Trigger warning, now we are going to talk about actual shit.
This morning when I went to the bathroom I looked at what my body had produced a week after chemotherapy and thought “ this looks evil.” The demonic substance was flushed (twice) and the bathroom disinfected (again), but this is the stage after the infusion that I’ve begun to think of as “purification.” The body that grew the cancer that was sliced out in September is now being purged of its remnants, slowly, through chemicals and then radiation, followed by more chemicals.
Nearly all world religions think of suffering as purification, the path to enlightenment. Duhkha, the Sanskrit word that loosely translates as suffering, was of such paramount importance as something to be understood as fundamental to the human condition that it became an essential concept of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. Our lack of satisfaction in life comes from Duhkha, which causes us to cling to things that make us feel better. Releasing those, these traditions teach, is what helps us on the path to enlightenment.
The Hebrew scriptures, too, are full of depictions of suffering, and depict a God of punishments and rewards. The Book of Job is one of my favorite pieces of religious literature, the story of a man who endures and endures and finally breaks and begins shouting invective at God. Why me? is the refrain of Job and every suffering person. When it comes to suffering, it’s not you, it’s everyone is what God replies.
For Muslims, human selfishness and human evil are the cause of suffering. “Hold to forgiveness; command what is right; but turn away from the ignorant,” the Qu’ran says. (and I want to note here without veering too far off track from where I’m going that when it comes to politics in the Middle East at the moment, the suffering happening is very real for all involved and can only be ended by a cease fire).
It is in Christianity, however, that I feel most comfortable traversing in the language of suffering, and as you probably know, as a Catholic (though not a very good one at the moment, church attendance being off the table with the treatments going nuclear on my white blood cells, and the American Catholic church being led by a bunch of clowns doing their best to crash a clown car*), I was raised in a religious tradition where depictions of suffering are front and center. To this day, when I go into a Protestant church and see the starkly empty cross versus the vividly bloodied and flayed crucifixes of Catholic parishes, the empty space is still jarring.
Jesus’ suffering is so central to Catholic thinking that you still see Good Friday re-enactments in some countries involving actual nails in actual mock-crucifixions. It is because Jesus suffers, in theory, that God understands human suffering. Note here that Mary certainly also suffered in childbirth bringing the body of the human Christ into the world, being basically a child herself and epidurals not easily available in stables. During the hellish weeks of diagnosis when my own body was being poked, stabbed, scanned, re-scanned, drained, sedated, sutured, reawakened and now chemically strafed, the images of all the crucifixes I’d seen in my lifetime, everything from Chagall’s White Crucifixion to the mashed-potato pale Goyas in Madrid to Kehinde Wiley’s reimagined Pieta have whirled through my mind.
Image: Kehinde Wiley, Femme Piquée Par Un Serpent (Mamadou Gueye), 2022
But here’s the thing you learn when you get seriously ill, or when your country breaks out in warfare or your city sends a bulldozer to clear out a homeless encampment: suffering is not always redemptive. The evil stuff in my toilet doesn’t make me a better person or closer to enlightenment. It is simply the body being impacted by medicine in ways doctors don’t always explain very clearly. The fact that my chemo regimen is, in the words of the oncology nursing team (and truly, oncology nurses are incredible people, and I don’t say that lightly), “better tolerated” than other chemo regimens only turns suffering into a kind of competition. It’s true that some forms of chemotherapy are harder than others. But let’s be fair here. Sick is sick. Suffering is suffering.
And, I suppose, redemption is redemption. Julian of Norwich, who herself got so sick she nearly died from what was likely some form of the plague, told us that “if there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me.” But she also tells us that “in falling and in rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.” This is what friends, family, and my medical team have been the face of in my own illness. That is my redemption, maybe even more than whatever “survival” turns out to be.
The danger is that we can come to fetishize suffering, to assume that it is just so innately part of the human condition that God actually desires it. This is something Mother Teresa seems to have mistaken for mercy. Her obsession with suffering was so great that she denied painkillers to those who came to her care homes to die, something glossed over when I happened to be in Rome during her canonization as a saint. This too thrums through my unease with people who turn chronic illness into a hustle, though I also know capitalism will force you to make a dollar off anything these days, suffering included.
The thing about getting sick is that your suffering is also supposed to be redemptive for other people. My breast cancer should remind someone else to get a mammogram (never mind that my own breasts were so dense it evaded detection on four separate mammograms), my suffering should be inspirational (never mind what I witnessed in the toilet this morning). The catalog of my own book publisher also features a book about chronic illness called Chronically Fabulous. At the moment, I cannot imagine what this actually means. Of her own breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, Ann Boyer writes:
People with breast cancer are supposed to be ourselves as we were before, but also better and stronger and at the same time heart-wrenchingly worse. We are supposed to keep our unhappiness to ourselves but donate our courage to everyone. We are supposed to, as anyone can see in the YouTube videos, dance toward our mastectomies, or, as in “Sex and the City,” stand up with Samantha in the ballroom and throw off our wigs while a crowd of banqueting women and men roars with approval. We are supposed to, as Dana does in “The L Word,” pick ourselves up out of dreary self-pity and look stylish on the streets in our colorful hats. If we die later, as Dana does, we are supposed to know that our friends will participate in a fund-raising athletic event and take a minute, before moving on to other episodes, to remember that we once lived.
We are, in other words, supposed to suffer, but only in picturesque ways that make other people grateful for their own lack of suffering. The reality of shit, puke, and urine so toxic I was told to use a different bathroom from my spouse for 48 hours after chemo (alas, we only have one bathroom) is very different, less transformative, less, imagine this word spoken with a hissing sound like a snake coming to strike at you, inssssspirational.
The truth is that suffering is evil, and even with a religious education that taught me plenty of things about the body were evil, I still don’t know what to do with the fact that so many of my co-religionists insist on suffering as purifying, necessary, and meaningful. Four months into this experience, I don’t feel more like Jesus – if anything, I’m envious that he never had to deal with chemo. But I do know that suffering has an endpoint, and maybe mine will be the end of these treatments.
God help me, however, if I come out of this and ever tell someone else that suffering made me purer, better, stronger or wiser. That, I think, is the real evil of illness: that it pits us against one another, not just the sick versus the healthy but the sick versus the sick. “Good” chemo or bad chemo, stage 1 or stage 4, “previvor” or “survivor.” In truth, sick or not sick, we’re all just imperfect bodies wrapped around imperfect souls. So much of life is about expectations of health, success, and happiness that suffering shouldn’t come as a shock, but it also shouldn’t be used as a cudgel to force someone into being grateful when they feel like shit. The sick need fewer expectations placed on us of how we should look, act and feel. That in itself might be the end of suffering toward which all religions point.
*Lately the only person who I think is writing anything worth reading about the clown car of the American episcopate is Tony Ginocchio over at Grift of the Holy Spirit.