A year after receiving a diagnosis of prostate cancer and going through successful cancer treatment, I am thinking about the psychology of hope and what it means to be a Christian in a materialistic society. It is time that I came out of the closet in terms of writing about being a Christian and about the experience of being diagnosed with a life threatening illness. My intention has not been to conceal my Christianity behind studying and writing about different faiths like Sufism and Buddhism. Moreover, it has felt more direct to address a pluralistic society through a comparative process of looking at several different spiritual paths while not owning my own Christianity. That approach worked for me until I was hit with the menacing illness of cancer. In fact, being a Christian helped me to survive cancer, along with good spiritual support and the prayers of many people, and, of course, excellent medical care.

This unwelcome but profound experience has finally given me a way to write about Christianity that feels appropriate to my own personal style. My spiritual director, Morton Kelsey, told me several years ago that if I would be willing to openly own my faith I would be a much better writer. Now that I have been lucky to have a year of surviving the cancer, I am ready to write about how the cancer changed my life and how Christianity helped that process. It feels good to let people know that I am a Christian because every writer should be open to their audience about their biases. For the sake of being candid with my readers, I believe that people should know that my prejudices lie within Christian spiritual social engagement.

The experience of having cancer made me think theologically about the crucifixion and the resurrection. Then I found, or I was found by, the theology of hope, a Christian perspective developed by the German theologians, Jurgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg. I also revisited Paul Tillich's existential theological writings about "the New Being." After having cancer, Pannenberg's theology of the historical Jesus that surrounds the empty tomb and the resurrection meant for me that no matter how much suffering all of us have to endure, the story of Jesus leaves us with what Pannenberg calls the final future of Being and Hope. This phrase means that the future of the final days of the resurrection points us beyond the here and now, and gives us hope to actively work to transform our lives and the world. This is a powerful message that I needed to hear as I faced the possibility of my death. The "Promise" that is held out to us by the prophets of the Old Testament and the Apostles of the New Testament is that love and truth should be our focus. My interpretation of Moltman's theology of hope is that the suffering in the world is difficult but we have to "keep our eyes on the prize," the victory of love and truth over despair and anxiety. The Promise is a promise from God that no matter how much suffering we experience we will be all right in the end. These are western theological ways of staying detached so that we do not fall into being an absolutist about our suffering, our personal perspective, our social action, or our work.

The resurrection and the promise are theological ideas that influenced and comforted me as a person living within a dangerous situation. Imagined or real, I felt like I was living in a different category separate from other people. The initial feeling of living with a life threatening illness is an experience of the mixed emotions of fear, anger, anxiety, and strength that I am going to survive this cancer. Facing one's own death makes a person want to live an authentic life. The promise of the prophets from the Old Testament is a "Testament of Hope" for cancer patients to reframe the suffering and fear they are experiencing as they live with a life threatening illness. The hope will help the person suffering from cancer to be motivated to work in a creative way to fulfill their side of the healing contract. To fulfill our side of the contract we need to see that we are not bad people because we have cancer. We need to love ourselves by doing the inner work of praying, meditating, and journaling. We need to love others and the world and if we are able, to choose a way to do outer work. My mother-in-law, Maxine Goddard, during and after her recovery from breast cancer, creates beautiful pieced quilts for children in emergency foster care as her form of outer work. For me, outer work is to do my part to rid the world of racism, sexism, poverty, war, and the destruction of the earth. The inward path and the outward path are tools to help us to live a life of salvation and by the grace of God to process into becoming a "New Being."

Eastern Orthodox Catholicism gives us the image or goal of becoming a new person when St. Athanasius the Great says, "God became man so that man could become God." In today's nonsexist terms, we would paraphrase St. Athanasius and say that God became a person so that people can become God. This is the hope that Paul Tillich's theology of the New Being gives us as patients trying to survive a life threatening disease. I try to keep these images in my mind from the time I wake up in the morning until the time when I go to bed. It helps to repeat a positive mantram or affirmation all day that centers on the empty tomb and the resurrection. Using our creative imagination gives us access to the imaginal realm to liberate us from the sting of death and to cradle us in the arms of God's love. These images tell us that we will survive no matter what happens to us.

The New Being is the term Paul Tillich used to describe the process that Jesus moved from being Jesus of Nazareth to becoming the Christ. For Paul Tillich this quest for the image of God within captured his existential reality and he provided for us an image that would enable us to move from alienation and anger to the core of our essence. Becoming the essential person, the New Being, is growing into our Christhood or our Buddahood. Great persons like Mother Theresa, Mohandas Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrated the New Being to us in our own time. These remarkable individuals are ordinary people who put enormous effort into their personal growth so that they could be selfless and compassionate toward other people. They are heroes who modeled courage when they were facing dangerous situations that could take their life.