Writing Through Cancer

 Yesterday, in a peaceful retreat center north of San Diego yesterday, I participated in a workshop on contemplative practices that enrich our lives.  My role was to invite  participants to consider the spiritual practice inherent in writing.  Like so many Americans, I’ve been a lapsed church-goer for the better part of my adult life.  I had dabbled with other religious traditions, tried meditation, but still, I couldn’t find the spiritual practice I longed for.  What I hadn’t realized is that I had already had the tool to enrich my spiritual life—writing.  I’d always written. During the years of a soul shattering time in early adulthood, writing was a refuge, my port in the storm, a virtual sanctuary.  I just hadn’t thought of it as a spiritual practice.  What we need is here…

Years later I was struggling with a near perfect storm of loss—my father’s death from lung cancer, Mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s, the task of downsizing a dying nonprofit, and my unexpected diagnosis of early stage breast cancer.  Writing was the lifesaver I clung to in that turbulent time.  It helped me cope, but more than that, it became an important daily routine. I realized it was fundamental to my spiritual life.

Writing is my spiritual practice, a ritual and meditation that begins in the early morning, before the outside world intervenes to pull me into its noisy demands.  It is in the stillness of early morning that I first open the pages of my notebook, the same leather-bound journal I’ve written in for years.  Like the dawn of a new day, a new page awaits, blank and inviting.  I think of Rita Dove’s line in “Dawn Revisited:”  “the whole sky is yours/ to write on, blown open/ to a blank page…”    I write without expectation, each day starting with one small observation, something noticed in the present moment—the fog lifting from the canyon floor, a trio of hummingbirds at the garden fountain, the red-tailed hawk’s wings spread as he glides just beyond our deck—whatever captures my attention.

“At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world~ now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.– Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Now I will stop and be wholly attentive…Sometimes, a haiku poem emerges; other times, what I describe triggers a memory or a feeling that begs to be written.  It hardly matters.  What does matter is that I write, embracing the solitude of the morning and intertwining the external world with my internal one, going deeper into whatever I’m exploring on the page.  I write myself into “knowing.” 

Writing is a kind of meditation and it is my prayer.  It opens me, ensures I am “paying attention” to what is before me and what is inside me. It informs my intentions for each day and the work I do with others in my groups.  Although writing is my spiritual practice, anything that takes us into the quiet contemplation and deeper parts of ourselves can become a source of spiritual nourishment:   art, music, dance, yoga, T’ai Chi, meditation, prayer.  As Thomas Merton wrote, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time,”

One’s spirituality is not dependent on a specific religious belief or theology.  We all have spiritual needs and yearnings.  What matters is finding a way to nurture them, that we feed our souls as well as our bodies and minds.  It’s our spiritual lives, in times of hardship, life-threatening illness, or other suffering, that keep us from losing hope, that keep us whole. Dana Jennings, New York Times editor, was diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer several years ago, writing a series of blog posts for the Times.  I recall how he wrote  about his need for “spiritual antibodies” during treatment. 

I am not a fool. I am a patient with Stage T3B cancer and a Gleason score of 9. I need the skills and the insights of the nurses and doctors who care for me. But they don’t treat the whole man. Medicine cares about physical outcomes, not the soul. I also need — even crave — the spiritual antibodies of prayer, song and sacred study.

Medicine cares about physical outcomes, not the soul.  A cancer diagnosis may challenge all that you believed was right and true in your life.  Cancer–and many other painful experiences–may seem like a dark night of the soul, but it offers you the chance to deepen your self-understanding and compassion for others.   Isn’t this the spiritual journey?  I think so.  It’s one I witness it repeatedly in the writing groups I lead for cancer patients and survivors:  people deepening, clear about what is truly important to their lives, noticing the gifts present in every day they have.  

Through the exchange of stories, we help heal each other’s spirits…Isn’t this what a spiritual life is about?

–Patrice Vecchione, Writing and the Spiritual Life

Life’s hardships, the losses and suffering we endure,  thrust us into what can only be defined as a deeply spiritual journey.  We may kick and scream, rail against the injustices of those events, but like it or not, we’re forced to re-examine our lives in ways we have not, perhaps, done before.  We begin to pay attention, really pay attention, to what truly matters to us. What we need is here…

Varda, who wrote with me throughout the last two years of her life, died of metastatic breast cancer.  She wrote about her cancer,  humorously,  poignantly, but always honestly, many times voicing what others were afraid to express.  Cancer, as she wrote in one of her last poems, “challenged her faith,” but she was unafraid to re-examine the meaning of the spiritual traditions in her life.  Her words touched us all profoundly.

…My cancer has challenged my faith,

and I have found an incredible well I did not know I had. 

I have found true surrender,

 enormous peace.

I have come home to God, and we have renewed

our friendship.

(From:  “Faith,” by Varda Nowack Goldstein)

Varda may have been thrust into a journey that brought her to her knees, but she nurtured her “spiritual antibodies” by writing deeply about her life and learning from it.  She demonstrated enormous courage, helping others in the group, as she faced her inevitable death with grace, love, even shared laughter.  Surely this was the evidence of the depth and sustenance of her spiritual life.

What nourishes your spirituality?  What practices or rituals have helped sustain you in times of illness, hardship or struggle? Where have you found your solace, your strength, your source of “spiritual antibodies?”