I was listening to a woman talk about cancer today. I didn't know her. I just overheard what she was saying. She was telling a group of people about her "struggle" with cancer and how she was very accepting of having the disease because she knew that God was taking care of her and that is was his will that she be all right. She took a tremendous comfort in the fact that God had a plan for her. It was clear that she knew what God's plan was - and it did not involve her dying of cancer.
I felt very sick inside hearing this. My mother died of lung cancer in 2005. She was a very devout Catholic and practiced her faith every day. She was a minister of service at her church and she was a member of a Masonic organization dedicated to the Knights of Peter Claver. She did service to the poor and prayed for people. In short, my mom had a very concrete relationship with God, on that I did not completely understand, but it was very real to her. God was manifested in all areas of her life. She loved him. She also loved life and she didn't want to die of cancer. And she certainly did not want the pain, difficulty, and stress - for herself or her loved ones. I kept thinking "Why was God's plan to let this woman live and let my mother die in such a horrible fashion?" I am sure that this woman feels like her spiritual connection was so strong that God just took her cancer away. Did my mom pray the wrong way? Was her faith not strong enough? Was there a particular thing she needed to do? (Kill a fatted calf, for example?)
I don't know why people get sick and die. I really don't want to think that God is up there granting some people favors and letting the others who beg for his help rot. It is a pretty dim view of the almighty. I also feel like people who say that they know God has a plan might feel differently if God's plan did not coincide with their own projected outcome. Put it like this: What if God's plan was to save you from drowning just to beat you to death on the shore?
3 comments:
You have to remember that God made the Earth and all the creatures on it. A massive insight into how his plan could be gleaned from this.
What is that insight. Every animal brutally kills and eats the other animals or plants. Kill or be killed. Eat or Be Eaten type stuff.
I had to add that after that last line of "What if God saved you from drowning just to beat you to death on the shore"
Faith is such a personal thing, but I don't personally believe that god plans anything at all for anyone. My Catholic mother raised me to believe that wearing a brown scapula would protect me from dying or my soul from going to hell regardless of the situation, but my step-mom's Catholic family had a different view on things, in which faith is meant to be questioned and tested. If anything, bad things that happen absence of god's divine plan for their lives was reason for them to persevere and strengthen their faith. I'm not an atheist, but I'm not religious either, and I don't believe that anything that happens to me has anything to do with karma or god or anything else. Things, shit, and life happen, good and bad, no matter whom you worship or how devout your life was. What really matters is the peace your soul receives from belief in god or whatever else. For most people it seems to make the difference between dying miserable and scared to ending their lives fulfilled, and ultimately, feeling loved.
Hello Steve,
we have had issues in th past but for some reason I am on your blog and by coincidence I just came back from visiting my cousin who is dieing as I write of ovarian cancer.
Rena before she became sick was a veterinarian who kissed all her patients on the lips.
I just said good bye to her and she has maybe a week of two to live.
She's a Jew like me and spiritual but also into Buddhism on some level.
Death and coming near to it an part of life. I have to preface this and say I don't believe in God myself.
However as I held Rena's hand and kissed her and hugged her and saw her slip in and out of her morphine induced mental state I found myself thinking about my own state of affairs and her how happy we both were to see each other one more time, most likely the last. What Rena still has is her sense of humor which was amazing, her ability to make jokes about her extreme pain and the reality that she is dieing. She was in control and holding court, I loved her dignity and her ability to just be.
She is a year younger than me so it's kind of personal.
Anyway this is raw for me and since you have posted on this I thought I would comment on this.
I wanted to draw he in the hospital but time and situation kept me from doing it. I did them from memory on the flight home which was hard, I cried and drew.
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