A woman in the iglesia--the wife of the pastor--has recurring breast cancer. Last year, she went through chemo, had a mastectomy, lost her hair. Then they found more spots in the same empty breast. Now, another six rounds of chemo. Spirit much closer to the dry earth roads we walk on.
Does a woman feel like a woman apart from her breasts? Could I accept myself with inverted scars where life should be, or could another love me?
Is being un-hopeful a sin of omission?
We are called to always hope, to persevere, to wish and believe the best where the worst is so much more obvious, where it´s so much less painful to be skeptical and jaded and write off the ones who hurt us.
Hopeful with the former love who continues to disappoint, with the already-left behind students in a class when you 'know' they won´t make it and you´re hard, with a woman who has recurring Stage IV breast cancer, for the broken dreams she and her husband had of children, of creating a family. When you´re 40 and on the verge of a double mastectomy, that doesn´t happen.
And yet YHWH called Abram, called Sarai, pulled wet life out of dry flesh, and I don´t want to be found whispering no, I won´t believe it.
Maybe it is the path of less suffering, but I don´t want to be found hope-less. I want my hands in the dry dust, picking up the bony cracking earth in anguish and believing, believing. Believing G-d heals even cancer. Believing my students will make it, even if they stay in La Venta and work construction for a living, and 'making it' isn´t what my idea of it is anyway. Believing rain will fall, and wash away all this dust on our hands and feet and faces and make our blood run uncongealed again.
Believing that even if nothing is healed and nothing changes and everything is shitty and hard and you get let down over and over again and you hurt the people you care about the most, believing despite all of this that in the end, even if we don´t get our dream, or whatever we think our dream is, all is well and all will be well and all manner of thing shall be well. Believing even the suffering will bring goodness, will change us, and one day we will look back and even the suffering itself will be good.
One line (my first?) of Spanish poetry has woven in my mind...
Escuche la historia de su roto corazon:
So I have heard the story of your broken, beat-up heart.
1 comment:
Wow, Cari, come on. Your writing is so good it's like a meal. Thanks so much for this. I hope you keep writing that poetry.
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