Saving One’s Life

            When Moses speaks to the Israelites of a stark choice between “life and prosperity, death and doom,” he implicitly evokes the quality of time.  Prosperity is, of course, lived across the extension of many days and even years.  Doom, on the other hand, indicates the absence of a future, indeed the annihilation of the goods of time.

            When the news first hit me in the orthodontist’s chair in 2010 that I was faced with a serious jaw problem that was inescapable and “chronic,” it felt like the ending of my whole life as I had lived it up to that moment.  Temporary illnesses come and go, even though in the moment they can feel like they’ll last forever.  But the TMJ diagnosis was different:  My easy, unreflective experience of life and health was over.

            Through the experience of trying to manage various ameliorative therapies to ease the slipped cartilage discs of my jaw, I literally felt the futility of the various systems of my body trying to “save” themselves.  The muscle spasms and sympathetic nerve flare-ups, the pressure and ringing in my ears and the sharp stabbing deep in my jawbone all conspired to indicate a curiously destructive internal competition rather than any restorative cooperation, and the net effect was a pervasive feeling of being painfully doomed.

            For Jesus in the Gospel to announce that the Son of Man must suffer and die is---even at the human level---extraordinary.  Like a doctor trained to see such things clearly, Christ announces that this condition is not a mere possibility but a full-blown inevitability. He---and those He loves---will lose their lives as they know them, and do so literally excruciatingly unto the grave.

            When my orthodontist, after giving me the bad news, in the next breath mentioned that there is a clinic in Florida in which a doctor he knows---Dr. Mark Piper---treats conditions like mine, restoring patients like me to health, I was still in shock.  The offer seemed unreal and utterly abstract; I was unprepared to hear it, let alone accept it.  I also remember the orthodontist promising that his staff would give me a folder from the Piper Clinic so I could contact them.  As I got up in an unbelieving daze to leave, the receptionist apologized that she actually didn’t have a copy of the promised folder; she could offer me the Piper Clinic’s phone number and I could look them up on the internet. 

            Though I was deeply confused and shaken and angry, I took the initial steps they suggested.  Knowing what I know now---having finally encountered Dr. Piper who has over the past months diagnosed and operated on me, restoring me to health again---I understand more of exactly what depth of faith was required of the Apostles in being told they would travel the three-fold promise of suffering, death, and resurrection.  To accept the Gospel as lived in the Church is to stake one’s life on promises imperfectly understood (and all too often imperfectly delivered by professed believers awkwardly pointing the way forward).  And yet---miracle of miracles---these very promises ultimately come from and lead to the Divine Physician, Who is Restorative Perfection itself.   

            For Christ our Life to face death---and for Him Who bestows eternal prosperity to taste temporal doom---teaches us how good and beyond ordinary time this Lenten season is.  Our lives as we think we know them must end.  The conspiracies and competitions within us must give way to the Lord’s startling announcement.  This summons may strike us with the seemingly indirect and impersonal character of being handed a phone number or the oddness of an internet search on which one’s whole future happiness hinges.   But in the end (and from the beginning), it is our Savior’s very faith in us---as in the first Apostles---that allows us to stake everything on this strange new life relentlessly pursued by Christ and by all called to bear His saving name.