Feb 11
A few months ago someone gave me a miniature rose plant. It was very kind of them, and very pretty! Unfortunately though, I’m terrible with plants. Within weeks, the leaves went greyish, brownish and crispy. Dead, in short. I almost threw it out, but I’m also not very tidy, so for weeks it sat in my kitchen looking like dead twigs in a pot.
Today is World Cancer Day. This morning my social media streams contained a steady drip of reminders about it. Some were stories of hope and healing, but more were of battle and bereavement.
Even the word “cancer” is difficult. As a descriptor of illness it’s so incredibly general as to be practically semantically empty, but simultaneously its utterance has an almost unparalleled power to conjure deep fears about our mortality and the inescapability of death. Of course, not all cancer stories end that way, and I’m glad to know many who have battled and won. But the fear reaction still prevails, doesn’t it?
Everyone seems to have a personal cancer story of some sort. Mine is of the loss of my father. Read more
Probably my second favourite book of 2013 was a memoir by an American Lutheran pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber. In one of the passages I liked best she wrote about how she likes to “box” things: X is good. Y is bad. I like to do that too; it makes life easier if I can categorise things neatly.
But then she talked about why the categorisation habit is a problem. She said that a friend pointed out to her that: Read more
