THE ONLY RATIONAL ACT [Sun, 8-15-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

All I ever needed to know I learned by dying.

That is what I thought as I completed the second year after my cancer diagnosis.

My first oncologist told me I would probably be dead “in a year or two.” It was just a casual statement, a general idea, an approximation. But I seized on the idea of two. Two years sounded like so much more than one. I really wanted that second year.

So, with optimism, I worked on a two-year plan. Everything I needed to do to get ready to die had to be done in those two years. There were things I could not control. I had not walked my daughters down the aisle. I had not played trotty-horse with my grandchildren. But what I could control, I had to accomplish in only two years.

There were things I needed to do, first to deal with cancer, like chemotherapy, and then to deal with life, like taking out the garbage.

I did not have a bucket list, visiting Timbuktu, or sky-diving, or writing a novel. In the two years I had left, I needed to get ready to die by learning how to live.

Learning to live is the opposite of a bucket list. It is learning to be rather than to do.

That ran counter to everything I knew. You deal with life by doing. If that doesn’t work, you do other stuff, you do harder, you do more. You do. Even learning how to be instead of do—aren’t there routines and activities and disciplines you’re supposed to do to learn to be?

I can’t really tell you what happened that second year, except that I became aware of God’s presence, not God’s action. I didn’t need God to do something for me, I just needed God to be with me.

I think I had been misled into doing by the doctrine of “the substitutionary atonement,” Christ dying in my place. If God loves us, why does anyone need to die to satisfy the holiness? Christ on the cross is not a sacrifice, it is a symbol. God is saying, I love you all the way, not just through life, but through death. I’m not doing for you; I’m being with you. Love does not stop with death.

So, at the end of that second year, I died. Because I didn’t need to live any more. I died to the need to control, to understand, to accomplish. I had nothing more to do to make my peace with life. Everything in those two years taught me this: Love is the only rational act. I didn’t need to know anything else.

That was twenty-nine years ago. I still don’t need to know anything else.

John Robert McFarland

“Love is the only rational act” is attributed to Stephen Levine, but probably comes to most people through Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie, when the dying Morrie Schwartz quotes it.