For Wilshire Baptist Church
“I’ve spent a lot of time in your head this week.”
That’s what my radiation oncologist said last Friday in a surprise phone call. After seven weeks of chemo to shrink the tumor in my sinus, the radiologist said he was making adjustments in his plan to zap what has become a smaller target. That was great news, but more than that I appreciate a commitment to my case that had him spending long hours studying scans of the inside of my noggin.
On the other hand, in my imagination I wonder what else he can see. Can he see my doubts and fears? My guilts and regrets? My shames and embarrassments? And more relative to my current situation, can he see a moment in my life that might have caused the cancer? And was it something I did – like harboring all of the emotional debris of life that I’ve listed above – or was it just some rare mutation that statistics indicate occur only 200 times a year in the United States?
Of course I know he can’t see any of that, but I believe God sees that and wants us to be healthy in every possible way. We all live with cancers of a sort that eat at us and diminish our joy and zest for life. There are lots of strategies — all kinds of “self care” as it’s called — for fighting those cancers: counseling, meditation and medications that boost the chemicals in our bodies that stimulate optimism and diminish pessimism and depression.
And, there’s prayer. During Lent 2020, Wilshire’s daily devotional guide was “God be in My Head: The Sarum Prayer” by Ken Wilson. The prayer comes from 13th century Salisbury, England and goes like this:
God be in my head, and in my understanding.
God be in my eyes, and in my looking.
God be in my mouth, and in my speaking.
God be in my heart, and in my thinking.
God be at my end, and in my departing.
In his reflections on the first line — God be in my head, and in my understanding — Wilson writes:
“When we are attentive and curious about the world around us (plants, other creatures, the weather, how traffic flows, how a different language works, what makes music beautiful), and in that process of discovery gain understanding, we are participating with a God who related to the creation in the same way. The delight we experience is shared delight with God.”
There’s a lot of debate about religion and science and whether or not the two can exist in the same space. I believe the two are bundled together; I believe the same God who created our amazingly complex physical bodies also gifted some among us with the curiosity to want to know how things work, and if they are broken, how to fix them. I believe it’s a spiritual gift.
My radiation oncologist is one of those gifted in that way. I have no idea if he is a man of faith, but when he talks about what he is finding and doing in my head, there is excitement in his voice and a sparkle in his eyes. I could see that when we first met with him and the way forward was uncertain, and I see it even more now that the treatment plan is working. His gift of curiosity is not only healing me physically but also spiritually.
For that reason, he can spend as much time in my head as he wishes. He may not know it, but he is experiencing the presence of God in there too. Perhaps I should slip him a copy of the Sarum Prayer book and highlight in bright yellow what Wilson says about that:
“The next time you experience the kick of discovering how something works . . . consider the possibility that your feeling of delight is a feeling that puts you into conscious contact with God.”