A Narrowing Place: Responsive Spirituality

Abstract

Among the many distinct experiences of cancer is the experience of the parent who watches their child become pale and drained of energy in the weeks preceding diagnosis. The journey from there to the oncology ward is one that can be adequately described as increasingly claustrophobic. It is all one-way traffic from flourishing life to the abyss. Perhaps being a parent makes one even more prone to the universal human tendency to find fault with oneself where there is only the blind force of nature at work. Whatever dark alleyway that self-destructive sentiment emerges from to ambush the optimist, it is certainly an effective hiding place from which to cause them to stumble. The child slips inexorably out of the parent’s grasp. The notion of parental protection is no haven. Yet the blindness of nature unwittingly tips the scales. In the narrowest of narrow places, the human organism responds with homeostatic resilience. Whether death is near or far in this place is unknown. In the moment of constriction, however, the child and its parent respond with that most irreducible of passions, the will to live. The human spirit emerges.