Good Cancer and Where Growth Really Happens

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They call it basal cell carcinoma. 

It is a florid phrase for a punchier reality: cancer. 

When the dermatologist’s office called to give me the results of my biopsy, they said that word again (cancer) and try as I did I couldn’t shake the echoes (cancer) or the implications (cancer). 

They reassured me, It’s one of the “good” cancers. It isn’t detrimental to your health.

Ah, the good kind. Right. But they still used that word (cancer) and I still heard things that sound like (cancer) but apparently everything will be alright. 

The truth is that this form of cancer is 99% curable. It doesn’t metastasize to other organs, and in fact the deepest impact is felt in the deep tissues under the bump, lump, or growth that we see on the surface.  

Like an iceberg, as my dermatologist said. What you can see isn’t really the problem, it is the stuff below the surface. 

So, on a particular day during a global pandemic I donned my mask and headed to the dermatologist’s office for an outpatient procedure. 

Three hours, a lot of local anesthetic, and about 20 stitches later I left the office. Cancer free. 

We got it all, the dermatologist said. 

Great.

Talking with friends, men of a certain age, they said this thing was common. Been there, done that. 

There is something about that word (cancer) however that allude to other words (frailty) and realities (death) that we avoid at all costs. 

There is where the real work of our formation begins. 

At the intersection of reality and our avoidance of it is where we grow. 

Growth of course is a paradox. 

Any real growth and development requires relinquishment before acquisition. Patience comes when we are pressed by uncontrollable circumstances and release our need to control. 

Hope comes when we stare down the dragons in the dark and walk by, whistling, to whatever awaits beyond. 

Life comes, as strange as this may sound, by learning how to die. 

Jesus’ teaching about anyone following Him has to take up their cross is daunting on the surface. If we try to put Jesus at a distance, set him on some ethereal plane where mere mortals like us aren’t privileged to dwell, we miss the deep significance of this statement. 

We often see this particular teaching as something coming from the outside that is put onto our lives, like a novel and unusual moment in the human story. 

But is it?

Joseph Campbell, eminent writer and teacher in the field of comparative mythology talked about “the hero’s journey.” The hero’s journey was first and foremost a movement away from what was familiar and towards a quest that tested every aspect of a person’s being.

Then after slaying the dragon or simply setting aside youth for the trappings of adulthood, the journey turns back home. 

When we see Jesus as incarnate, flesh-over-muscle-connecting-bone, we see the humanness and commonality of this teaching. We all leave behind the familiar and we die. The question is how?

We all cut ties with former loyalties, in a small sense, and take what we’ve learned and apply it to a new task. 

And we all die in little ways.

We come back “home” – in whatever sense we see home – and realize that we are different and therefore our life at home will be different as well.

Jesus knows, perhaps better than any of us, that the words (cancer) or the concepts (frailties) or the realities (death) have a way of gnawing through the rope we’re all hanging onto. 

He then says, “For this journey – let go of the rope. If you want to come with me, centering your life around the mystical way of life with God, some things will need to die.”

For you to parent well, you will need to let your desire for correctness and control die. 

If you want to love your neighbor well, you will need to kill some spots in your calendar and actually listen to what love means to them. 

Loving our neighbor without knowing what they need, knowing what being loved well looks like for them, isn’t love at all.

It is the spark of colonization. It makes us their “savior” and benefits only our interests. 

I drove home from this minor hero’s journey – tongue in cheek, of course. The real hero is the man who wove thread through my forehead like an old torn sock. Even now, the healing is reducing traces of a gash in my head to a mark many would miss. 

Driving home, I stared at the pressure bandage in my rearview mirror. A very present tense moment confronting that word (cancer) and that reality (frailty) occurred. 

I remembered this moment well when I read the following words from Abraham Joshua Heschel:

“We are constantly in the mills of death, but we are also contemporaries of God.” 

I am frail. There are cancers that aren’t the good kind in this walking world; a world that is both temporary and miraculous. 

And that is the journey - that’s where growth really happens. Knowing these things and their little deaths is what makes us more a contemporary than simply dust. 

There is where we grow. That is how we heal. 

Same as it ever was. 

(Photo by Mitchell Griest on Unsplash)