New Year, New Head, a New Life

This is the first time I have tried to write since I went down with a brain tumor on the 9th of December.  The surgery was on the 14th and for a few days I couldn't even speak following what the neurosurgeon pulled out some of the tumor.  It was as much a problem to try make my head to try to explain what was going on inside my head.  For several days I thought I was explaining what I thought was in my head, but there was really not much pain.  I just felt that I had 2 heads.  There was numbness on the left but not real pain.  As the past 2 weeks have gone on, I have finally been working out at a Rehabilitation Hospital and I am now in better physical condition than I have been in the past 20 years.

Tomorrow I go home for a week and do outpatient work.  Next week I will meet with an Oncologist  as well with the Neurosurgeon to see what more needs to be done.  Most likely there will be chemo.  I don't know how long that will be or whether there will be radiology.  But if what they have already done with almost no pain, or illness, I can't complain.

What I am finding is just as much difficulty is trying to use my new computer and the Windows 10 that was before a tumor so I guess my having to deal with something new that pushes me each day to think a bit more.  It sort of feels like there is less in my brain to get in the way of computer stuff and have a whole new way to orient to my computer. I find a positive way of coming to this new computer with a new way of relating to my computer that I would normally just find as a computer one more pain.  But this morning I am finding an opening to something quite open, something embracing technological that I would not normally have done.

The relationship of God has been one that has so cradled me in a way I haven't known in years.  It is a time that I would never have known...it is something I have believed.  But this is a time of an experience of friends, family and spiritual closeness that is on so many levels that I am still unable to even explain how close and how I have known God's presence.  It is both transencendent and immanent all at the same time.  Is it merely medication?....no.  It is being able to know that God in humanity and Creation is doing stuff in my life that I have not known.  Am I more than usual? No, but I feel nicer than I have in a number of years.

I will begin to write theology again now.  I will begin to take on the things that those writers like Diarmaid MacCulloch, Diana Butler Bass, and other people who are beginning to describe faith that are willing to address the goodness that the God who has always been able to reach so much more outside what the Church has often tried to demand what the Church has demanded rather than what God wants.

If there is a new world that faith does demand of us for the future, the Church is being faced with a way of knowing what it means to claim that what is good and holy.  It may not look like what Christianity has dealt with for the past 1000 years.  It may look like a way of who we are in the face of what people from different faiths that allows us to hear how people who find how that holiness speaks finally to all.  The more that I have seen in the health of people both in the medical world no matter what their faith brings to them, they are willing to make sure that the goodness for whatever reason they call me to think and live in a way that embraces world in a way that I have never thought of.  It is a type of faith.  It isn't so simple to just let God do God's thing.  It is a participation in a way of life that is much grander that I would have allowed myself.

I do hope those who read my blog these days feel free to hop on what I say now.  I will appreciate for people to have ideas different from mine to put their stuff in comments.  It is a new age.  It is a new way to look at the goodness of all that still speaks of the goodness of the Holy that is still so very much available.  The goodness however it makes itself available to us and that is all that is important.