I thought I would put up a few things I have written previously. Chemo makes for some interesting dreams, but not much lucidity.
A year or so ago I went on a Frederick Buechner binge. This was from his autobiography (I can't remember the name of it).
Buechner is responding to his grandmother's stoic view of "Le Bon Dieu" (the good God), who is more of a mild presence than anything like the intensely personal yet all encompassing God of his own experience:
"But she was also wrong, Le bon Dieu, she would say with that faint little smile, half ironic, half wistful, and if her smile never quite dismissed le bon Dieu himself, what I think it did dismiss was anything like the serious possibility that through flaws and fissures in the bedrock harshness of things, there wells up from time to time, out of a deeper substratum of reality still, a kind of crazy, holy grace. "You should face reality," she wrote, and in terms of what was humanly best, this was perhaps the soundest advice she could have given us: that we should stay and, through sheer...endurance, will, courage, put our lives back together by becoming as strong as she was herself. But when it comes to putting broken lives back together- when it comes, in religious terms, to the saving of souls- the human best tends to be at odds with the holy best. To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do- to grit your teeth and clench your fist in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst- is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own. Surely that is why, in Jesus' sad joke, the rich man has as hard a time getting into Paradise as that camel through the needle's eye because with his credit card in his pocket, the rich man is so effective at getting for himself everything he needs that he does not see that what he needs more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift. He doesn't not see that the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept, even for Le Bon Dieu himself, a helping hand."