PARISH BULLETIN: MORAL ISSUES
Challenging Words

by James F. Keenan

Whether the news is good or bad, particularly significant words can be challenging, even breathtaking. Sometimes it takes time for us to absorb and deal with their meaning.

"You are going to do a doctorate"

In the spring of 1981, a year before my ordination to the priesthood, while studying at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, the assistant to the New York Jesuit provincial made an unannounced visit to inform me that I was to do a doctorate.

I had two immediate questions. Having been a Jesuit for eleven years I was surprised that this decision had never been communicated to me; in fact, I thought I would be working in one of our parishes. Thus, I asked, "When did you make the decision?" "Yesterday, at the provincial consultation. We thought you should be the first to know." Then I turned to the second question, "a doctorate in what?" "In urban studies or a political science. We know how good you are in community organizing and activism, but we want you to be an intellectual activist!" I responded, "You can't afford the psychiatric bills for me to work in either of those fields." "Well, you are going to do a doctorate. Let me know tomorrow in what other field you propose to study."

I returned to my community and told them about the very peculiar encounter. One member of the community said, "Jim, study moral theology." "Why?" "You get 'A’s in it, you say interesting things in class, and you seem to like it." That sounded right to me; I saw the assistant provincial the next day. "So?" "Moral Theology." "Good. So where will you study?" "OK, already!" I answered with exasperation, "I need to ask around.” At the end of a year of searching and reflecting, I followed the advice of many to study in Rome's Gregorian University, with Josef Fuchs, a man whose writings I most admired and who was the senior moral theologian in the Jesuit order. I arrived in Rome in September 1982 to earn a licentiate and a doctorate; I stayed for five years.

"Your brother Bob died this morning"

Two years before I left for Rome, my twenty-six-year-old brother Bob suffocated during an epileptic seizure. Indeed, the words notifying me of his death will never leave my ears. Bob was 360 days younger than me. We were very close.

We were all still grieving his sudden death when I went to Rome. My mom, especially, saw my departure as painful. As I left, she and my dad asked that I be available every Friday at 12.45 when they would telephone me. For the entire first year, in each of those phone calls, my dad would speak to me, and occasionally so would one of my siblings, but never my mom.

That first year was overwhelming. I had seven classes first semester, all in Italian; I barely understood a word. I knew no one in my community of 120 Jesuits. I was still grieving my brother's death, alienated from my family, and second-guessing my entire decision. Besides, I was a priest in a city where there was no shortage of priests; instead there was a shortage of opportunity to serve. Every Friday evening I would go to the beautiful Piazza del Campidoglio, where the bronze of Marcus Aurelius dominates the center and the statue of Roma seated at the base of the Roman Senate is flanked by the gods of cornucopia. I would sit next to one of the gods with their baskets of plenty and watch tourists, especially lovers, come to see this enchanting piazza constructed by Michelangelo.

Inevitably I would start crying, for about an hour. In seminary everyone says that your first year as a priest is your happiest; mine was to date, my worst. After my cry, I would return home. Fridays were tough.

In time, I became a very different person. I remained resolute in my decision, hard as it was. I made friends, accepted invitations to different communities, and cultivated my relationship with Fuchs and his colleagues. By the end of the year, one of my papers was published in a German journal, a German newspaper profiled me as a new voice, and I was establishing myself in my field, with the help of my mentor. When I returned to the New York area for a month in June 1983, my mom and dad became reconciled with my stay in Europe and in the following fall visited me for the first time.

"Your melanoma has returned"

This summer, on August 6, as I was tarrying in Europe, having just participated in a small conference, I found a lump just below my waist. It was a swollen lymph node almost four centimeters long. Having had a very thin melanoma removed from my back in November 2006, I called my primary care physician for an appointment and saw him when I returned to the United States two days later.

I was going to be in the States only for five days, heading back out to a conference in Manila where twenty-five moral theologians from all over East Asia would be meeting for the first time in their history and I had been asked to chair the meeting.

My physician could find no other swollen node and my blood showed no infection. He set me up to meet a surgeon who would remove the node when I returned from the Manila meeting. I met the surgeon on August 11, a day before flying (28 hours of travel!) to Manila. "I'm afraid it's your melanoma," he said. "It's near the site of your first encounter with melanoma. I want to do an emergency CAT scan to see if there are other swollen nodes." Five hours later, the report showed no other swelling. "You are returning the 23rd. You'll have surgery on the 26th. I'll excise the node and biopsy it." "OK."

As I flew to Manila, I found myself sobbing. I asked myself what I was doing on the plane. I realized, however, that I had made a decision. My doctors told me that delaying surgery by ten days would have no impact on my health. Since I had been recruited to chair this meeting in which much was invested, I was honoring an important commitment. In hindsight, I learned that by not acting on my fear, I had become stronger.

I chaired the conference, but at the end of it, I pulled the main organizer aside and said, "I think I have cancer." It was a relief to finally say what I feared.

For the next five days in Manila, I gave lectures around the city at different hospitals and universities. Throughout I kept seeing poor and working-class people on the streets of Manila. I saw in their faces and in the pace of their walking something about the frailty of human life. It was overwhelming. Somehow instead of wondering how I would do, I saw with a new freshness how they were living, with an enormous range of challenges and infirmities. In an odd way, given my own unstable situation, I felt the immediacy of their lives where stability is a rare commodity. In that vulnerable sea of humanity, I fell into a momentary peace about my future.

On August 28 the surgeon told me, "Your melanoma has returned. You are at level three melanoma." As I write this, eight days have passed and my next surgery is scheduled for September 26. I begin Interferon in mid-November. Unlike those in Manila, I will be at a major health facility in Boston.

The news, of course, is daunting. My family, friends, colleagues, and students are as surprised as I am because I am a person of considerable health and energy. Yet, even though the horizon looks somewhat challenging and limiting, I think I will be living into the future with a vulnerability that I first encountered when I had the original melanoma removed and waited for the results. Now I will be living like that for years to come, in a more "real" time, when everything becomes present because I am surrounded by loving people, from family and friends to nurses and doctors. As frightened as I am, I know I am in their hands and that I will be fine.

Challenging words make a great deal of difference, but they come in very different ways. Some words, like the news of my brother's death, leave us breathless. There's nothing to be done; the news comes too late. The words are numbing as they echo down the years about an unalterable moment that transfixed all of us who heard them. They are words that simply leave us to pick up the pieces as we await the comfort of the resurrection.

Other challenging words do not leave us bereft and powerless. Like my call to studies, they can energize us and allow us to pursue a course of action we never anticipated. The challenge from beyond allows us to realize that, at times, anything is possible. The willingness to hear those words is key, and therein opportunity rewards the vigilant.

But these new challenging words that I heard last week are at once overwhelming and, strangely enough, manageable. For me, there's no race against time. The words are destabilizing, and I wish they had never been uttered, but they were, and so I find my life being changed again remarkably. While I never thought this would be, I await my future as a challenge not unlike that first year in Rome when everything was so strange and new, and my anxiety at times got the best of me. As then, this challenge, inevitably, has to be accepted.

And, like so many other people, who hear such similar words in better or worse contexts, like them and with them, I stand and wait.

James F. Keenan, SJ is Founders Professor in Theology at Boston College, Massachusetts.