Lives Touched, Lives Celebrated: HEALING (2021)

This is part 2 of a 3-part talk I gave for the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester's event, Lives Touched, Lives Celebrated. Part 1 is about hope, and Part is about celebration.

Healing

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about acceptance. I remember when I first starting thinking deeply about acceptance was during an activity at my church, during our Epiphany service, where we picked out of a basket what we called a “star gift” – a word to take notice of throughout the year as a way God is being made manifest – and my gift, the paper star I drew out of that basket, was acceptance. I had just found out I was pregnant with my first post-cancer baby, a pregnancy I had feared would never happen, and my first instinct when I saw that so-called “gift” was to throw the star and the gift back in the basket. There was too much at stake, too much that could go wrong, too much I was 100% unwilling to accept, and I rejected any possibility that I might have to. 

I did keep that gift of acceptance as one to reflect upon that year. And everything went fine. But I think it is only in recent months, really, that I have finally started to see it as a gift – and a gift, it turns out, that is intimately a part of healing.

We all know a thing or two about healing, right? But if you’re like me, you have often thought about it in very physical terms. Healing is the absence or successful management of a physical disease. But of course, it is not merely physical. A mental illness, for example, definitely requires healing. And emotions need healing. And, Lord knows, relationships need healing. 

But all of these ailments share something in common: they all cause us great pain. Right? Sometimes the pain is physical – I remember all too well the pain I felt in my bones when I was having chemo treatments, and the excruciating pain right after mastectomy that seemed insurmountable when all I wanted was to go to the bathroom, and the aching pain in my chest that remained for weeks after. 

But pain is not relegated to our bodies. Just as bad or sometimes worse, is the emotional pain we experience, and the suffering we endure because of it. And healing from that, is a pain that cannot be addressed by chemo, radiation, or surgery. You can’t just cut out the heartache! What I’ve come to learn is that the best treatment for that heart pain, is acceptance. 

In the well-known book, The Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck begins with these words: “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth, because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult, once we truly understand and accept it, then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

In other words, what is truly the cause of so much of the suffering we endure is not our pain, but our resistance to that pain. It is feeling out of control. It is dwelling on how unfair it is, how hard it is, how irrational it is. And our response is to push away pain and suffering, to avoid it at all cost. We strive to grasp for pleasure to avert the pain. Perhaps we just refuse to talk about the hard stuff, focusing only on the positive. Or less constructively, we just blame something or someone else for our pain, because this takes the pressure off of us to deal with it. It’s someone else’s fault, after all. We become victims, the issue is someone else’s problem, and we are off the hook to address it. 

But that tactic is not where healing happens. Ironically, the place of healing, of the joy and serenity that we all crave, is the place of surrender to the way the world is. And you cannot surrender to what you cannot admit is there. And the first step to surrender, is acceptance.

Acceptance of pain. Acceptance of loss. Acceptance of grief. Ugh, all those things we would rather avoid, would rather toss back into the basket and choose a different path. But the more I encounter these things, the more deeply I have learned that the only way through them is, indeed, through them, not around. They need to be not avoided, but engaged, to be approached with curiosity and openness. To be questioned, and heard. And yes, to be accepted. “Yes, I feel a sense of loss,” we can say. “I have lost something important to me – a previous way of living or thinking, a dream I once had, a life I once lived. I’ve lost it. This is the hand I was dealt. This is my life. I can gripe and complain and lament it all I want, but the fact remains: this is my life. Now, where is the invitation in this? Now that I have accepted it – where will it take me next?”

And then, a remarkable thing happens: once you accept it, it begins to lose its power over you. Once you have accepted something, you regain your agency, to see the invitation, the possibility, the what’s-next. The purpose. 

That is where the healing happens. That is where we no longer are beholden to the pain, the anger, the fear, the resentment, the sadness. That is where we begin to grow back into joy. And that healing, my friends, it cannot be seen in blood work or on a scan. But you can be sure it is felt in every other aspect of your life. Acceptance is where healing truly happens.