Alive… and no time to lose

It can take a brush with death and an experience of total dependency on others to open a window into a deeper sense of who we are and what we are here for. I celebrate this Christmas and New Year with extra delight. Not just because I am still alive after major surgery, but because I have learnt a little more of what it means to live. I hesitated to write about my illness. The sick can be self-centred; eyes glaze over as one recites the litany of one’s pills and symptoms. Virginia Woolf tells the ill not to expect any sympathy. Those who are well need to get on with their own lives. I dare to do so because I hope it sheds a glimmer of light on our belief in our God who became incarnate.

I was admitted to hospital the day after the Assumption for an operation for cancer of the jaw. It took 17 hours. I was out, bar a minute or two, for 30 hours. Five weeks in hospital were eventually followed by six weeks of radiotherapy. But on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I felt the first return of a hint of energy. There is still a long haul ahead but the corner has been turned. It is time to try to preach again.

This experience of illness was embraced by two great Marian feasts, which are both about Mary’s body: the beginning of her life in the womb, and her sharing in Christ’s victory over death. In the days after the operation, it was almost impossible to pray. I ran out of steam after the first words of the Our Father. Two prayers sustained me: the daily Eucharist livestreamed from Blackfriars, the gift of Christ’s body, and the Hail Mary, whose few words embrace the drama of bodily life, from the conception of her child, then one pregnant woman greeting another, and finally our prayers for help to live this present moment and face its end, “now and at the hour of our death”.
The trauma of this operation, with the removal of several inches of my jaw and its replacement with bone and tissue from my leg, opened a small window on to the Incarnation, the embodiment of divinity. Is so much religion boring because we have shoved God back into heaven, remote from dangerous intimacy?
Aquinas asserted that “I am not my soul”. If I stub my toe, it has no spiritual meaning, but surely every spiritual experience is bedded in our corporeality. Aquinas again: “Nothing is in the mind that is not first in the senses.” Sickness plunges us into the messy confusion of our bodily life, where God embraces us, even if with infinite discretion.

Illness chipped away at the identity I had created and opened the door to a deeper one that was a gift to be discovered. Soon after I surfaced in the Blenheim ward of the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, a young doctor sat by my bed and asked simple questions, including: “Where are you?” I remembered the place was connected with Blenheim but it did not look like the palace. I could not answer. I hoped that he would ask me who was the prime minister so that I could reply that I was not sure if Boris knew! Instead he asked me who was the monarch, the only question to which I gave the correct answer.

I was, he said, disorientated. The separation of the world of my dreams and of woken reality became porous. I read in the eyes of the nurses that I had been difficult. This time of confusion only lasted a couple of days, but it touched the heart of who I thought myself to be: a teacher and preacher, a writer for whom a certain clarity of mind was of the essence. The brief fragility of my hold on reality disclosed the profound unity of body, soul and spirit, whose dramas are interwoven. The Word became flesh and embraced us in our moments of clarity and confusion. He knows who we are even when we have lost our bearings and are engulfed in fog. I was blessed to discover that I was a brother of those who struggle with mental illness.

I have always loved to be up early, eager for the tasks of the day, but in those early weeks I was deprived of all agency. I lay there, connected to myriad tubes, which pumped in a sugary drip 12 hours a day and carried away waste. I was constantly injected, tested, examined. Even when the tubes began to be removed, I could do nothing, not even wipe my own bottom. I worried endlessly whether anyone would get me a bedpan in time. So my identity as an agent was also lost for a while. The nurses and doctors did their marvellous best, always asking my permission before any procedure. My fragile sense of self was nourished by their gaze and touch, their eyes and hands. We exist in the gaze others offer us.

This utter dependency was embraced by our God who became a helpless swaddled infant, incapable of anything, also needing his nose and his bottom to be wiped but held and beheld by his mother. He became the eyes and hands of God, gazing at edgy Nathaniel, at the argumentative Samaritan woman at the well, at the despised tax collector Matthew, and seeing God’s friends and reaching out in touch to the sick. These nurses were ministers of the divine gaze and touch, as were my brethren who faithfully came and sat with me every day, even when I could not say anything.

Britain is a secular land, it is claimed, but the hospital was full of religion. A nurse showed me her favourite image of the Virgin. Another spotted my rosary and showed me hers. Others asked for prayers and promised them, whispering their allegiance to their God, Christian or Muslim. Most of them came from countries where religion is still part of the air they breathe. The NHS is said to be the religion of modern Britain, but it is a ­temple in which God is acknowledged and served every day.

A third challenge to my self-identity was in a sort of sensory deprivation. Like all of my family, I love my food and drink. I have always hesitated over Paul’s words, “For God’s kingdom does not consist of food and drink” (Romans 14:17). Surely the word “only” has dropped out? Taste is a fundamental to the openness of the body to what is other and so one’s sense of self. But for weeks I was “nil by mouth”. I felt trapped within myself, and thought often of Hopkins’ bitter lines: “My taste was me.” When at last I could hobble around on a Zimmer frame, I loved to clean my hands with the sanitiser and smell the hint of alcohol.

I first woke with a raging thirst, which alternated with a panicky feeling that I was drowning in the liquid pouring down my throat. For weeks I was not permitted to drink anything, just to dampen my lips with a wet sponge. All I could think of was Israel’s tormented desire for water as she wandered in the wilderness, not trusting in the Lord who brought forth water from the rock. I obsessively repeated the words from Psalm 81: “By the waters of Meribah I tested you.” In this desert, one must trust in the Lord, for whom one thirsts. On feast days we sing those lovely words from Psalm 62:

O God, you are my God, for you I long,
For you my soul is thirsting.
My body pines for you
Like a dry weary land without water.

God became human to share our thirst and teach us how to live it well: a baby thirsting for his mother’s milk, parched for 40 days in the wilderness, asking the Samaritan woman at the well for a drink, and finally dehydrated on the Cross.
In Soif, a novel by Amélie Nothomb, Jesus delights in thirst. “Having panted with thirst for a while, don’t drink the goblet of water straight down. Take a mouthful, keep it in your mouth before swallowing it. Measure how marvellous it is.” So once again, depriv­ation followed by new gift. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). So often it was the words of Psalms that shone the light. How marvellous was that first sip of water, the beauty of which I had never known before.

The Hail Mary ends with asking for Mary’s prayers “now and at the hour of our death”. A previous bout of cancer had awoken me to my mortality. Now death had called to tell me that it was on the way. My consultant told me the survival rate for this operation is 60 per cent after five years. Is that a long time or short? I am not sure. I might live for much longer or less, but surely the summons is to live now. There is no other preparation for eternal life. Who are the people whose forgiveness I must seek? Who are those whom I love but have never told them? What are the acts of kindness that I must do today? There is no time to lose.

Timothy Radcliffe is a former master of the Dominican order. He is the author of Alive in God: A Christian Imagination, What is the Point of Being a Christian? and I Call You Friends. He lives in Oxford.