SENTIENT TIMES Feb/March 2001

Cancer: An Unexpected Way to the New Being
By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

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.

I found it encouraging focusing on the lives of these courageous role models while I was recovering from surgery. To have a picture or symbol of such a person, who has struggled with the suffering of others and with their own suffering, shows us how to encounter death and become winners. This is important to the survival of a cancer sufferer. Once we have cancer, it changes our life and our reality will never be the same. The change is good when we use it as an opportunity to work into a healthier life style. We can use our active imagination by visualizing we are walking with Mother Theresa, Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Jesus the Christ, or the Buddha. By keeping company with such figures in the imaginal realm, we can start changing our negative emotions like anger, fear, guilt, and anxiety into positive emotions such as love, joy, justice, and hope. Using our imaginal abilities to feel connected to a saint, or a spiritual person, or a positive person we admire, can help us to deal with the isolation and alienation that can accompany a life threatening illness.

New Being as Love & Freedom
Great spiritual texts, such as the Bhagavad-Gita, the Koran, the Dhammapada, the Old Testament, and the New Testament point to the New Being as an example for becoming an archetypal lover in the world. These world scriptures point us toward

Self-realization through making us aware of our inner God image as an inner process that pulls us beyond ourselves. American process philosophers and theologians John Cobb and Charles Hartshorne describe the Self-realization process in their many works as the "subjective aim" of one's life÷the many possibilities God presents to us in our existential concrete daily reality. God lures and persuades us by presenting us with many daily opportunities to choose love and nonviolence over hate and resentment. It is our responsibility to choose the basis on which we prefer to live our lives.

The diagnosis of cancer can cause us to feel a lack of influence over our health÷ or to feel helpless, worthless, hopeless, and depressed. Visualizing and concentrating on the empty tomb and the resurrection of the New Testament can combat these negative emotions and replace them with the feelings of empowerment and love as cancer survivors. This is a path of individuation and self-growth that uses our active imagination to visualize the empty tomb and resurrection, creating a psychology of hope that helps us to overcome the frightening and depressing emotions that naturally come to us as when we have an illness that could lead to our death. Visualizations of the resurrection, or the appearances of the risen Jesus, present us with what the great American philosopher and theologian, Martin Luther King, Jr., called the "Supreme Personality" that helps us when our lives are threatened. Pannenberg, the German theologian, encourages us to use these images so that we can realize that the future has already appeared in the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. The appearances of Jesus after he arose from his tomb are the images of the Love-Force that can help patients to have a psychology of hope as they live through the five-year probation period that all cancer survivors have to learn to accept. The positive side of this life style is that, after a year of cancer survival, life for me has more purpose and meaning. If we put the necessary effort into being aware of our own subjective aim, of God luring us to Himself/Herself from moment to moment, we can learn to move beyond our negative emotions and to live more authentically in love and nonviolence. To be loving and nonviolent toward others and to ourselves is important in the healing process.

This self-growth toward being a loving, compassionate person through the healing process and God's grace benefits all our family members and friends. We receive feedback from friends who feel our positive energy and who observe the healing process that cancer stimulated actually changed our life for the positive. This appreciation from family and friends helps to keep us on the path of healing and love and helps us benefit from the empowerment of living an authentic life.

The New Being can see that God is truth and love. When we live more in truth and love, we experience liberation and we enjoy a deeper freedom. Truth and love delivers us from the feelings of fear, anxiety, and resentment that we may experience as cancer survivors. God is luring, persuading, and presenting us with many choices of truth or falsehood so that we have opportunities to be more responsible for our own destiny. The existential battle between freedom and destiny is a reality that we face as cancer survivors. Rollo May, the great modern existentialist writer, said that we have to make daily choices between our freedom and our destiny. We do not get to select our parents, the region of the globe in which we are born, nor the historical time in which we live. Cancer, AIDS, and other life threatening illnesses make us face our own existence as a fact of our destiny. Existence is a process of always growing, becoming, and dying. The forced awareness of death by having illnesses such as cancer or AIDS is a threat to our personal freedom. Our whole existence is threatened and the idea that we may not survive triggers anxiety, sadness, and fear. The idea of our nonbeing is so frightening that we feel like we cannot bear the loss of freedom, the loss of life. Death is the ultimate threat to our existence.

The absence of love threatens our spiritual and emotional survival. Love is necessary for anyone who experiences a menacing illness. Cancer patients can come to live a meaningful life if they follow what the Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, advises us to do÷to look into the face of others, which pulls us to help others. In the faces of others we may see the despair and anguish that our illness is causing them because they love us. The cancer survivor must learn to face the pain being caused to their family and friends without a sense of guilt, understanding that pain, fear, love and concern in the faces of the people who surround them can bring a sense of balance and an awareness of their own center. This direct experience of love that comes from looking in the face of the other can provide the cancer survivor with the motivation and the desire to live for the loved ones. Seeing the anguish and pain in the face of the other, as well as their joy and gratitude, is a direct expression of God's love for us through family and friends. Love is God. This type of love, coming at a time of extreme need for reassurance, restores our freedom to live life anew. Love is the direct experience of the New Being as freedom.

Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D., is a Licensed Marriage, Child and Family Counselor, co-founder of the Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychotherapy Center in Arcata, California and adjunct faculty at Saybrook Graduate School in peace studies, conflict resolution, creativity and shamanism.

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