John Lewis was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer a few days before 2019 ended.
A decade ago, that would have been a death sentence. Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, after a controversial liver transplant in 2009.
But there’s a new way of attacking it, immunotherapy. James Allison and Tasuku Honjo shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of immunotherapy, turning the body’s own immune system against cancer. Four years after their discovery Jimmy Carter saw his own cancer go into complete remission, thanks to immunotherapy. An old friend, David Coursey, recently reported his own pancreatic cancer is in remission, a year after diagnosis. He looks good, strong, and has all his hair.
In short, there’s hope. But there’s also the reality. John Lewis will die. Just as you will die, and I will die.
Whenever that happens for John Lewis, he will go in peace because he’s a practicing Christian. His life has been a testimony to Christ’s work among us. He has kept going forward, 50 years past Dr. King’s assassination, because of faith that will make his final moments on Earth a celebration, a going home.
I lost a similar man just a month ago. His name was Rev. Cantrell Johnson, and he died from a heart attack. He was my neighbor for 36 years. I have never known a man who lived so consistently in the image of Christ. Right down to the carpentry. He put the broken tile floor into my kitchen and, later my laundry room. I’m proud of it. He worked six days every week and spent the seventh in celebration as associate pastor of a church a few miles from my house. I went there for his 50th wedding anniversary.
They say God gives us no more pain than we can bear. Rev. Johnson was an example. His son suffered from a lung disease that kept him homebound from a young age. His daughter divorced and raised three sons under his roof. He took in his mother in law for decades. In his later years he suffered from diabetes and gout. But I never saw him angry. He always smiled, always. He felt blessed. Born a year after Rep. Lewis, in 1941, he was also a soldier in the Civil Rights cause, just a private rather than a major. Privates make an army.
Rev. Johnson’s daughter told me that on his last day here on Earth she asked him not to go to work. By then his work was done on a big riding lawnmower, pulled by an enormous black pick-up he could barely get into his driveway. He insisted on going. So it was that, on his break from that work, he sat down as he normally did, looked up at the Sun, and walked off with the angels, his race well-run.
John Lewis will also walk with the angels.
The reaction to his announcement troubled me, however. My timeline was filled with white folks telling him to fight, urging him on, insisting he’ll beat cancer as he has beaten so much else in his eventful life.
To me, it was the wrong reaction. John Lewis should be celebrated, now, while he lives. He doesn’t need platitudes about beating death. To a good Christian man, where is its sting?
Death’s sting is right here, for me and tens of millions of Americans younger than me, and probably for many of Lewis’ well-wishers. Its sting lies in the corruption of Christianity, of all religions really, by immoral money-grubbers. Its sting is in people like Jerry Falwell Jr., who see Christ only as a route to money and power. Its sting is in the Catholic priests who abuse children, the Muslim Imams who abuse women, in the Hindus and Buddhists who use their version of God to abuse Muslims. It’s in all the evil purposes to which organized religion is put, still, in this world.
I can’t handle it and won’t support it.
I was raised Catholic. As a young child, my mom took me miles out of our way to attend mass, in small, drafty buildings in nearby towns, when we had a big beautiful cathedral just a mile away. Many years later, I learned why. It was because Carlo Gambino, the model for “the Godfather,” gave the money for that beautiful cathedral. I’d go there for catechism school. I’d be confirmed in that church because it was nearby. Afterward mom fell away from the church over the child abuse, and so did I.
Here in the autumn of my years I consider myself, like Thomas Jefferson and some of the other Founding Fathers, a deist. I try to practice my own faith, in my own way, in the way I treat other people. I try to forgive their trespasses and have learned to forgive my own. The details don’t matter. Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, none of that matters. The work of so-called believers condemns too many people who loudly proclaim their faith.
I prefer the faith of Rep. Lewis and Rev. Johnson. I prefer a quiet faith driven by acts. I prefer to see this planet as a church, one of billions upon billions of little churches spinning outward from the Big Bang. When I want to meet God, I open a science text. That’s where we’ll learn the operating system for this universe God, by whatever name we call her, has made. Science is where I turn when I want to know the answers. I’m proud that my son has chosen to become a scientist, that my daughter advocates for science.
Science, of course, has its charlatans. Science has its scandals. Science is not perfect. But science at least has a method for debunking lies, and for uncovering cheaters. Religion, not so much.
When my time comes, my heart won’t have the peace of Rep. Lewis or Rev. Johnson. But I have faith that such peace awaits all of us.
That’s the message I take from the start of this crisis year.
