“You should prepare yourself for it to be a brain tumor,” the pediatrician told me. It was a Monday in August 2020, and, thanks to COVID protocol, she had just conducted a FaceTime examination of my toddler, Ashe. She was frustrated with the limitations of the technology, and I was sweaty from wrestling Ashe while also holding my phone close to his face. “I’ve never seen an eye cross this quickly. That’s not how it happens. It’s very likely a brain tumor,” she told me. The morning before, while I was filming our live-streamed worship service, my three-year-old’s left eye turned inward. “Okay,” I said with a shuttering breath. “What do I do next?”
Ashe needed to see an ophthalmologist and a neurologist as quickly as possible. “If he hasn’t had an MRI by Thursday afternoon,” one doctor said, “you need to just go to the emergency room at UNC Children’s Hospital.” I was grateful for that declarative sentence. Our world was full of questions. What kind of brain tumor? What else could it be? How do you get seen faster?
Fear roiled through me. My child’s body, once as familiar to me as my own, had been translated into an unknown language — inaccessible, undecipherable. Courage had no place in this strange grammar where question marks were the only punctuation.
The narrator of T.S. Eliot’s 1919 poem “Gerontion” is, as the Greek root of his name implies, an old man. He speaks of his life and its ultimate emptiness in the rubble and detritus of post-World War I. Observing the emptiness of heroism, religion, history, and his personal relationships, Gerontion says, “Think/Neither fear nor courage saves us.”
“Think/Neither fear nor courage saves us.”
I thought of these words during this period of unknown in my son’s health. They plucked a string deep within me. Gerontion is not a model for living. He’s miserable and probably antisemitic, but his musings on fear and courage seem right. As a society, we talk as if courage is the antidote to the fear that is all around us. We behave as if the unknown could be tamed by either fearing the right things or courageously marching into the right battle. The problem with the unknown is of course, that one rarely selects the right doom to fear or a hypothetical hill on which to die. Gerontion observes that heroism is the “father” of vice and “virtues/Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.” Salvation is not to be found on the spectrum of fear and foolhardiness.
My son did not have a brain tumor. He had a rare presentation of the rarest form of esotropia (a type of eye misalignment). His ophthalmologist had never seen it in her career. There were special glasses, and then eventually surgery. Eventually, the punctuation of our lives changed back to periods, at least for now.
I think Gerontion is right; “neither fear nor courage saves us.” Had my fear controlled me in the unknown moments before Ashe’s MRI, it would have consumed our whole family. Courage would have been foolhardy. Faithfulness was the only option. The string of time is twined with both fear and courage. The threads form a tapestry of faithfulness that is usually unspectacular, but miraculous, nonetheless. Fear informs us, courage empowers us, time gives us perspective. It is faithfulness that saves us from the tumult and terrors of daily life.
Fear informs us, courage empowers us, time gives us perspective. It is faithfulness that saves us from the tumult and terrors of daily life.
If that is true, then the role of the Christian community in unknown times is to name God’s faithfulness and encourage ours in response. This is not done by directives to “just have faith” (an imperative that generally offers shame rather than encouragement) or “believe” (as if vaguely spiritual words automatically inspire trust). No, we call out faithfulness in storytelling, reading Scripture, connecting over meals, weeping, laughing, and worshipping together. We carry on and we carry one another. “Neither fear nor courage saves us,” but in the grace and mercy of human connection, in the presence of God’s Spirit, faithfulness just might.
The afternoon I first heard the words “brain tumor” in conjunction with my son, my sister sent me a text message. “I’m having pizza delivered to you tonight. You don’t need to cook. What kind do you want?” Salvation: connection, generosity, faithfulness.
