01/11/2019
CHRISTMAS, CANCER, and the ONE RING
Christmas is a time of joy: we say Merry Christmas (or Happy Christmas); we sing Joy to the World; we give and receive presents, have get-togethers with family and friends, and we try to be nicer than usual.
But we all know there are things that can interfere with the joy: family problems, financial difficulties, sickness, or even the death of someone we care about at this “most wonderful time of the year.”
In the spring of 2012 my wife Marie was diagnosed with metastatic ovarian cancer. It was an automatic Stage IV — and as we all know, when it comes to cancer there is no Stage V. While there were some reasons to be optimistic, the diagnosis itself was certainly sobering.
Fast forward to Christmas of 2014. It was still beautiful: a few days before, carolers from our church visited the house as Marie sat at the open front door rocking one of the grandkids on her lap, singing softly the words of the familiar carols she loved. We all got together on Christmas day, opened presents, and shared some good food. We enjoyed some of Marie’s trade-mark items: Christmas Chex Mix and Poppyseed Bread. And it struck me: I vastly prefer Chex Mix and Poppyseed Bread when there’s love all around, to anything else — comfort, power, fame, or money — without love.
Then just four days later, we all gathered together again to say goodbye as the wife, Mom, Nana, and friend we loved left this life.
Time is precious. People are precious.
None of us is guaranteed another day. That’s not morbid; the great sages throughout the ages have always reminded us of that fact in an effort to broaden the puny perspective we tend to have naturally. The wares of this world pass away very quickly. Few things are, in the deepest sense, irreplaceable.
So it’s helpful and wise to remember how little time we have, even if we live to a hundred, and how few of us will simply not be remembered by many other human beings after we’re gone. How easily we forget these things. “So now abide faith, hope, and love, these three. But the greatest of these is love,” wrote the apostle Paul.
We’re all Stage IV.
We may delay the inevitable, but it remains inevitable. Like Tolkien’s Frodo, we each have this 'One Ring' to bear — this source of evil, pain, and death for ourselves and the world. None of us want it, but like him, it’s ours whether we want it or not. As Gandalf reminded him, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
At first I resented the fact that Marie’s death came during the Christmas season, her favorite time of the year.
I don’t anymore.
Why?
Because Christmas is when we celebrate the Incarnation of God as the Christ-child, in a lowly manger, in a backwater Jewish town — arriving humbly, with only some shepherds and far-away Wise Men taking any notice. This Child would go on to climb His own 'Mount Doom' — a mount upon which He linked Himself in every possible way to the pain and suffering of those He created. There He finally destroyed not only the One Ring itself, but the Lord of the Rings, too. And by His sacrificial death, He set us free from their power:
"So then, as we all share in flesh and blood, He likewise took part in these, so that through death He might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver those who through fear of death were throughout their lives subject to bo***ge" (Hebrews 2:14-15).
Because He was sent to demonstrate God’s love (Romans 5:8; John 3:16), Christ offers this freedom from bo***ge as a gift we need only accept.
Marie had accepted that gift years earlier, during her junior year of high school; so several times during her last days she would tell us, “I’m not afraid of dying.”
She had placed her hope on the Son of God, who came in real flesh and blood one night to a Bethlehem manger.
