CS Lewis - Joy forevermore.

Yesterday, I received news from a friend, sharing that someone he knows and treasures deeply has a cancer relapse.

It was a painful news since his friend has been fighting it for so long, and at one time, seemed to have overcome it. They have also been praying for her, and though his friend was delivered then, it now seems like the affliction has returned.

My friend thus questioned his faith. He asked me, “where is God in all this? Is he there?”

This morning, I thought about him and the noted apologist CS Lewis. He too fought for his dearest wife, Joy, for five years. She had bone cancer. She succumbed to it after a long battle. 

Considered a giant of the Christian faith, one who wrote scores of books about it, even inspiring many who have become great apologist of the faith, CS Lewis was himself tormented to the core. 

He once said that "death of a beloved is an amputation." He did not say "like an amputation". It's neither a metaphor or analogy - its viscerally real to him. He was not mincing his words here. It is not armchair philosophizing. It’s real. It’s pain. It’s amputation.

Ever the effervescent author, CS Lewis wrote a book about it entitled A Grief Observed. He had to disguise the authorship for fear that people might be shaken by the unravelling and brutal honesty in the book. 

CS Lewis felt deeply that the book challenged all his preconceived and idealistic pronouncements about the faith. And for a moment, in the eye of the storm, CS Lewis lost his apologetic mantle, resilience and persuasiveness (at least it seems that way), which he had excelled so well in with the books he had written about defending the faith. 

Here is what made it so painful: CS Lewis loved Joy. He wrote that she completed him. Notwithstanding her previous marriage and 2 sons, he found in her a love that stands closest to the love he has found and experienced in God. They were in fact inseparable. Two peas in a love pod. She encouraged him, inspired him and transformed him. Joy was joy indispensable to CS Lewis. 

After her passing, CS Lewis took her two sons in. He treated them as his very own. He also kept his faith, yet at one point of the book, he blamed God for misleading him up the garden path of hope and then, squashing it with one cancer diagnosis after another. Can you blame him?

However, coming to grip, he wrote this, "We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, "Blessed are they that mourn," and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination."

I myself saw the same mortal reality in the eyes of my loved ones when they stood beside the bed of another before he breathed his last breath. When my brother-in-law finally let go after more than 7-year battle with cancer in October 2016, the collective souls in the room collapsed. For that moment, our collective faith was silenced, as we witnessed the passing of a life. Indeed, for those years before, we all trekked up the garden path of hope, but it was not meant to be a long tenure in a place of healing. 

However, after all the pain CS wrote that “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to know it down.”

Alas, CS Lewis grew stronger in the faith and understanding after Joy's departure. You can say that he lived out the dark, cold bowels of his writings, every vowel of it. And he passed away soon after his beloved's demise, but his belief stood firm (and inspired many, till today).

He was better for it (so to speak) because he confronted (unavoidable) pain, consorted with it for a while due to the fragility of humanity, but broke away from it for the unsurpassed eternity that lies before him. It is one eternal desire he wished never to extinguish.

This was the endearing apologist’s own words: “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trust it?”

Indeed, CS Lewis tested his rope. And it stood the test of time, pain, grief, trials and even death. 

So I return to my friend’s plea for a miracle in the life of another. It is a young life full of promises, full of hope. I too join him in prayer, pinning for a turnaround, that is, a much longer tenure in the garden of hope and overcoming. 

In a life, there is always hope. And we cling on to it, resting on the knowledge that the hand, upon which a life emerges, is also the same hand that offers life both in abundance and for eternity.

 

Palliative Psychiatry.

“Palliative psychiatry”. That’s the description I read about when a psychiatrist has come to the limit of his or her expertise. 

Today’s article, “What a young patient with schizophrenia taught me about limits,” is a lesson in humility, medical humbleness. 

Dr Chong Siow Ann admits that some mental illnesses are simply beyond him. At his wit’s end, he even advised the parents of a young man suffering from schizophrenia to seek a second opinion. 

The case came to him as one named “Mr L”. He was in his twenties, studying in an American university, when he suspected that his housemates were trying to murder him “by poisoning his drinking water.”

Many things happened in between, mainly concerning hallucinations and constant withdrawal, before events “culminated in an assault on housemates late one evening. Bloodied, they managed to escape and called the police.” 

That was when Mr L was committed and diagnosed to have paranoid schizophrenia. 

Mr L became Dr Chong’s patient. He went through a battery of treatment and medication, but none cured him. His symptoms varied from hallucinations and delusions to “profound loss of motivation, withdrawal and cognitive impairment such as difficulty in abstract thinking and concentration.”

A range of anti-psychotics and psychotherapy were tried on Mr L, including numerous hospitalisations and months of inpatient rehabilitation, but they did not bring “significant improvement.”

Dr Chong later admitted to “having run out of ideas as to what else (he) could do to improve Mr L’s symptoms and functioning.”

Although Dr Chong advised that they seek a second opinion, the family rather stick with him. “And so, together, we decided to just try to keep things on an even keel and to ensure that he stays as physically healthy as possible.”

Dr Chong observes: “He is still symptomatic and unable to work, but he is at least free of any side effects and has not been hospitalised for years. I continue to see him and family on a regular basis and assure them that if anything untoward crops up, we will deal with it together.”

Lesson? I like the way Dr Chong describes the multivaried causes of mental sickness. He wrote: -

“As with the rest of the medical specialities, the primary goal of psychiatry is to get our patients well and back on their feet, and on with their lives. But mental illnesses are intricately complex conditions with multiple causes interacting with one another in an unclear manner.

We have but rudimentary knowledge of the biological substrates of human thoughts and emotions. And we might never know all the murky secrets of childhood sexual and physical abuse, emotional neglect, parental losses, bullying and deprivation, and their terrible implications for mental health.”

Some of this mental illnesses can be so debilitating to the sufferers that Andrew Solomon, author of Far From The Tree, wrote, “an illness not of accrual but of replacement and deletion; rather than obscuring the previously known person, this disease to some degree eliminates the person".

Imagine that, a mental takeover so grave and aggressive that you not only lose your sanity, but your personality, a condition no less than self-oblivion. 

Dr Chong cited a case of such a hostile personality takeover that resulted in tragedy. 

“An article in the International Journal of Eating Disorders gave an account of a 30-year-old woman with chronic anorexia nervosa. After years of unsuccessful treatment, a clinical decision was made to forgo repeat hospitalisations, with their cycles of "forceful, intrusive, autonomy-depriving yet physical-life types of medical interventions" that she, the patient, experienced as personally unacceptable. She subsequently died - reportedly with the treatment team by her side.””

Every doctor worth his salt would be hard pressed to admit to reaching the tail end of his expertise. Most times, the struggles between competence and ego would drive a doctor to do all he can, even adopting draconian medical measures, in order to find a cure - staking his good reputation on it. 

But according to Dr Chong, “such an urge can lead doctors to pursue aggressive treatment, with risks of causing more harm to the patient.”

The reality is, to finally come to a point whereby you have to admit that nothing can be done towards an effective cure, but you will just have to manage it for as long as it takes, is always a struggle of sizeable proportions. 

The dearth or end of hope torments everyone, especially those who have the greatest emotional stake in a loved one’s recovery. Imagine the sufferer is your baby, your spouse or your beloved parent. 

Promises, especially those based on religion, can be a double-edged sword when it comes to hope. No doubt it acts as a great motivation to never give up, to persevere towards the light, but for a handful of cases, never giving up can become an obsession, when hope turns into depression, faith into disillusion, and trust into betrayal. 

Pastors do struggle deeply with cases that go beyond the laying of hands and the daily frantic utterance of scriptures. They are equally helpless when a case comes to them from loved ones desperate for some form of relief after seeking one help after another. 

They know their limitation, and those honest and humble enough like Dr Chong, would openly and readily admit to it. 

Yet, there are those who openly deny that nothing can be done. They actively resist it because to come to that point, one’s ego would have taken a severe beating. It is thus no longer about whether God can heal or deliver, but whether they will be seen by their congregant as less than creditable or reputable. When pride overtakes, the blame is sadly pushed back to the sufferer and this only hurl the victim into a vicious cycle of guilt, shame and pain. 

Alas, bearing that in mind, we too have to admit that love never gives up. Possibilities do exist, over time. But love however overcomes in many ways. In the article, Dr Chong concludes with this: -

“I continue to see him (Mr L) and his family on a regular basis and assure them that if anything untoward crops up, we will deal with it together.

Medicine, with all its stupendous and dazzling advances, will continue to have its limits. But there is always room - indeed, a need - for concern, kindness and compassion for us to fall back on when that limit is reached.”

And if love is indeed patient, kind, compassionate and longsuffering, then by never ceasing to demonstrate its fruit through our actions and words, the face of God is never far from our loved ones because God is love.

The forgotten discipline - prayer.

I had always struggled with prayer. Not about what to say, but why I still bother. I like to think that my struggles were reasonable. 

I often asked myself this, if God bothers about the trivia, why didn’t He care about the trauma? If He answers my prayers for a carpark lot or heal a common cold, why didn’t He save the children from the gas chambers or intervene when a girl is sold into sexual slavery and praying for help in the inhumane cage she was kept in?

When I come across prosperity preachers who tell me that if you believe, anything is possible, my mind usually goes into a tailspin wondering, are you sure? 

Why do they think that they serve a God who readily signs off blank cheques to everything they ask for? Is God the saviour of their soul or the genie in the lamp, granting endless wishes of their heart’s desires? 

Many Christians have a bias for prayer, claiming that God has answered theirs with promptness and completeness. They pray for health, and thus far, they said they are healthy. They pray for promotion, and they boast that their bosses were equally agreeable to it. And they pray for academic well-being of their children, and it came to pass with flying colours. 

However I have to confess that I am wary about such prayers because they hide the many requests for prayers that fell upon deaf ears. 

I once attended a meeting where one mother shared a testimony of how God saved her son from a road accident. A car just missed her son because the driver was somehow alert and keeping a proper lookout. 

But having represented numerous victims in their accident claims for the last 20 years, I have seen young kids seriously injured, some even paralysed, in an accident; notwithstanding prayers offered before and after the accident for their well-being and safety in general. 

Where is God for those kids? 

I admit that at this point my point is not about a glowing report on prayers. And admittedly, many Christians reading this have every reasons to just walk away, dismissing my doubts and struggles as evidence of a misguided belief. 

But, am I? That is, am I misguided? Are not my struggles and doubts reasonable in the face of this broken world, a world where God is often silent for many?

I know some may say that I have started this post on a wrong footing. I ought to have dialled down on unanswered prayers and dialled up on the many that were however answered to much publicity.

But, I wouldn’t be honest to myself if I just airbrush my thoughts and doubts with what have been possible with God when he answered prayers while leaving the many unanswered ones to melt away in the solvent of exuberant faith. 

When it comes to prayer, that is, asking omnipotence to make a way for me in the face of a crisis, the last thing I want to do is to tell those I care about that you just need to pray, believe and then receive. The cause and effect is that simple: pray (petitioning the cause) and believe/receive (realising the effect). But is that how prayer work? 

Now, I do not dismiss miracles happening in our lifetime, but miracles at one’s command or order? Even Jesus encountered limitation in his hometown. 

What then can we expect when we pray?Or am I trying to defend something that is clearly indefensible? Am I putting another spin to what is wishful thinking of a deluded believer? 

Seriously, as a believer, not one day goes by without me being tempted to equate prayer with wishful thinking, but what arrested that thought for me was how I never gave up seeking after an authentic faith, and with that, an authentic prayer life.

The atheist may consider me as a man living in the comfort of his own delusion, but I rather see it as a man embarking on a journey to discover the hidden divine wonders that are beyond science and empirical proof. 

And in this journey, it is not those prayers that are answered that challenge my faith, but those that are left unanswered. 

In other words, it is those prayers that did not come to pass the way I want it to come to pass that I believe many out there are quietly struggling with. I would like to think that their struggles are no different from mine. 

So, let me start with this encounter in my lifetime quest for authenticity. 

In a Sunday school, a six-grade girl once asked Einstein this, “Do scientists pray?”

To which, Einstein replied: “A scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer.”

He was right you know. I can’t argue with Einstein on this. I can’t expect the one who discovered that space could be bent by mass and time could slow down when we speed up to believe that a prayer offered can suspend time, reverse fates or grant immunity.  

But while events could not be influenced by a prayer (so said the Nobel Prize laureate), other things can. I always believe that events are not limited by what happens outside of us, it also includes what happens inside. And while I believe that we have to believe what we pray for, to hold on to our petition with anticipating faith, our hearts have also to prepare for what we did not pray for. 

This is another way of saying that prayer is not a magic incantation (susceptible to human abuses or ego-distortions) but an earnest travailing by a believer whose heart is always open to how events will unfold even in a way that does not always go his or her way. 

Theologian Ray Anderson said: “Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.”

Are we then prepared for that? That is, a faith that is robust enough to see not just the working of our own will (or desires) when we pray, but the “outworking of the grace of God in our lives,” even if it means a result that we do not fully understand.

This I believe is the hardest part of prayer. At times, I still struggle with this. This is the part that invites doubts, skepticism and even ridicule. And it is only human nature for one to question prayers when it doesn’t deliver the result.

But, that is the issue with us when it comes to prayer. It just doesn’t work that way, and insisting that it does is the source of most of our frustration, disappointments and resignation. 

In Philip Yancey’s book “Prayer”, he cited what Thomas Merton said when he was asked to diagnose the leading spiritual disease of our time. He gave a curious one-word answer: efficiency. “From the monastery to the Pentagon, the plant has to run...and there is little time or energy left over after that to do anything else,” Thomas said. 

By the same token, we often professionalize the faith to expect prayer to be efficient. Efficiency means cause must equal effect; ask and it must happen the way we ask of it. 

Efficiency also means that the answer must be prompt. We thus expect God to work on our clock, setting anticipated deadlines that puts as little strain on our patience as possible. 

If we apply the mentality of efficiency to the travails of Jesus in Gethsemane, we would have skipped the part about “not my will but yours be done” and go straight to the part about “take this cup away from us” - period. That is how prayer works for us, a bending of God’s will to ours. 

But that was not how Jesus prayed. He knew some events are not to be removed, in particular, the road of grief to the Cross that He was destined to walk.

For him, it was not about walking away from the Cross, but to face it. You can say that his prayer is a prayer for the miracle of character and not the miracle of circumstances. In other words, it is a prayer for strength to complete his Father’s will. 

And if you examine the seven cries of Jesus at the Cross, three of them are essentially framed as prayers, with one asking for forgiveness ("Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do"), the other agonising over his Father’s absence ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"), and the third was the fulfilment of His Will ("Father, unto your hands, I commend my spirit"). Alas, none of them were pleas for the cup to be removed.

That is why Jesus reminded us of this: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” 

When it comes to prayer, the late Eugene Peterson said: “I do not control the action; that is a pagan concept of prayer, putting the gods to work by my incantations or rituals. I am not controlled by the action; that is a Hindu concept of prayer in which I slump passively into the impersonal and fated will of god’s and goddesses. (Instead) I enter into the action begun by another, my creating and saving Lord, and find myself participating in the results of the action. I neither do it, nor it done to me; I will participate in what is willed.”

And what is willed may sometimes demand that we as believer lament, travail and even engage God in arguments. If you take a leaf off the prophets of old, great men of faith in the Bible, everyone of them did not have it easy. 

For them, their prayers were an intense exercise, largely argumentative, challenging, clamoring, pleading, crying and full of doubts. 

Moses wanted out when he confronted God in the burning bush. Job nearly abandoned prayers with a wounded heart. David lamented, “I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God.” Jacob wrestled for his life. Jeremiah doubted and Isaiah asked why God had hidden His face from His people. 

That is why a Bible scholar, Walter Wink, said: “Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous. It is more like a haggling in an outdoor bazaar than the polite monologues of the church.”

Let me leave you a Franciscan Benediction which may not completely answer your persistent question about unanswered prayers, but it does (at least for me) offer another perspective about prayer that is beyond the world’s concept of efficiency, promptness and professionalism. 

“May God bless you with discomfort. 

At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships.

So that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger.

At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,

So that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears

To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger and war, 

So that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness

To believe that you can make a difference in the world,

So that you can do what others claim cannot be done

To bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.”

Amen. Have a Blessed Sunday mornimg.

The suicide of a loved one - surviving the loss.

I feel comforted to read that Prof Chong Siow Ann, a psychiatrist and vice-chairman of the medical board (research) at the IMH, did not give easy answers to why people commit suicide. 

In his article “Living after a loved one commits suicide”, let me fast forward to his conclusion, which I thought would unveil some 5-step or 10-step solution to the issue. But it didn’t. 

He wrote: “And we should continue to talk openly and widely about mental health and what is it that makes us despair and question the meaning of life to the point of wanting to end it, and more importantly, how we can pull ourselves and others from the edge of that abyss.”

Of course, I would expect Prof Chong as a psychiatrist to give advice to his patients on addressing depression and stress which are the most common causes of suicide, but in the article, he did not give any advice, just observations and understanding. 

Because if you think about it, a life is a journey and this journey is filled with stories, and these stories come with layers after layers of most times raw and unprocessed emotions at every crossroad, which are personal and intimate to the sufferer. And this is made even more complicated by the fact that no two lives or experiences accumulated are alike. 

Therefore, an advice to one may not apply to another, and an advice at one point can lose its effectiveness or resonance with the same person when he or she is at another point of his/her life or crossroad. 

The journey that is life is too complicated to be resolved by a series of seminar or a 5-day life-improvement camp or a few interrelated sermons on a Sunday.

But I have to say that the focus of Prof Chong’s article is the suicide survivors, and no, it is not written for those who have passed on, but those left behind. 

He wrote: “many people think the term “suicide survivor” refers to those who have tried unsuccessfully to kill themselves, but it actually refers to family members, friends, co-workers and mental health workers who have lost someone, with whom they had a close relationship, to suicide, and whom the suicide has also traumatised in various ways and to varying extent.”

To the suicide survivor, he is left with the stinging guilt and stigma of not being able to help to step in at the right time and place to save the life he loves deeply. 

Prof Chong wrote: “That act of self-destruction is, after all, also an act of abandonment and rejection and a reproach that somehow you were not powerful enough, had not loved enough or were special enough to keep that person from choosing death over everything and everyone else.” 

Most times, if not all the time, it is the whys that haunt the suicide survivor. While the pathologist performs a post-mortem on the deceased and it generally takes just a day to confirm the cause of death, the suicide survivor does his for almost a lifetime to find the whys of it. 

His post-mortem is not only to find the whys but also to struggle with the anger, the pain, the guilt, the blame, and the self-reproach. And not only that, the suicide survivor, according to Prof Chong, has to deal also with being the “object of gossip, morbid curiosity and speculation” about why the loved one committed suicide. 

Admittedly, most of it may be imagined or exaggerated, but the suicide survivor’s compromised mind often plays tricks on them and the bitter regret or mental script for not doing enough will always come back to them in some form or another even when they have thought they have moved on. 

In the article, Prof Chong quoted this apt observation by Dr Edwin Shneidman, founder of the American Association of Suicidology: -

“The person who commits suicide puts his psychological skeleton in the survivor’s emotional closet - he sentences the survivor to deal with many negative feelings and to become obsessed with thoughts regarding his own actual or possible role in having precipitated the suicidal act or having failed to abort it.”

And that explains why many of them become victims themselves. “Research has shown that suicide survivors are more prone to developing symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder; they are more liable to get into accidents and develop alcoholism, physical illness and a variety of problems.” 

...and I suspect one of the problems is the contemplation of ending their own life too. 

Lesson? I think life for the living and those thinking of ending it is, most times, too complex to be captured in one or two well-intended advice or seminar notes. 

At this juncture, let me bring up another relevant news today to illustrate my point. 

Mr Henry Antoine Nicolas Sebastien, 34, recently received the Public Spiritedness Award at a ceremony at Clementi Police Division for saving a teenager’s life. 

It happened on 4 Nov at Skywalk, Sentosa Island. The assoc game director of Ubisoft saw the boy “perched atop the metal ledge of the bridge” and he seemed to be in great distress. According to Henry, he also looked “extremely tense”. 

Henry then distracted him by speaking to him for 15 minutes while his wife called the police. At one moment, Henry “lunged forwards and grabbed the teen by the waist...Henry then held on to the distressed and sobbing boy, until the police arrived on the scene.”

One passerby said: “The teenager is lucky that there was a Good Samaritan who was there to save his life.” (Ms Christine Yap).

Henry shared the same sentiment when he said upon receiving the award: “I am happy and humbled. I was just in the right moment, in the right place, at the right time.” 

Well, being there at the right moment, place and time is often what it takes to save a life contemplating suicide. And ironically, it was the same for the boy who wanted to jump down the Skywalk. 

For him, I believe it is also the perfect storm of being at the right moment, the right place and right time for him to resolve in his mind and heart to end his life. When that perfect moment comes, it usually takes either a nudge or a grab to end or save a life. 

But not every act of suicide crosses the path of the timely presence of a rescuer. Hundreds of successful suicide are committed every year and none of them were as lucky as the boy Henry met that fateful day. And who is to ensure that the perfect storm would not happen also in the future to go either ways? 

After all’s said, the most ironic question is, how do you save someone from himself? 

For them, the right to live also comes with the right to end it and the reasons for it is too multivariate for enumeration. 

Most times, even the suicide survivors are helpless to prevent or stop since they too cannot be present at that point when the living is helplessly hijacked by that compulsive-possessive act to take his own life. 

So, in the end, Prof Chong’s conclusion is the best way forward, and let me repeat it here: “we should continue to talk openly and widely about mental health and what is it that makes us despair and question the meaning of life to the point of wanting to end it, and more importantly, how we can pull ourselves and others from the edge of that abyss.” 

Hopefully, this continual talk and openness, and this search for the meaning of life and how it can empower one to overcome his or her demons can save more lives in the future. 

And my takeaway from it all is to never take anything for granted. I can never be too sure of anything, or anyone, including my own loved ones. 

My relationship with them can never be on autopilot, left to its own devices. For this reason, intentional living is more than just being aware of how I feel, but how others feel about how I feel, and how it affects them for good or bad. 

And I strongly feel that everyone of us has a responsibility towards life, and every conversation we have with our loved ones, every unspoken word even, ought to be not only consciously evaluated by us but also consciously acted out to make sure that it encourages a soul towards life, and not condemn him or her towards, well, otherwise. Cheerz.