What Now?

Quest Monthly Magazine

Fifteen years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had what the surgeon called a “strenuous” surgery, was off work for nearly three months and debilitated for another six. But…it was OK. The results of the surgery had been the best possible, and this kind of cancer wasn’t supposed to come back. I spent the last month of my medical leave polishing a sermon about what I’d learned from having cancer, and from the debilitation of the treatment. I got much more out of that writing than you could imagine. And then…a shadow on a scan. It looked like it might have come back.

Of course, every cancer survivor knows that it might return, but my kind wasn’t supposed to. Because of what the doctors told me and because of my own inner experience of being healed of that cancer, I hadn’t expected it to. It was all over with. Cured. Recovered. Gone. There was always that dread chance of a recurrence, but it was slim enough to forget about, and dire enough to be worth the energy of denial, so I was utterly unprepared for the news that I needed another surgery, even though not (probably) for cancer. And among the many feelings and thoughts and questions that swirled through my battered self was that universal and universally futile one, “Why me?”

“Why me?” We ask it when things are not going our way, and it is not a bad question. It is a part of trying to assert control over a situation that seems out of control—a very healthy thing to want to do. It is a part of trying to accept responsibility for the things that happen to us, and that is a good thing as well.

“Why me?” however, is a question with an attitude. It has an assumption behind it, which is that Somebody ought to be in control around here, and that Somebody ought to be able to keep a handle on things: a good and fair Somebody who doles out consequences in some kind of proportion to the goodness and badness of each person.

Well, I know that I’m not that Somebody. And I strongly suspect that you aren’t. And I don’t even believe that God is, so I don’t know why I keep asking that question!

I try to remember that the best that you and I can do in this life is to exercise influence. Influence is a more subtle word than control. When we have influence, we can shape a desired end, but not assure it. We can influence our health, but not control it. We can eat right, exercise, watch our stress levels and wash our hands—and all of those things make a difference, but doing them offers no controlling guarantee.

Even the healthy and virtuous die sometime; some even die young because of errant viruses, troubled classmates, evil governments, cancer cells, or runaway trucks. So should we throw up our hands and eat Twinkies in front of the TV? By no means. We need every ounce of influence we can muster. But we need to always remember that no matter how good we are and how well we do, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune can—and probably will—strike. And after we’ve had some time to rail at our fate with questions like, “Why me?” we can turn to something a bit more productive.

Even though the orthodox call God omnipotent, I have never thought that God was in control. I mean, just look around! No God worth calling God would let babies die, or fail to keep guns out of the hands of disturbed youth. Any omnipotent God worth his salt would have cleared up the situation in Afghanistan a long, long time ago. And what good does a tornado do, I ask you?

Nope. I couldn’t possibly believe in a God who was in control of this world, not with my head or with my heart. The God I believe in is, like me, stuck with influence. The God I believe in gives me strength to do what I have to do even though I didn’t deserve to have to do it, and then urges the hearts of those around me to help me through it all, and might even give me an extra shove or insight or strangely warmed heart. But that God can’t control my life any more than I can. The God I believe in, that basically unnamable force, can stir the waters and the soul and urge on us a new possibility, but this force learns and waits and works with what is left just like we do, only bigger. So I can’t demand of the universe, “Why me?” It’s the wrong question. A better question is: “What now?”

It’s when our lives are out of control that we are offered the opportunity to experience something new and perhaps grow from it. “What now?” This thing has happened, how are we going to deal with it? Will we be inspired to new ways of life, led to new insight, motivated to find greater meaning in our lives? Unlike “Why me?” “What now?” is an answerable question. We don’t choose crisis because we want to grow, but growth is nearly always available as a byproduct of those uncomfortable, out of control times. We may not like it one little bit. We might not even think that what we gained out of it was worth the suffering, but at least we gained something.

Perhaps the archetypal story of suffering and waiting and learning is the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. As you may recall, Demeter’s daughter Persephone is stolen away by Pluto and taken to the underworld to be queen there. A grieving Demeter searches for her daughter while forgetting her duties as nurturer of the earth, and when Zeus notices that nothing is growing and his subjects are starving, he orders Pluto to let Persephone return to her loving mother.

But since Persephone has eaten three pomegranate seeds she must spend three months underground each year, which is why we have winter, and her joyous return to Demeter is the reason for the warmth and beauty of spring.

The focus of this story is on Demeter, on her love of her daughter and her devastating grief and her insistent demand that her child be returned to her. All fine and good. But what struck me as I pondered my own experience of illness and suffering was: what about Persephone? What happens to her? You have to dig a bit beyond the “Child’s Introduction to Greek Mythology “ to find out; because we want the children to focus on mother love and parental care.

What happened to Persephone was that she was abducted, raped, tricked or seduced into eating the pomegranate seeds, and had to take the consequences for a part of every year for the rest of her life. Hardly a child’s story. It takes a grownup to resonate with this story: a grownup who has discovered that life isn’t fair, that beauty and innocence have their dangers, and that we live by the consequences of our experiences even when we did not choose them.

It takes a grownup to appreciate what Persephone did the next fall, after she had been back at her mother’s side. With protection and a guide, she left her mother willingly this time, and returned to hell to be queen of the underworld, as was her fate. The unexpected part of the story is this: she chose to find meaning in her fate and to turn it to good by becoming a guide and protector of the dead, for this is what the initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries believed her to be.

And thus, for four thousand years, twice as long as dying mortals have commended their souls into the loving arms of Jesus, dying mortals counted on the loving protection of Persephone, daughter of the mother Goddess, whose fate and privilege was to be queen of the underworld and guide to the dead.

Persephone returns to her mother’s arms and love, to sunlight and laughter, and that is what matters most. But she doesn’t survive unchanged. Nobody comes back from the underworld unchanged, not even a goddess. She can’t recapture her innocence, her virginity or her childhood. Nor can she avoid going back to the underworld, time and time again, and those times do not pass without touching her, either.

The grace in the situation is not that she returns from her experience in the underworld unchanged. The grace is that she is able to make something good out of such a difficult situation, that she can find a way, even in hell, to do something meaningful for herself and helpful to others.

Fifteen years have passed since that second surgery, which found no cancer, and I couldn’t be happier for my continued good health. But I have not lost track of the lessons I learned from my own personal trip to the underworld. It’s a matter of finding grace and growing a soul in the midst of it all, even in adversity—a matter of learning, waiting, and returning to work on what remains. The difficult, terrible things that eventually happen to all of us are not put there to make us change, but if we can learn from them or find new possibility in them, then even the small and large deaths in our lives will be healing.