. While this may not result in the answers that are desperately hoped for, I believe that it has the potential to provide insight that might ultimately be of greater relevance to life as we experience it and, therefore, a solid foundation upon which hope can thrive.