Walter Wangerin Jr., one of the finest Christian novelists around, was tragically diagnosed with cancer last year and has been posting updates on his website about his spiritual and physical progress. Let me rephrase that. He is not only a great “Christian novelist” but the most warm-hearted, humorous, prophetic writer one could imagine, someone who transcends all boundaries of genre and subculture. I was particularly struck by these comments from his December letter:

I have never construed my cancer as my enemy.  No, I do not judge others who do (thoughtfully) choose it, for whom “fighting” may be a helpful stance and attitude.  On the other hand I am critical of the media when, without genuine thought or analysis, it routinely declares in its death notices, that so-and-so died “after a long battle with cancer.”  Why does it have to be a “battle”?  What:  are folks with cancer good fighters if they win?  Bad fighters, failing knights, if they lose?  Can they be heroic only in triumph?  It really isn’t an issue of defeat or victory.  We are all going to die:  what a terrible, terribly total annihilation such language must make of our slaughters individual and wholesale, of our universal losses to sickness, disease and death.

Why not use the imagery that acknowledges how one experiences dying?–how one behaves in the face of death?–what one has to offer those who stand by in love and relationship?  These have been forms of discussion very familiar in the church of the past.  Read Jeremy Taylor, HOLY LIVING and HOLY DYING.  Before sciences and the medical profession began (indirectly) to persuade us that cures could be possible for every disease we might diagnose, describe, explain and name; before commercials began to establish it as a principle that each affliction identified also had an antidote; before our society made “feeling good” an individual human right (setting at enmity anything that made us feel bad) we did not have so self-centered, so childish, so simplistic, so unavailing and purposeless a frame of reference for the experience of sickness-unto-death.

Why not use the imagery of the psalmists in the Hebrew Scriptures?  A human is his body or hers (note:  even my genitive language here supposes a possessor of the body, this possessor [a soul? a mind?] supposed to be the “real” person).  Never in isolation, the body/individual exists ever and only in relationships:  to elements of creation; to a people, a tribe, a family; to God.  Suffering a physical sickness, then, is to experience the effects of breakage in the body’s significant relationships.  Sickness is not an enemy.  It is a rooster’s crow, calling me to the truth of myself and to the precise condition of my relationships–God, society, nature.  Enemies?  The psalmist knows some.  Those who hate God.  Those people(s) who attack him–yes, and who hurt him in the attack, for wounding is distinguished from physical disease; but even human warfare and defeat (see the books of Joshua and Judges) are attributed to disobedience, our breaking of God’s commandments, our breaking of the divine relationship.

For my own part, I recognize cancer cells as parts of me (of Walt, the body-soul continuum), tissue which is part of all my tissue–even as my children are a parts of our family (without whom the family itself would be something else).  They (whether cells or kids) become selfish, demanding more of the resources of the family (of the body) than other members can receive.  My children are not my enemy.  And my diseases, far from acting the foe, are profound initiators of spiritual clarity, devout meditation, a faithful (a peaceful!) seeking after God, praying, shaping thanksgivings for Jesus’s re-building of the relationship between God the Father and me.  And just this (the reconciliation Jesus effected between the All-Father and all children) becomes the object of my most careful contemplations.  And these contemplations themselves are made more patient and more mature by the disease and by the convictions of mortality which the disease infused in me.

Pastor and freelance writer Shawna Atteberry has a sermon posted on her website about the Book of Esther that dovetailed with my recent musings about the role of Christianity in fiction. She notes that Martin Luther would have excluded this book from the Old Testament canon because it looks like a purely “secular” story. God is not mentioned anywhere in this narrative, as full of melodramatic coincidences as a Dickens novel, about how a heroic queen saved the Jews from persecution by her pagan husband. Shawna rightly takes a broader view:

If Esther is read historically and literally God can be left out all together. It is truly a book of coincidences. That is why we need Esther. To often we think that just because there is no obvious working of God in the world that God is not working. Esther’s discreet witness says otherwise.

And we need these reminders. We need reminders that God working in our world is not always obvious—even to those in the church. We also need reminders that God uses harem girls to accomplish His purposes….

There are always those times in life when we wonder where God is. Esther reminds us that there are times that God is firmly behind the scenes, and we may not see how He has been working till well after what is taking place now. Part of our walk with God is realizing that God is with us regardless of circumstances or how we feel. The Jews had to have felt abandoned as they saw the decree that would take all of their lives. But seven years before they even realized they were going to need a deliverer, God had made sure a Jewish queen was in the palace. Even in the worst the world can throw at us, God continues to walk with us and provide ways of deliverance for His people. He walks with us through the messes as well as the celebrations.

The book of Esther seems to be driven by whims, accidents, and coincidence. But is it? The underlying, almost invisible, current running through Esther is that God is working His purposes out for the world—He can even use a harem girl and an arrogant, pagan king to do this. The book of coincidences is really a book of grace. In one of the most pagan places possible—the palace of a pagan king who does not even know that he has married a Jew, nor does he know that a decree has went out in his name to destroy his wife and her people, God is working.

As a writer, my obligation is to tell the truth as I see it. As a Christian, my obligation is to honor God. You wouldn’t think those two would conflict. The problem may lie in those words “as I see it”. As a fallen human being, I can’t be entirely sure that what I see is the truth. (Nor, for that matter, that my actions really honor God.) Is honest intention enough?

I’m working on a novel that is taking me to some pretty strange places. Places in my head, for now, but no less dangerous for all that. These people are doing things that I’ve generally been too sensible, uninterested or afraid to do. At the moment, they’re having a lot of non-marital sex, and describing it in words that the New York Times is still quaint enough to refer to as “obscene gerunds”. The central love story in the book, the one that’s most likely to end happily (if they cooperate), is between two gay men. While I’m not shielding my imaginary friends from all the consequences of their poor impulse control, I’m also letting them enjoy themselves in the short term, rather than imposing immediate punishment from above.

Am I, as a Christian, allowed to write a book like this? Are other Christians allowed to read it?

My characters drink, swear, commit adultery, have one-night stands, choose rock ‘n roll over doing their homework, and otherwise follow what they think is their bliss because the gospel is not just for people like me who don’t find any of those things appealing (except swearing — I am from Manhattan). I see the beauty and joy that they are seeking, the genuineness of their quest for a life beyond rational self-interest, as well as the insufficiency of their answers. Just because you could read my life story without blushing doesn’t make me less sinful than they are. They did, after all, come from my subconscious.

Perhaps I’m rationalizing my inappropriate fantasies, like a porn addict who argues that otherwise he would have to rape women in real life. All I know is that as I write, I’m constantly praying that God will reveal the truth through my work. I could assume I already know God’s truth, and impose it on the narrative like a Procrustean bed. That’s how I’ve always worked before, and my work became more lifeless the more I strained to make it “Christian”. It’s far scarier and more delightful to step out into the abyss, hoping that if my writing rings true to my experience of the world and human psychology, it will also end up at God’s doorstep. If Christianity is true, it has to work in the real world, not a world between Thomas Kinkade pastel book covers where moral judgment is always swift and visible.

No one says this better than W.B. Yeats, in his famous poem “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop”:

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’