Today this tweet came from the Shrine of St. Jude:
Today is the Day of Prayer for Cancer at the National Shrine of St. Jude. Today we pray in a special way for all those affected by cancer.
On the same day one of the worlds most famous atheists pens an article called Topic of Cancer where he talks about the effects of radiation therapy:
Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.
Even as we regret the sad ending to an exciting story and empathize with certain battles that are lost; “If Penélope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even notice.”“, it is apparent that he struggles with cancer he hasn’t ended his struggle against redemption to wit:
Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger emphasis mine?
Ah yes the villainy of the pope, that arch meddler who still leads a church that insists on praying for him and doing its all to grab him from the abyss he cannot see and refuses to acknowledge. Some things never change.
I’ve often said that people have the rest of their lives to ridicule, abandon or live without the grace of God for their satisfaction and the approval of the world, after that they’re on their own. For Mr. Hitchens that reality is closing in, but in fact it closes in on all of us every day. The difference is that Chris Hitchens is aware of it. May the rest of us not forget.
Via Robert Stacy’s post titled Just another Deadline:
Memeorandum thread here.
Update: The Anchoress response reminds me of the nuns at the convent at the end of Cyrano de Bergerac
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 