Sorry I Haven’t Written Lately

Huffing dust off my blog this morning. The etiolated rays of light that penetrate the cobwebs reveal I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks or more.

The thing is I’ve been sick - well, that could happen to anyone but this was an illness with a particularly distasteful taint of death, a flavor of mortality about it. Bottom line (pun intended): I came down with a prostate infection. Earlier this year when my left shoulder began to ache, I consulted a physician who diagnosed - what? A torn rotator cuff from years of whipping my treacherous curveball past stunned batsmen? No - bursitis. Now a bad prostate. (”Boggy,” was the good doctor’s adjective of choice.) Nothing left, I thought, but orthopedic shoes and snaffling sugar packets from the table at Denny’s. I don’t mind the pain, only the source.

“Nought cared ths body for wind or weather,” lamented Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “when youth and I liv’d in’t together.” He was twenty-two at the time. To be fair, the romantic poet already had a good start on his lifelong opium addiction. “Nought cared this body for wind or weather/’Till drugs and I liv’d in’t together” might explain a great deal.

Still, difficult as it is for my kids or students to credit, youth and I did once cohabit these premises until the former, as he inevitably does, left me for someone, well, younger. I had my share of pain in those days, too, indeed most of it self-inflicted, but that was a different deal. I courted pain for the sheer joy of conquering it, like a man calling the tune because he knows he can not only pay the piper but spring for a drummer and electric guitar if he wishes.

I once played a high school football game with both ankles busted. I led the team in tackles that night and when the trainer sliced tape from my mummified feet I could hardly walk. I lifted weights until I ached because it forced torn tissue to re-knit itself, a little bigger and stronger each time. I wore sprained wrists, gnarled knuckles and a busted nose as badges of honor and was even a little sorry when they healed. I loved gritting my teeth and pushing past the pain because there was some cause that seemed sufficiently noble (it may not in fact have been) to justify the sacrifice. (That, by the way, is why I believe there will be opportunity to hurt in Heaven doing work we know is worth the price and suffering agony we know will end. I’d love to give to God forever what I so enjoyed offering to the Sunnyslope High Vikings.)

For now, though, the pattern is more pain and less recovery. During the last preseason physical I took for football the medico heard my knees crack. He asked if I did lots of heavy squats and warned me that I would have knee trouble by the time I was forty. “But,” I responded in all seriousness, “I’m never going to be forty.”

I was wrong, of course, but so was he: I started having knee problems in my thirties.

The thing is, it no longer goes away. I’ve always regarded denial as the first line of medical treatment. As the great philosopher Rafe Hollister put it, “Bein’ hot ain’t sick. Sooner or later you’re bound to get cold again.” But now stuff just keeps hurting and even gets worse.

But I think I can live with this. “Therefore,” Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4.16, “we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day.” Paul had doubtless discovered that those scarred-over whip welts ached worse on damp days than they used to. He’d recovered from that stoning outside Lystra but traumatized bones now hosted arthritis. He chose his word carefully (well, verbal inspiration being what it is . . .): decay describes moth larvae who burst from their eggs to feast on the fading thread-count of a bride’s trousseau (Luke 12.33). Scripture doesn’t record what kind of shape the apostle’s prostate was in at this point but I imagine he had that trouble too.

And I think this is more than a stoic acceptance of the ravages of age. Paul seems to view this as a transaction, a trade-off. It’s not so much that he spends his youthful vigor and gets wisdom in return as that he reluctantly, helplessly loses the former only to discover that he now has room for the latter. Health, strength, youth, though doubtless enjoyable, are high-maintenance. They demand such a stiff tariff in terms of activity and throw off so much bi-product by way of cocksure confidence that they leave little time for attending upon still, small voices.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” explores this very idea. The title character procures what he claims is water from the Fountain of Youth and administers it to a collection of broken-down debauchees. These old geezers, their health ravaged by youthful excesses, feel the fresh bloom of adolescent energy and immediately forget any lessons their suffering may have administered. What looked like a medical experiment turns out to have been psychological, or at least sociological. Is the wisdom of age chronological or biological? The answer, at least according to Hawthorne, at least partially, is the latter. Is it possible that our youth-obsessed society could actually discover a way to Botox our souls, patch together Frankenstein hearts that remain forever immune to depth and insight? Could the bright light of the plastic surgical theater crowd out for good the dark night of the soul?

William James argues for vulnerability as the key to religious experience. He contrasts the receptive - if seemingly sickly - self to “the robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fibre in its composition.” One wonders if Heaven is truly to be thanked, or Hell blamed for this state of affairs.

Granted, all of this sounds less romantic when I wake during the night and limp to the bathroom. On the other hand, what else can make a midnight potty break into a moment of spiritual formation? In his science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, Frank Miller depicts a debate between a euthanizing physician and a Catholic priest. The medical man explains that patients come to him in incurable pain and ask, “Doctor, what can I do?”

“What would you say?” he asks the cleric.

“‘Pray.’”

“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? Listen, pain is the only evil I know about. It’s the only one I can fight.”

“Then God help you.”

Pain comes with age. Wisdom comes with pain. If all we know to do with pain is prevent it, then God help us. But as long as there is still pain we don’t know how to fight, then God is helping us. Even so, Lord Jesus, come.

This entry was posted on April 22, 2008 at 11:21 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.