One of the many gifts that Nic left us with was his blog, describing the tortuous and transforming journey he was on. It is a marvellous portrait of his deepening awareness of the gift of life and of the challenge we face of making the most of this gift. It was one of the ways he learned to own his feelings by naming them and laughing and crying about them. It gave him a way to acknowledge how deeply grateful he was to his family and friends for their support, how much he appreciated Izzie and David and Robert, how deep his bond was with his mother and with his father, how much strength he drew from their unconditional love.
The blog was also a way of exploring the soul’s journey which he was being led into by his disease. He talked about cancer as the catalyst of that discovery; he was learning that the opposite of love is not hate but fear. He went so far as to acknowledge that as long as fear ruled his heart, the cancer had not yet served its purpose. Most of all, I think, his blog revealed his awareness of the blossoming seed of his fuller humanity which death could not destroy; because of this emerging awareness, he was able to play with the idea of dying as a marvellous adventure, something perhaps like childbirth . . .
Was he deluded? Was this all just a form of denial?
What we’ve been listening to in these readings from the Bible [Isaiah 61. 1-3; Psalm 23; Revelations 21: 1-7; John 14. 1-6] assures us that Nic was not deluded, that this spiritual quest will not be disappointed, because it has always been God’s loving and enduring purpose to bring our human endeavour to fulfilment in a world transformed. The reading from the last book of the Bible invited us to fix our hopes on a holy city coming down out of heaven from God, a new society which God would call ‘home’; where every tear would be wiped away and death would be no more. “See, I am making all things new,” says God. And so I see the hard-won transformation of Nic’s soul as a sign, a foreshadowing even, of that ultimate universal transformation. It’s the home meant for us all, if we’re willing to risk the adventure that Nic knew so well.
Butu yet, I still find it very easy to get stuck on the hard question: Why did he have to suffer so much? — a question I will not try to answer. All I know is that Nic’s experience bears a striking resemblance to the experience of the One whom Christians know as “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” The story of Jesus, his great project, and how it ended, is marked by great suffering — not just the final ordeal of an unjust trial and a brutal execution, but the siffering of anticipation: knowing that the world was not yet ready to welcome the kind of transformation he was offering, and that the triumph of social panic and suspicion would crush him rather than accept transformation. Yet today we stand amazed, inspired, and grateful for his courageous faith that made even his suffering a revelation, a demonstration of God’s solidarity with us in our suffering, because we know that God raised him from death to a new existence. And Nic’s life is now “hidden with Christ in God,” who will one day reveal the new, transformed Nic in glory, when the world itself is reborn through the love and courage of Jesus.
Today’s first reading, from the ancient prophecy of Isaiah, was the very text that Jesus himself adopted as the definition of his own mission: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because . . . he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted . . . to comfort all who mourn . . . to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning . . . “
He is our hope of human transformation.
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