To die and not have loved is a tragedy

By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi
Rome

Sometimes only death can teach us that. Sometimes, through a painful conscription, we can learn it without having to die to pay for its wisdom. Here's an example: For 20 years, I've been teaching a summer course at Seattle University. I spend the big American holiday, July 4, with some family friends on Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle. This family has its own rituals and one of these is that it watches the July 4 parade from the front lawn of one of their friends' houses.

Four years ago, sitting on that lawn, waiting for the parade, I was introduced to the youngest daughter in that family. She was a high school senior and a member of their state-winning basketball team. She was also suffering from cancer and the debilitating chemotherapy treatments being used to combat it. Just 18 years old, weighing less than 100 pounds because of those treatments, she sat wrapped in a blanket (on a warm summer day), quiet and melancholy, while her friends, healthy and robust, drank beer and celebrated life.

Things didn't look good that day. The long-range prognosis was iffy, at best, and her body and spirit didn't belie that, though friends and family did. She was surrounded on every side by attention, affection, concern, the sense that everyone cared. She was very ill, but she was loved.

When she eventually returned to school, rejoined her friends in their social activities, and picked up the pieces of her former life, she knew that, while things were the same again, they were also very different. In the wake of such an experience, ordinary life is no longer something you take for granted, there's a deeper joy in all things ordinary and a new horizon, wisdom, maturity and purpose that wasn't there before. God writes straight with crooked lines and sometimes cancer, terrible as it is, gives more than it takes.

Her new health is more than physical. It's too a thing of soul, a colour, a depth, a wisdom. Asked publicly by her friends if, given the choice, she would give the illness back so as to have the life she could have had without it, she replied: "No, I wouldn't give it back. Through it I learned about love."

Researchers on the human brain tell us we only use about 10 per cent of our radical brain capacity. Most of our brain cells never get activated, both because we don't need them (they exist for wisdom rather than utility) and because we don't know how to access them.

The same doctors too tell us, paradoxically, two things do help us access them: the experience of love and the experience of tragedy. Deep love and deep pain, together, deepen a soul in a way that nothing else can. That explains why Therese of Lisieux was a doctor of the soul at age 24.

It also explains the wisdom that this young woman now lives out of, gently challenges her friends with, and radiates to the world.

Today, a radiant young woman, Katie Chamberlin, strolls the campus of Gonzaga University, healthy, happy, preparing for a career as a teacher to special-needs children. More importantly, she's wise beyond her years, having learned what most of us only learn when we die, namely, that ordinary life is best seen against a bigger horizon, that life is deeper and more joy filled when it isn't taken for granted, and that love is more important even than health and life itself.

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