Fore note: This written blog is a cousin to a podcast I did about “The Stiff Upper Lip,” so if you are one of the people who listened to that, there will be some redundancy here.

Culture is inescapable. It probably serves a positive role in making the way we think and act robotic, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel with each generation. However, culture can become unhealthy, like a straitjacket upon a society, invisible guard rails on an otherwise safe road.

This negative role of culture was illustrated well in the short film of 1969 called The Lottery. In that film it was custom or part of the culture of a small New England town to, once a year, have a lottery of the citizens and whoever’s name was drawn, had to be stoned to death by the other citizens. No one knew why they had to follow the culture, but they just did.

The healthy approach is to recognize culture for what it is, culture. This was my point of the post about seeing culture as a duck and not a fish. Often it is built around arbitrary rules of behavior, many outdated. Yet, those rules are powerful and if someone tries to take the liberty to violate these unspoken rules there are harsh repercussions. You become the weirdo, the outcast, the “immoral.”

I have many qualms about culture, and I’ve made it my goal not to be a conformist for the sake of conformity, yet I do still wear pants and try to shower every day.  But one of the parts of culture that I despise is the long list of things that are taboo to talk about. I owe my perspective, I think, to my mother who could and would talk about anything. And the fact that I worked for 38 years as a healthcare provider in pain management, where I had intimate conversations with 15 people every day. Nothing was taboo in our conversations, allowing my patients to share their most bitter disappointments. Such sharing was essential to their path to better health.

However, I’ve often found myself in a social situation and began to visualize the herd of mythical elephants in the room that cannot be talked about. Taboo! This is worse, in my opinion, in Christian settings. You know, the pressure to present the idealized Victorian Christian behavior, stiff upper lip, big smile, never saying anything negative, never even farting. Pretending evil doesn’t exist, of if there is evil, being a Christian, erases its sting. The grand masquerade, as I call it. Can’t stand it.

I will give one personal example, and I’m always hesitant to do that. Personal examples are sometimes read as personal grievances and that is not what this is about, it is the much larger picture. As I’ve said before, in philosophy you deal with issues that are the particulars (small scale) and universals (above everything and applying to everyone). I’m trying to talk about universals but using my own experiences as examples. So, I am a student of society, not venting petty grievances.

I’ve noticed that since I’ve had cancer, which is a big part of my life now, whether I like it or not, that part is now taboo. For example, I can post on social media “positive” stories about beauty of nature, how wonderful life is all day long, but, if I dare mention the word “cancer,” invariably, someone will comment to the effect, “Obviously you don’t have your eyes on Jesus.” Sometimes they will send me a personal message with a veiled scold about self-pity. Give me a break, seriously!

When I was first diagnosed with cancer four years ago, there was a mix of responses toward me. I must speak of the positive first. I had old friends coming out of the woods (figuratively) to reach out to me, to join this blog. One such friend was an old roommate, with whom I now disagree with almost everything. He, (a pastor) a profoundly devotee of Donald Trump, blends it seamlessly with his Christianity, which I find repugnant, and he who spouts baseless conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. Normally something I don’t appreciate. However, after not having contact with him for decades, somehow, he heard about my cancer and called me from across the country while I was on my “death bed.” Last year we had a two-hour conversation and once again, we disagreed on every issue we discussed. Yet, at the end of that conversation I had to tell him that I would NEVER forget his call when I was really sick and that I love him and will consider him a dear friend forever, a love that no silly political disagreement can soften.

We also had 18 dear people from our church give up two Saturdays to build Denise the garden I had promised but was no longer able to build. Gerry, Don, and Curt reached out to me when I was in isolation for almost three years, to buttress my sanity. There are many others who have been so kind to us.

But then there are many others, who I’m sure are good people, but the bizarre social stigmas about “failure” make them intensely uncomfortable with tragedy, their own and with others. It violates their paradigm of a happy, God designed world. This attitude was exhibited with many people I bumped into right after my perilous diagnosis, who could not even make eye contact with me. Who could talk to Denise standing beside me but imagining that I was invisible. It was like they were embarrassed for me, as I should be ashamed of myself for catching cancer, as if my very existence was giving God a bad reputation.

But here is the real impetus to my writing, and it is not about me. I had several conversations in the last few months with people I knew had suffered severe personal losses. I tried to draw them out, to share their feelings, but they couldn’t talk about it. Some would think, why is it any of my business? My point is that I am my brother’s keeper. It is my business because I’m a fellow human being and I too have tasted calamity. Call it empathy. So, it frustrates me when people choose to suffer in silence because of the ridiculous social mores of the stiff upper lip, or the belief that “God is in control” as one of these suffering-in-silence people told me. This is not about God’s control or theology. It is not about being strong. If I hear one more story about a grandma who suffered from cancer or some other disease, and never talked about it, never complained, but smiled all the way to the grave, I think I will puke. I now see the person of faith as he or she who slides into their grave on a bed of tears. It is about being human. It is about being genuine.

When I first entered my tribe of cancer victims, some were talking about how lonely suffering is. I was perplexed as I mentioned above how so many people came into my life to offer comfort. But I too learned how lonely it is where the biggest thing in your life is taboo to speak of. If you got a new dog, you could talk all day about it. But if you have cancer, a spouse who left you, a child who has committed suicide, a business failure, or whatever, those things are unmentionable. You must stap on a crocodilian smile upon your face (the opposite of crocodile tears).

I want to tell two more stories to illustrate this. I know this is getting long and feel welcome to leave if you’ve heard enough, my point being made.

The first is a general story to illustrate how this is idiomatic to our culture. I know the Muslim-Arab world pretty good. They don’t have to wear this straight-jacket, phony smiles and pretending all is well. They do share, maybe even more intensely, the notion of an all-omnipotent God, but their culture has not been processed (150 years ago) through the English-Victorian choke point. My Arab friends always spoke their mind. I remember my best friend in Egypt becoming very angry at me and said our friendship was over for good, because I rode a bus to Israel (a country he hated). Yet, he is still my friend today. But, with that said, they too have social rules. Failure to them, could mean payback for evil in their life (sort of like Karma, but from Satan or the “evil eye.”). They do have unhealthy shame about their “failures.”

I will end with one harsh story, just to make a point. In the mid-1990s, I was still attending an evangelical church. Once we invited the youth pastor, his wife, and their 14-year-old daughter over for dinner. During the evening, our conversations became more intimate, and we seemed to project a welcoming and gracious tone, they shared with us a horrible story, which they had never told anyone beside the witnesses to the event ten years previous. They had carried this awful burden alone, thinking that if anyone knew, he would lose his job as a pastor, and they would be hated by everyone.

You see when their daughter was 4-5, they had their second child, a baby boy. Like all toddlers, preschoolers, and the like, they can get quite jealous of a new baby in the house. Ours did. But during a barbeque, this little girl took the lighter fuel from the grill, doused the baby in the stroller, and somehow, set him on fire. He later died from his burns. How in Gods merciful name does any mere mortal deal with such “failure?” I could tell that they had carried this burdened for a decade. No one can recover from such a tragedy; even with God’s help, you can only cope with sorting the pieces left in your life like arranging the water-logged deck chairs on the Titanic . . . after it sank.

Were they bad parents? I seriously doubt it. Why weren’t they watching their baby or their daughter? During the life of our five children, I can promise you that we didn’t watch every move they made, and we were not immune to such a heartbreak. Was the little girl insane? Criminal? Of course, there was a police investigation and the family had years of therapy, but there was no evidence of mental illness in the girl, just horrible judgement by an immature mind. We live in an imperfect world. We must either accept that or live in an “happy” illusion of our making.

This couple was afraid—rightly so—that the more superstitious people in their Christian community would make something “spiritual” out of their loss. “The girl was possessed by a devil.” “They had something bad in their lives that God used this to punish them.” I’m sorry, but I think such ideas are bullshit. Worse, cruel.

What is my point? No, I’m not advocating that we all spend our days crying over our losses and telling everyone we meet the miserable details. But it is my hope that we can move past the ridiculous straight jacket our culture puts on us, that we can talk about our tragedies without shame, without the fear that someone is going to judge our character because of the event, even all the horrible things that was never of our making. Like cancer. We need a tsunami of grace in our culture, where we can love and respect those who have suffered terrible things, even those things THAT WERE of their making, or in people whom we have fundalmental differences on the big questions of life.

Mike

Footnote: We leave in 24 hours for a trip to Iceland. There we will meet
most of our children for a reunion. Two of my grandchildren will not make it
because their passports expired.

This trip is a big deal for us. When I was first diagnosed in 2019, I was
doing dialysis for 4 hours every other day, had a life expectancy of 11 months
and was told I would never board a plane again. It had been our dream to do
adventure travel during our retirement. I was diagnosed when we were training
for a trek across Greenland. So, to have come this far, to consider a trip to
Iceland, is remarkable, of which I am humbly gracious to God and the wonderful
way he has made our bodies and the science that enables us to live.

I love Iceland and this will be our third trip. We almost moved there in the
1980s. I chose it carefully. It is a low-population country (save the
tourists), easy to manage by a rental car, spectacular scenery, and great
people. The travel time is shorter, 7 hours, than in the rest of Europe or of
course the Middle East.

I do have some hesitations and prayer concerns. The last time I flew on a plane,
to see my grandsons, I came home with pneumonia. My immune system is toast. I
am also dealing with my leg pain (for two months now) and I don’t want to hold
up my family. The last thing, to do this trip, I have to delay my chemo and
follow up blood tests for a week. But otherwise, I am look forward to this trip
with so much joy, I can’t hold back the tears of rejoicing.