A (belated) birthday meditation — trying to be a mensch in a suboptimal year

In an unexpected turn of events, I celebrated my 81st birthday with my first immunotherapy infusion for what has turned out to be stage 4 bladder cancer. When a recent biopsy came back showing a trouble spot in one of my lymph nodes, my oncologist wanted to start treatment as soon as possible. And he got me into the infusion center at the med school two days later, on Sept. 26. That’s my birthday, but I wanted to get started ASAPest², too.

So I’ve decided beginning a new course of treatment on my birthday is a good omen.

Something else that’s new is using the occasion of my birthday to reflect on what I’ve done over the past year and set goals for the coming year. Debi does this on her spiritual formation blog, Seriously Seeking Answers (see HERE and HERE for two very different, and very readable, examples). With everything that’s going on in my life, taking stock seems like an especially good idea this year.

Also: It gives me a deadline for completing a similar exercise I started back in May. (Without deadlines, I procrastinate. There’s a reason why I went into a newspaper career back in the day.) Back in the spring, I’d planned to look back over the commitments I made as a Dominican associate the year before — how had I done? what would I do in the coming year? — but I was in the hospital at the time. (Have you ever tried to type on a laptop with a pulse oximeter on your finger?) Well, I never got around to writing it, but I can still take stock now.

So … let’s get started.

Since I was diagnosed with cancer about a year ago, in October 2022, I’ve been a little bit reminded of the old joke: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? I’ll spare you the medical details (there are such things as TMI and TL;DR, after all); I’ll just say any plans I’d made for 2023 were overshadowed by my medical drama.

I did chemotherapy over the winter and had a radical cystectomy in April. There were infections and complications of the surgery that landed me back in the hospital a couple of times in the spring. (I lost 30 pounds, but my body-mass index had never been better!) Over the summer, I got better (and gained most of my weight back, so I’m officially overweight again). Now we’re dealing with what a Facebook friend calls those “bad boy cells” that turned up in the biopsy, and I’m starting immunotherapy.

It probably goes without saying that this whole process has been an emotional roller coaster ride.

Editor’s (admin’s) note: This is as far as I got when I started this post in September. Within a week, war broke out in the Mideast and something like guerrilla warfare consumed the US House Republican Conference at home. As a lifelong news junkie, I couldn’t not stay glued to CNN and the internet all day. Now, a month later, I feel like the world will have to get along without my constant supervision (which had no effect anyway), and I can return to the post.

I think it also goes without saying, dealing with cancer threw a monkey wrench in my plans for 2023. But the whole process of dealing with it is sorting itself out into accepting the suboptimal as a new normal. I first heard the word from one of the many doctors I’ve consulted with in the last year (no, I’m not going to say which one — overall I’m very happy with my medical team). It’s become almost a mantra. I wake up to a gloomy, rainy late fall day? Well, that’s suboptimal. It gets dark now at 5 o’clock? Suboptimal. I have a new theme song, too. Remember the old song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco?” Well, I had my cystectomy at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. So now I can sing “I left my bladder in St. Louis.” It doesn’t quite fit the meter, and I guess that’s suboptimal, too.

So maybe suboptimal is just another way of life. Maybe even, when you stop to think about it, life itself is suboptimal.

Helping me sort through all of this has been my mix-and-match spirituality, a smörgåsbord of Jesuit exercises; livestreamed services at my parish church, Peace Lutheran (ELCA) of Springfield; an online adult book study that Debi and I moderate for Peace Lutheran; an idiosyncratic blend of Franciscan theology and memories of growing up in an Episcopal parish named for St. Francis (click HERE for my thoughts on the subject); a Missouri Synod Lutheran curriculum for cancer patients (click HERE); an occasional whiff of yoga and/or western Buddhist practice (click HERE and HERE); and the wisdom I’ve gathered over the years from middlebrow Jewish authors and entertainers like Judy Blume (click HERE), George Burns (and HERE) and Chaim Potok.

Potok I first read when I was in grad school, and over the summer I re-read his pop history Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews. His writing style reminded me why I liked him so much as an English student, and through the summer and into the fall I read through his backlist. His stories of ultra-orthodox Jews confronting the world of arts and scientific inquiry helped me, then and now, sort out my own attitudes toward science and religion (click HERE and HERE) in an age when so many self-proclaimed Christians and their political allies are loudly hostile to science, public health and the arts.

True confession: My spirituality, like everything else about me, tends to reflect popular culture, and a lot of it boils down to this — be a mensch. (It’s the Yiddish word for “man,” but it’s more — and less — than that.) Think Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.³ Think George Burns’ character in Oh, God! Or John Denver’s. At least he tries. I think being a mensch — menslichkeit in Yiddish — is almost undefinable. “For as we look in the face of another human being, we see the image of God, the image of all God’s creatures who have ever existed,” says the MyJewishLearning.com website, explaining the concept behind it:

Ultimately, we are looking in a mirror and seeing our own face. Through the realization that we are all equal, both in our humanity and in our having been created in the image of God, we learn to treat the other with respect and with kindness.

I’ve also been helped by a remarkable set of posts by author and spiritual director Brendan McManus of Belfast during the pandemic on the Jesuits in Ireland website.

In an October 2020 post headlined “Ten Ignatian tips for surviving autumn lockdown,” McManus noted that crises, like other changes in our lives, often follow a “‘U-shaped curve pattern” — in other words, “things get worse before they get better” — similar to St. John of the Cross’ dark night of the soul. Prayer and discernment⁴, McManus suggests, are the best way out of the U-curve. “This prayer has to result in some positive, practical action, acting more like Christ, reaching out to others for example,” he adds. “It becomes easier with practice.”

Why yes, that’s it, I would add — act like a mensch.

On the whole, though, I’ve done more reading than writing. More thinking than acting. That’s probably appropriate at my stage on the U-curve. I think it also keeps me on the right side of the iron laws of TMI and TL;DR — when in doubt, shut up about it!

In all of this, I’ve been helped by my association with the Dominican sisters in Springfield. Almost as soon as I learned you don’t have to be Catholic to be a associate, I decided to join the program. As so often happens, I went into it thinking I could use some of my writing and editing skills to help the work the sisters do for social justice in the larger Springfield community. Instead, I’ve gotten more from the Dominican sisters than I’ve given.

Funny, isn’t it, how often things work out that way?

Which brings me back around to what I wanted to do when I began this post a month ago. In May 2022, Debi and I completed a nine-month faith formation curriculum and committed ourselves to live out the Dominican charism (a term I wasn’t familiar with, which means a spiritual gift but also carries, at least for me, the same meaning as a statement of mission and core values). In a blog post headlined “Another step in a spiritual mutt’s surprising journey — committing as a Dominican associate,”⁵ soon after the commitment ceremony, I summed it up like this: “for now I think it’s enough for me to keep doing what I’m already doing while I learn more about the Dominican charism, but do more of it — and do it more intentionally.”

So that was in the spring of 2022. Now it’s the fall of 2023, and my birthday to boot. Time to take stock. What have I done? How have I done? At the commitment ceremony, I highlighted four areas I intended to focus on. Some worked out as palnned, some didn’t.

• Co-facilitating faith formation and bible study meetings over Zoom at my parish,  Peace Lutheran Church of Springfield. That one worked out! Debi and I are still doing it, and we’re delighted with the discussions. Of course most of the credit, as always when you’re leading a discussion, goes to the group. We’re reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (click HERE for a recent blast email). For the spring of 2024, we’re looking at The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby.
• Being guided by the Dominican pillars of prayer, study and ministry, as I maintain my spiritual formation blog for a diverse ecumenical and secular readership […] Oops! There were several months I let the blog lapse while I was dealing with the aftereffects of chemo and complications from the cystectomy. […] and seeking opportunities to publish my research on immigrant church history. I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen, for complicated reasons that won’t interest anyone who isn’t already fascinated with 19th-century Swedish theology. But I’m blogging again now! Still do more reading than writing, though.
• Deepening my understanding of the Dominican charism, especially by learning more about the Laudato Si’ Platform, Jubilee Farm and other initiatives of the Springfield Dominican Sisters […] Well, I kinda did that and I kinda didn’t. Instead, I wound up joining Debi on a newly formed associates’ committee, a spinoff from the Springfield Dominican Anti-Racism Team (SDART, pronounced ess-dart) that “work[s] toward an inclusive and anti-racist church and world.” It meets on Zoom, which is important since my immune system is shot these days and I don’t go out, and its focus has been educational. Again, I feel like I’ve been the main beneficiary here.
• Continuing to work on my prayer life, becoming more aware of the presence of God in my life and deepening my connection with the Springfield Dominican community as I continue spiritual direction with Dominican Sisters. That one I can honestly say I’ve kept up with, although my spiritual practice and prayer life are more like the 11-year-old title character in Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret than St. Dominic or St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Notes and Links

¹Debi documented the event on her blog Seriously Seeking Answers on March 3 under the headline “Pete rings the bell!” (https://seriouslyseekinganswers.com/2023/03/03/pete-rings-the-bell/). The photo is hers.

²ASAPest. ASAP, of course, means as soon as possible. It comes from the days when wire service correspondents actually transmitted copy over the wire, i.e. a telegraph service. Since they were charged by the word, they developed abbreviations similar to today’s texting. Since “-est” is the superlative form of an adjective, “ASAPest” added a note of urgency.

³To give due credit, the thought isn’t original with me. It comes from an article on menschliin the Jewish Chronicle (London) Jan. 6, 2015 https://www.thejc.com/news/all/what-is-a-mensch-1.64427. A deeper explanation, in my opinion, is by Rabbi Michael Strassfield on the MyJewishLearning.com website at https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/mentsch/.

⁴Discernment has a specific meaning in Jesuit spirituality. “In terms of Ignatian decision making or discernment, ” says McManus, “it is about identifying what is the unhelpful inner movement (anxiety, shame and paralysis; desolation) and moving towards a more positive one (connection, reconciliation, positive action; consolation).” See “Ten Ignatian tips for surviving autumn lockdown,” Jesuits in Ireland, Oct. 27, 2020 https://jesuit.ie/blog/brendan-mcmanus/ten-ignatian-tips-for-surviving-autumn-lockdown/.

⁵My post, “Another step in a spiritual mutt’s surprising journey — committing as a Dominican associate” (https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2022/05/10/commitment/), appeared on Ordinary Time May 10, 2022.

[Published Nov. 7, 2023]