In 1992, the transept of Boston’s Shrine of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, where healing services were held. Photograph: Geoff Why

On the evening of March 11, 2008, the Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College and the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University jointly sponsored a panel discussion, “Catholic Writers on Hope,” at Fordham’s Manhattan campus. The inspiration for the program was a book, Take Heart: Catholic Writers on Hope in Our Time (2007), edited by BCM editor Ben Birnbaum, who served as moderator of the discussion, in which four award-winning writers participated. They were the New York Times national correspondent Dan Barry; the essayist and memoirist Nancy Mairs; Carol Zalezki, of the Smith College faculty and coauthor of Prayer: A History (2005); and the poet Lawrence Joseph, author most recently of Into It (2005). Two of the panelists, Barry and Mairs, spoke of their encounters with grave illness—cancer and multiple sclerosis, respectively—and the following essays are drawn from their presentations.

Abducted

By Dan Barry

A few weeks ago, my father died in a veterans’ facility on Long Island. His lungs had finally betrayed him—or, more accurately, he had betrayed his lungs. He used to smoke as many as 80 cigarettes a day, his life lived in a wispy-edged bubble of bluish smoke.

My siblings and I often begged him to stop, but he would tell us to leave him alone. He had had a hard life, he’d say, with justification. He deserved this one pleasure. Besides, he’d say, coughing was the only exercise he ever got.

In the hours before he died, I sat by his bed, watching him sleep under that velvet morphine blanket, and I hoped that he would wake up. I hoped that he would ask me to see if there was a W.C. Fields movie on television. I hoped that he would complain to me about yet another misspelling, another typo, another misuse of the language that he had found in the pages of the New York Times. I hoped that he would ask me to wheel him outside, so he could have another cigarette or two.
None of that happened. But I can’t say that I felt my hope slipping away, as my father himself slipped away. What I felt instead was a sense that everything would be all right. For me, for my three siblings, but also for him, my father.

This might sound a little facile. But his many years of suffering and struggle had ended. And while I knew that I would ache to see him again, I also accepted his passing as just that, a passing to something else. Was that hope?

Over the course of my life, my most fervent moments of prayer did not take place in a church, or while kneeling beside my bed, but in a forbidding building on York Avenue on New York’s Upper East Side: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital. Death and salvation occur there, all day, all night—sometimes simultaneously, a drawn curtain apart, in the same semiprivate room.

When I was diagnosed with cancer eight years ago, it was a bad kind of cancer—not that there’s really a good kind. But you know you’re in for a rocky ride when the doctors avert their eyes while talking about your case. Instead of flesh and blood, you are now made of charts, X-rays, and dispassionate written reports.

I called up a friend of mine, a priest who had married my wife and me. I saw him as God’s agent, God’s rep. And, of course, I had some complaining to do. His response was something along the lines of: Perhaps this is all part of God’s plan.

Yeah, well, it ain’t part of my plan. I was 41 years old, with an 18-month-old daughter. I had things to do.

So, for the next six months, and then for another six months after a recurrence years later, I wrestled with hope. As I went through my chemotherapy, my radiation, my major surgery, I could not tell whether I was driven onward by hope, or by the lack of any other option.

I know for certain that it wasn’t courage that kept me going, because, to me, courage means having alternatives; it means rejecting the option of not pressing on. With cancer, most of the time, you have no choice but to fight back. You have to submit to surgery, accept the injection of Drano into your veins, receive the odd gift of radiation.

Still, during my “courageous” battle, I found the strangest moment of peace. It came during my daily radiation treatment. I would change into a white robe, almost like a baptismal gown, and sit in a room with other people wearing white robes. It was like the waiting room to heaven. Soon I would be led away and instructed to lie down on a gurney, with my hands raised behind my head. And then, on that gurney, I would be elevated—almost as if I were being presented to
God with the question: And what of him?

One of the contraptions around me would buzz. A laser beam would shoot into my chest where I had been tattooed, marked. All the while I would search for patterns on the ceiling that looked like a cross. And I would find relaxation; I would find comfort. Were these moments of hope? On my darkest Irish days, I’d say: No. On other days, I’d say: Maybe.

Remembering that room full of people in white robes, my body being raised up, my hope that there was something on the other side of those ceiling tiles, brings me back to thoughts of my father. Let me tell you why.

He had a difficult life, and only some of that difficulty was of his own doing. A child of the Great Depression in New York City, he endured poverty, abuse, and considerable time in an orphanage. Because his family was always one step ahead of bill collectors—or one step behind—he attended more than a dozen schools scattered around the five boroughs, started working full-time at 16, and finished high school at night.

In many ways, his adult experience was harder: cluster migraines, low-paying jobs, a stumble into alcohol abuse.

Anyway, this complicated man who died a few weeks ago in a vets’ home—this man who read voraciously; whose world view could be summed up as “Pete Seeger, yes; Frank Sinatra, no”—this man was, of course, a believer in the existence of UFOs.

Let me rephrase that: He was a believer in the possibility of the existence of UFOs.

UFOs loomed over my childhood—literally and figuratively. The family library seemed to include every UFO conspiracy book ever published, and family discussions during dinner often focused on crop circles and Roswell, New Mexico. I like to say that we may have been the only family that actually wanted to be abducted by aliens.

This meant that the Barrys often took drives in the family station wagon, searching the night skies for lights twinkling with possibility. And leading us always was my father.

Holding binoculars to his eyes, he would scan the darkness for any bit of glowing movement that might represent something beyond this world—something next. He seemed convinced it was there. I guess you could call that hope.

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Without Expectations

By Nancy Mairs

I am perhaps the most hope–less woman you’re likely to meet. More than 35 years of a chronic, incurable, degenerative disease have scoured hope, as the word is conventionally understood, right out of my soul. I can wish—long, yearn, pray—for recovery readily enough, but I cannot expect fulfillment. The disease is implacable. I will never be better tomorrow. If I’m lucky, I won’t be worse, either. In any case, I’ll become Whatever Happens Next, whether I want to or not.

Nor, as I’ve written elsewhere, am I especially sanguine about humanity’s prospects. If there ever was a time when we could have turned down some less agonistic route, could have elected to balance our desires with our needs and the needs of the rest of creation, that time has passed. And maybe there never was such a time, except in dreams. God only knows. At any rate, our technological capabilities have now so far outstripped our moral development that it seems likely that we really will blow ourselves up with nuclear devices or suffocate ourselves with petrol fumes or poison ourselves with chemical waste or drown ourselves in melted glaciers. There’s no reason—apart from our own egocentricity—to think that the human species is going to survive over the long term or to view our extinction as an outrage. God loves us boundlessly but not best. The cosmos is infinite, and events will keep unfolding forever. One of them might be a minute flare toward the edge of a small galaxy signaling our passage.

Clearly, I do not take a meliorative view of the world. I don’t believe that the cosmos was created by some entity looming outside of it in order that it would one day provide a habitable space for humanity. I don’t believe that, once there was a humanity, its specimens progressed and improved over the eons until they reached the pinnacle: us. Nor do I believe, should there be further peaks beyond, we will climb higher and higher, perhaps even reaching angelhood. Nothing has been developed for our sake. Nothing has been developed for at all. The mysterious process of unfoldment has no utilitarian end. God just is—here, now, always.

To be hope–less is not at all the same state as to be hopeless, because every definition of hopeless I can find sounds urelievably doleful—one must be pathetic, doomed to failure, despondent, irredeemable. Because I have clinical depression, I have had such feelings from time to time, but I don’t feel them now. I feel hope–less in the sense that one might refer to a woman as childless. Such a condition might be, as it was for my 95-year-old friend Elizabeth, “the great tragedy
of [her] life”; for another woman, it may represent a well-considered choice. What the word means depends on context or testimony.

My hope–lessness has various meanings and consequences, not all of them honorable. From early childhood, I have not done well with disappointment. It crushes my spirit, and I can take a long time to recover even a modicum of equanimity. I know that others derive enormous joy from the period of hoping and, if the hope is thwarted, they wince and then go on to hope for something else. This experience is so disruptive to my emotional life, and I get so stuck in a wallow of despondency, that I have trained myself not to hope in the first place. Thus, my lack of hope is, in part, merely a dodge.

More seriously, I relinquished hope altogether in December 1990, when my husband was diagnosed with stage IV melanoma, the chance of recovery from which is vanishingly small. Everyone believed that he was likely going to die; the only uncertainty was when and how bad that dying would be. At that point, hope seemed a distraction. I was going to lose him, perhaps soon, and I wanted to be present in every one of the minutes we had left together, not fretting about some other moments that hadn’t arrived yet. I dropped the future then, and I have never entirely taken it up again. For no ascertainable reason, George didn’t die, and the time since has been sweeter than any other I have known. Hope gone, I feel anything but downcast. I feel free to live here, now, trusting that Whatever Happens Next will happen without taking particular account of my wishes.

“But how can you remain an activist if you feel that way?” asked a friend, a member of the community with which I worship, as though lack of hope rendered me incapable of noticing the people in need around me, as though optimism is required in order to feed the hungry, give them clean water and piles of warm clothes in the winter, comfort them when they fall ill, grieve when they die. “Do you think you are going to change the world?” a reporter asked when I was instigating an antiwar poetry reading at the beginning of the war in Iraq.” “Well,” I snapped, “I’m not making it any worse!” He couldn’t believe, I suppose, that someone would act without expectation of success. But if you focus on the outcome of your efforts, you are likely to do a sloppy job of the task at hand. Attention, not anticipation, motivates careful service.

I may not feel hope or have hope, but I do hope, one small act after another—and I find deep joy in the doing. In her piece “Tikkun Olam,” the blogger Jennifer Jones writes that, according to Kabbalah, “To bring the spark of divine light into manifestation, or to unite our divine spark of light with that of God, we must engage in the spiritual journey, help the poor and needy. . . . With each deed of goodwill, we are helping to repair the broken universe. Humankind becomes co-creators with God as we work to bring the universe into its original divine form.” This is the work of which Rav Tarfon says in the Mishnah, “You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Without hope, I can only remain alive to the world and engaged with its creatures, rejoicing in the Holy that embraces us all.

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Dan Barry, a national columnist for the New York Times, is the author of the memoir Pull Me Up (2005) and a collection of columns called City Lights: Stories About New York (2007). Nancy Mairs, a poet and essayist living in Tucson, Arizona, is the author of, most recently, A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith (2007).