Each month, Fr. Bernard McGuckian answers some of the questions you ask about the faith and its practice.
Like nearly everyone else I have friends who have to live with cancer. We tend to talk about everything else except the illness which is the proverbial elephant in the room. Have you any suggestions about how to deal with a friend in this situation?
Eileen
There is no one way of dealing with the situation you describe. People see things differently. Some people hardly ever talk about their illnesses, whether big or small. While they may discuss them with their doctor, they rarely discuss them with other people and that includes their friends. Then there are others, probably the majority, who find consolation in sharing their situation with friends. I would like to share a personal experience. It is one of the great graces of my own life.
In the late 1970s one of her relatives invited me to meet a mother of six children, aged 4 to 17. On discovering that she had cancer she had expressed a wish to talk to a priest. Although natives of the same parish, we had never spoken to one another before.
When I arrived at her house on that beautiful July day she was out on the lawn playing with her youngest daughter. After introducing ourselves we talked about things in general but also about her sixteen-year-old cousin who had been buried earlier that day, a victim of what can only be described as a tragedy of unbelievable errors on the part of the combined security forces of the time. The subsequent official enquiry established the complete innocence of the young man beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt.
She invited me inside. I will never forget her opening words, spoken with complete sang-froid as her child played on the carpet at her feet. ‘I think my days in this world are numbered.’ She went on to say that she had been diagnosed with cancer of the brain and briefly described her current treatment in a top-class cancer unit.
Sympathetic friends were giving her copies of prayers for a cure, recommending prayer meetings and generously offering to bring her to meet people and to visit places associated with healing. It was obvious as she spoke that none of these proposals appealed to her. ‘Usually in a situation like this’ I commented, ‘we spend our time beating around the bush. In your case, we are already right in at the bush. Maybe we should move back a bit from it!’ She laughed.
What was very quickly becoming clear to me, as she spoke, was that I was privileged to be in the presence of someone far advanced in the ways of God. Otherwise I would never have dared say what I actually did. ‘Maureen, do you know what Saint Ignatius of Loyola says about bad health?’ ‘No’ she answered. ‘He said that we should see it as no less a gift from the hand of God than health.’ ‘What! Nobody ever told me that before.’ Off her own bat, she began exploring the implications of this challenging concept.
As a past pupil of a Loreto school, where the influence of Ignatius is integrated into the curriculum, some of his key ideas would have been in the air she breathed. Her subsequent experience as wife and mother led her to a good working knowledge of the holy man’s overall take on life and death. Ignatius did not think sickness a good thing in itself but from his meditations on Scripture, he realised that the God who abhors sin, sickness and death, (they were never part of the original divine plan for humanity) now draws goodness out of them. By giving sorrowful contrition to the sinful, patient endurance to the sick and faithful courage to the dying, He changes what are dead-ends into gateways to eternal life.
Maureen then went on to talk about her own father who had died of cancer. ‘Before the cancer there were things about him that I did not like. But before he died there was nothing about him that I did not love’. She saw how he had been purified in the process. The implication was that the same could happen to her and she was ready for it. In the context of a whole life, the important thing about any suffering is not how painful it is but how purifying it can be.
We talked about many other things that day including her deepest desires. Not surprisingly, a top priority was that all would be well for her husband and children after she had gone. One thing that did not feature was a miraculous cure for her illness. As we talked, I felt inspired to quote a line from the Psalms, one that surely presents a challenge to anyone in such straits as she was. ‘If you find your delight in the Lord, he will grant your heart’s desires’ Psalm 36(37):4. This consoling promise of the Lord touched a chord within her. She responded positively to the suggestion that God is prepared to teach us how to ‘take our delight’ in him if we keep asking for this grace. This seems to have happened, as eternity became more and more the focus of her thoughts over the seven months before she died.
On the day of her funeral, her husband, now deceased himself, told me that he was aware that something profound was happening. During her last days it was she who was supporting him. Her natural solicitude for her family led to neither disquiet nor agitation. In prayerfully trying to ‘find her delight in God’, she was confident that her family would be safe in more capable hands than her own.
Shortly before she died, I asked her if she had any regrets. ‘That I didn’t follow my instincts more during my life. I often allowed people to dissuade me from doing what I thought I should do.’
In the light of our conversations I couldn’t have agreed more. Maureen was one of those people whose heart had been purified so early on in her life that her instincts or hunches coincided closely with the promptings of the Holy Spirit. She should have had no hesitations about following them. Her other regret was at not having had a spiritual director to encourage her to act on these inspirations.
However, I think that in her case she had a more than adequate spiritual director in the Holy Spirit Himself.
It was only when I had penned these words that I realised that my own mother’s remains were lowered into the grave on the exact 30th anniversary of Maureen’s death. May they both rest in peace.