Twenty-nine months ago I was diagnosed with cancer of the prostate. Almost from the beginning, I have been in the care of Dr. Elisabeth I. Heath -- one of the finest genitourinary oncologists in North America -- at Detroit's Karmanos Cancer Institute.
Much has transpired over these life-changing months during which I have learned more about myself than I had in all my first 75 years. One truth that has been burned into my psyche is that I am no more special than the next guy. I learned that one day early on in my treatment when I joined other men -- it's our disease exclusively -- in a seminar Dr. Heath put on for her patients.
In my jumbled career as a parish priest, an on-and-off-again university instructor and a journalist, I have been at or near par with respect to credentials around most meeting tables, and the more so the older I got.
At the seminar that day, I sat between a former factory worker on the one side and an unemployed fellow on the other. As I listened to what each of them said in open discussion, I realized that they were far more in touch with what was at stake in life than I. Their words were gems, each of them, and full of wisdom to which I was still a stranger.
There I was with degrees from a first-rate college and a fine graduate school, a published author in my field, a former columnist for a major newspaper. I could read and speak German, read and translate Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin. And so what? Among the men present, I was far from being superior to any of them.
Each had learned more about life and had considered more about its inevitable ending than ever I had to that date. You'd think that a priest who spent most of 50 years dealing with dying and death would have their clarity about it all.
As I sat there, uncharacteristically mute as Michigan J. Frog, I heard in the back of my mind a line from a hymn text. Based on a passage from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, it refers to Jesus Christ, acknowledging that he was required to become one of us if he were to do anything effective for the human race. One of the stanzas reflecting that theological proposition begins Humbled for a season ...
Now for obviously different reasons, I have been humbled for an indefinite season as, for one thing, my mortality has become sure and certain to me as never before. Such a realization has burnished every waking moment of every day with a patina not yet faded by the light. I'm wondering if that's what the psalmist had in mind when he wrote: So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom (Psalm 90:12).
My confreres at the prostate cancer seminar and the fellow patients I see during my frequent appointments at the institute have become for me brilliant examples of what it means to be humbled and, at once, made strong because of it. They have made me see that we are, one and all, just a bunch of guys with rotten prostates trying with the help of one of the top oncologists on the planet to get well.
Some number of us will get well. Some of us won't and will take our final curtain call sooner rather than later. And it will be nobody's fault. That's what finally humbles me, but it also makes me strong and alert to every opportunity to be good and to do good as long as my useful life lasts.
When I see my fellow patients, some of them appearing at the clinic now in wheelchairs yet never unsmiling, another brief line from the hymn quoted above comes to mind: Bore it up triumphant, with its human light ...
Those guys are my mentors in humility. So what if I can recite from memory Virgil, Goethe and Schiller? Elsewhere in the Philippian epistle, St. Paul talks about what "rubbish" human pride can amass. I see now what he meant, and I look down at the ground abashed.
Cancer of any kind is accursed. It is also a tenured professor in the Department of Reality. I am majoring now in Reality and hope to pass the course so that I may get that heart of wisdom, which my fellow patients of whom I have written above seem to have attained.
Bless them, everyone.
