How Cancer Shook My Faith (in a good way)

When something trying or tragic happens, I’ve observed that one of two things will usually occur with someone: faith is either strengthened, or in some ways, is lost.

More often than not, I believe it’s strengthened. Sometimes that happens for life, sometimes only to carry one through what is happening. Just think about the tragic events of our day—ever notice how at those times, the churches seem to overflow? When things in our life seem to no longer make sense, we often turn to God. We realize that, if only for a week, or even just a moment, that the only way to make sense of some things is to put it in another’s—God’s—hands and simply have faith, no matter how overly-simplified that may sound.

I like to think that my faith is pretty strong. After all, I’m in seminary. I’m working to devote my life to service of Christ and His Church. How easy it can be for us to get a big head.

Ten years ago, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. He had quit smoking cold-turkey over thirty years earlier after coughing up blood or something like that. (I think I stopped listening when blood was mentioned.) Anyhow, it didn’t make sense—why so much later, cancer would show up. But it did.

Thankfully, it was caught early, and was operable. Dad went to the hospital, and had a quarter of his left lung removed. The cancer hadn’t spread, so we just had to keep checking for five years, and after that mark, he would be relatively safe, and it shouldn’t return.

Dad made it to the five-year mark, so scans were reduced to every two or three years instead of being an annual event. In the fall, his doctor realized it had been a while since dad had a scan done, so he ordered for one.

I still remember getting the phone call from dad. It was toward the end of the fall semester. I was walking across campus—cutting through the grass in protest to the fact that our sidewalks literally go nowhere—on my way to the student center when the phone rang. It was my dad.

“Hey dad, what’s up?”

“Tony, the doctor found another spot—this time on my right lung.”

I stopped where I was. I couldn’t believe it. Then I started to make every excuse in the book. It must be a problem with the machine. Maybe the doctor had misread it. Maybe I needed to quit denying what was happening.

I went home for Christmas break at the end of the semester. Dad had another scan, this time with an injection of some fluid that would go to the spot on his lung and turn a certain color if it was cancer or something like that. All this medical stuff confuses me. I study Theology and Philosophy, not medicine. He had an appointment to get the results, but said he wanted me to stay home and clean the house. I did what he said. I still remember when he got home. I could tell by the look in his eyes—he didn’t want to tell me.

It was cancer.

Why did this happen? He made it past five years—he was supposed to be okay! The rest of the break we were working on getting him to meet with the surgeon that would operate on him. It was the same surgeon who had operated on dad ten years earlier. In the meantime, more tests were done to determine whether or not the cancer had spread. According to all the tests, the cancer hadn’t spread. It would be just like ten years before—the surgeon would go in, remove the cancerous part of dad’s lung, we would go home, and life would go back to normal.

The day of dad’s surgery, we got up around four in the morning. I helped him finish packing his bag, and we made the hour trip to the hospital. He went into prep, and we had the opportunity to talk to the surgeon. He said the surgery would take about two and a half hours. We got to tell dad goodbye-for-now and that we’d be there when he woke up as he drifted off to sleep.

My sisters and I went to the waiting room and caught up on what everyone was up to. We went to the cafeteria for breakfast. We stopped by to see the Chapel (which was interesting because it was a Jewish Chapel, where I prayed with a Protestant chaplain). Eventually, we wondered what was going on. It had been longer than two and a half hours.

Almost five hours after dad had went into the operating room, his surgeon came out. He’s known for telling families right in the waiting room that everything was fine and how long recovery would take. But, he didn’t. He asked the receptionist for a consultation room. We went in and sat down. I knew something didn’t go right.

“The surgery was over-all okay, but rough” the surgeon said “I wish I could sit here and tell you everything is fine, but I can’t, because it isn’t. The scans that said the cancer hadn’t spread were wrong—it spread and there was a lot of it in there. I got everything I could see out of there. We’re going to worry about recovery right now, but I want to tell you upfront that I’m going to recommend chemotherapy. This isn’t going to be easy, and it will be a while before I can give answers to questions you probably have.”

I don’t remember anything after that, because I was in shock. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The scans said everything was fine—I even enlisted hundreds of people to pray a novena that it would all be okay. But, my prayer wasn’t answered. At least not how I wanted it to be.

After a few more minutes, the surgeon got up and left the room. As soon as he left, my sisters and I couldn’t hold it together anymore, and we all burst into tears. I got up, went to the receptionist and asked for directions to the chapel. It wasn’t even a Christian chapel, but it was a chapel, and that’s all I wanted.

I went in the chapel and closed the door behind me. Tears soaked my face, it was hard to breathe and even think. I was annoyed because I had walked through the hospital needing to blow my nose very badly and there wasn’t a tissue in sight. I sat on the floor in front of the Torah and screamed to God how angry I was. None of this made sense. None of it was fair. I tried to call my mom, but her phone wasn’t working. I ended up calling my Associate Vocation Director and a couple of priests. They talked to me and really helped me through those first couple of hours. Even more importantly, they assured me that one of the most important things I could do was to let myself feel what I was feeling, and tell God about every bit of it and hold nothing back. That was advice more valuable that I could have ever imagined.

C.S. Lewis once said, “Faith is the art of holding on to things in spite of your changing moods and circumstances.”

I think it was safe to say that my circumstances had changed, not to mention my dad’s. But, I wasn’t sure how well I could hold on to my faith. It was the first time in a long time that my faith had been shaken so much. It made me realize that sometimes I can be a little too confident.

Once dad came out of recovery and was assigned to a room at the hospital, I went to see him. I was terrified. I walked in the room, and my sisters were already there (while dad was in recovery, there was something else I had to go do, but that’s another story…). My dad, the strongest man I know, was hooked up to what seemed to be a thousand different machines with tubes coming out of his chest. He was going in and out of consciousness, and the few seconds at a time he was awake he cried out in pain. I was frozen. It didn’t seem real.

It may sound stupid, but in some ways, I was convinced that God didn’t love me and was absent in the moment when I—we as a family—needed Him the most.

Don’t worry. He proved me wrong.

Throughout the five days that dad was in the hospital, God revealed Himself—and His love—to me in a variety of ways.

First and foremost: through my dad. When he first woke up, he said, “Jesus was with me the whole time!” Not exactly what you would expect someone who just had a large part of their lung removed. This kept happening throughout the week. At one point, when he was in a lot of pain, he asked me to get him his rosary. He moved his hands along the beads until he found the crucifix. He grasped it in his hand, and when I asked him what he was doing he said, “If He can do that, I can do this.” The first time that dad had to walk was really hard on him. But, he went further than his nurse thought was possible. When we got him back in his bed, we asked how he did it and he said “I told myself how far I was gonna go, and asked Jesus to help me do it!” It sounded so simple, and in some ways it was—but it was more profound than I could describe. One of the hardest things I had to do that week was re-tell him what all had happened. The surgeon had already told him, but it was while dad was still out, and he couldn’t remember. I had to tell him that the cancer had spread, and that he was going to have to have chemotherapy once he got out of the hospital. When I told him, dad, who had every right to be angry, simply said, “Well, God isn’t going to give me more than I can handle!”

All of this showed me that my dad was good at doing what CS Lewis said, to hold on despite changing circumstances. He was just being honest in what he said, but almost every time he opened his mouth, I couldn’t believe what came out. It had me questioning—is my faith that strong? What if I was in his shoes? No matter the questions that came to my mind, the role that my dad’s faith played in his recovery in the hospital inspired me, and in many ways, helped me get through the week myself. I began to realize that God didn’t abandon me, my dad, or our family—I just had to actually look for Him, and pay attention to how He was acting in our lives.

God also let me know He was there through other people. So many people were reaching out with concerns for how dad was doing—which was of course appreciated, but slightly overwhelming. However, there were a few people who helped me through the week:

First, the Archdiocese. Whether it was someone from the Vocations Office sitting with me after the office closed and talking through everything, my pastor checking in on me, or the Archbishop calling me on my cell phone to ask how I was and how dad’s recovery was going, the support from the Archdiocese was overwhelming—in a good way.

I am someone who is blessed with amazing friends. I’ve always said that my best friends are those from my two summers at One Bread, One Cup, and my brothers from the seminary. That, I believe, is because we recognize the importance of the role that Christ plays in our life and that, when our friendship is grounded in an authentic love of and desire to serve Him, a great friendship is the only thing that can result. Anyhow, people from both of these groups were there, walking right beside me, the entire week. In particular, I was amazed with one of my brother seminarians. Whenever things weren’t going well, he was there to talk to me, to listen to me cry (yes, I cried that week…a lot), or even to drop everything and go to the chapel to pray. And, he was just one of many brother seminarians who in some way reached out to me and my family. I was astounded, and couldn’t believe how much God had blessed me with these people in my life.

So, people were there to talk to me and support me—what does that have to do with God? Right now, I’m reading Mere Christianity by CS Lewis (he’s become my latest obsession…deal with it). In it, at some point (I didn’t underline this part and I’m not going to hunt for it…deal with it.) Lewis speaks of the Christian ideal that those who follow Christ are instruments through which God works in the world. Those people that took time to talk to me, or to answer a text at one in the morning, or to drop everything and run to the chapel to pray, were, to me at least, Christ acting in my life. Through them, God let me know that He was there, and that He cared.

Dad’s cancer was discovered to be Stage 3. The doctors said that if they hadn’t found it and removed it when they did, my dad would be dead right now. And it’s all been treated because a doctor randomly decided to do a scan. If God didn’t have a hand in that, I don’t know who did. Dad’s currently in the midst of chemotherapy treatments, and has one more round left to go. Hopefully, once that’s done, all of this will be over and things can start to get back to normal—well, as normal as they can.

But, in some ways, things won’t go back to normal. Chemotherapy destroys—well, everything. So, in some ways, dad won’t get back to normal, but nothing too big. Something else that won’t go back to normal?

My faith.

I believe that everything happens for a reason. That sounds cliché, but I don’t really care. I think that God has a purpose for everything, and that somehow, everything that happens fits into the crazy, confusing, beautiful plan that He has. Yeah, it sucks that my dad was diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer. But, if I let the negativity of the situation sink in, my dad would be the first one to give me a good talking to. He raised me to find something positive in everything, because if we let the negativity have control, frankly, life sucks.

That week with dad in the hospital, and the months since as he undergoes treatment, has taught me a few things. First, on several occasions, I had to step out of my comfort zone. Not only that, but I had to have confidence in myself and tell myself “you can do this”. It also made me do something else, something that has indescribable value—be dependent on God.

Earlier, I mentioned CS Lewis’ book Mere Christianity. Today, I was reading it, when I came across this (rather lengthy, but oh so good) quote, which I think really speaks to this. Lewis said,

What Satan has put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. The reason why it can never succeed is this: God made us, invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.

There is no such thing.

So you may be wondering, what on earth does that long (and really awesome) quote have to do with all this? In this, Lewis speaks of how just as a car needs petrol (is that gasoline?) to properly operate and work to its full capacity, so the human needs God. When a car tries to work without petrol, things go wrong. When humans try to work without God, things go wrong. To put it simply, we need to realize that this thing called 'life' isn’t something that we can do on our own—in it, we need other people, and we definitely need God.

This whole experience with my dad has taught me this reality. In some ways, I knew it, but, as with other things in life, sometimes it takes something like this to help you see it a little more clearly. In the above quote, Lewis also speaks of the reality of happiness being a product of a relationship with God. This whole experience has definitely deepened my relationship with God, and, even though things have been difficult at times, I’ve noticed that I’ve become a more grateful person, and in some ways, a happier person. As Saint Therese of Lisieux once said, “For one pain endured with joy, we shall love the good God more forever.”

In all things, may God be glorified.

Amen.