It all started, perhaps, with my biological mother. Knowing she would die soon, she devised a way to teach me lessons that would last me for a lifetime. The solution she found was to teach me passages of scripture that would not be written on paper but would be inscribed in my memory. Thus, by the time she died when I was five, I had a store of unforgettable quotations to keep me company during good times and bad.
I no longer quote scripture and hold services as I did when I was a child. However, scripture has remained in my soul as an ongoing commentary to my life, often serving as a running companion in difficult times.
During the months since I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I have often reflected upon the old stories of determination, hope and survival that I learned from my dying mother.
One example is a story about Jeremiah the prophet. When the Hebrew people were sent away from their land into exile, the prophet Jeremiah was instructed to buy a plot of land in Jerusalem. It was not exactly a good business proposition, but the lesson was that land would be bought and sold again despite the exile - the people would come back. And so it was that on the day Dr. Sharkey told me that I had breast cancer I left his office and went to the store to buy six bras. I needed that reassurance that I was not entirely alone and helpless with the devastating news.
The practice of chemotherapy and radiation, where we are fighting an unseen invader, reminds me of some of the psalms where the psalmist is lying low, hiding from the enemies that are attacking him. There is fear in those psalms, even despair, but never a feeling that the psalmist is utterly alone. These are powerful messages reminding us that we are not alone.
Some psalms are strongly worded. Read Psalm 91. It will put hair on your chest, honestly!
"Whoever dwells in the shelter of the most high will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday".Even as a child, I remember "getting it"; understanding that these lessons did not mean that trouble would not come, but that I should not fear it. Trouble did exist, after all -- my mother did die when I was five, but she did not leave me alone.
I can still hear my mother's calm, soft, voice teaching me: "In peace I will lay down, and sleep, for you alone ... will make me dwell in safety".
These lessons are not magical potions. Trouble and shit still happen. They do not disappear by magic. But we do have options. We cannot control the attack, but we can control our reaction to it, and we can choose not to be alone. I think, considering her own life-story, that that was what my mother wanted to teach me. At least that is what I have taken from her story and her gift to me.
Thank you for walking with me today. We will see each other again, remembering and retelling the stories engraved upon our hearts, on the way to Santiago.
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