Last Updated: Friday - 09/24/2010

July 20, 2009

Love, prayer turned a potential funeral into a wedding

In Exile

By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

Last week I presided at a wedding ceremony. All weddings are special, but this one was particularly special. The young woman getting married was wonderfully radiant and healthy, but she was a cancer survivor. Five years ago, I used this column to tell a bit of her story. Let me repeat some of that here, updating the chronology slightly:

For 25 summers, I taught a summer course at Seattle University. One of the rituals I developed during those summers was to spend the July 4 holiday 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 Fourth parade off the front-lawn of one of their friends' houses.

Ten years ago, sitting on that lawn, waiting for the parade, I was introduced to the youngest daughter in that family. She was a senior in high school and a member of their state-winning basketball team, but she was also suffering from cancer and the debilitating chemotherapy treatments that were being used to combat it.

Just 18 years old, weighing less than 80 pounds, 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 then. 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 and concern. She was very ill, but she was loved.

STORMED HEAVEN WITH PRAYER

I got to know her that day and more in the months and years that followed. Her family and others prayed hard for her, storming heaven for a cure. Those prayers, along with the medical treatments, eventually did their work. She hung on against the odds, slowly improved and after many months emerged healthy, whole again, back to normal, except that once you've stared death in the face, "normal" is never quite the same again.

When she eventually picked up the pieces of her former life, she knew that while things were the same again they were also very, 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 also a thing of the soul, a moral tan, a depth, a wisdom. Asked in a public interview 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."

The love she experienced when she was ill taught her that there are worse tragedies in life than getting cancer.

John Powell once wrote a remarkable little book entitled, Unconditional Love, the story of Tommy, a former student of his who died of cancer at age 24. Shortly before he died, Tommy came to Powell and thanked him for a precious insight he had once drawn from one of his classes.

LOVE AND BE LOVED

Powell had told the class: There are only two potential tragedies in life and dying young isn't one of them. It's tragic to die and not have loved and it's just as tragic to die and not have expressed your love to those around you.

Doctors who do research on the human brain tell us that 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 also tell us that, 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 Thérèse 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 and radiates to the world.

Ten years ago, a young girl had her youth and dreams stolen from her by a brain tumour. There was pain, disappointment, depression, some bitterness, scant hope. Everyone seemed luckier than she did.

That was then.

Today, a radiant young woman, a gifted special-needs teacher, Katie Chamberlin-Malloy, is on her honeymoon, happy, wise, planning life, having learned at a young age what most of us will 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 - and that all fairy tales do end in a wedding.

Copyright © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 -- Western Catholic Reporter