God on Mute Read online

  “It’s my leg.” Samie’s voice bristled with fear. “I can’t feel it. It won’t move …” Samie, pale as the moon, was sitting upright in bed, clutching her thigh. Then, suddenly, before I could laugh and tell her that she’d probably just been sleeping funny and that she should go back to sleep before she woke the baby, the fingers of her right hand began to curl into an old lady’s fist. Her wrist twisted to a 90-degree angle. She let out a gasp—a yelp—of pain as shuddering spasms began to tremble up her arm.

  Samie watched the convulsions in horror, as if some alien power had seized her hand and was now advancing malevolently along her arm toward her head. “What’s happening to me?” she gasped, but I didn’t know. Her elbow jabbed sideways and her hand became a cobra ready to strike. These strange contortions reached the curve of her neck and then, with a dreadful inevitability, an invisible violence took hold of Samie’s head, thrusting her chin down toward her shoulder as if she was playing the fiddle. As if she was holding the phone to chat casually—hands-free—by shrugging that same shoulder toward her ear. I’d never before witnessed a seizure. I felt calm, yet breathless. My head was logical and my lungs were full of helium. Concentrating, I dialed the ambulance, carefully placing my finger on each pad.

  It is a terror to wake in the night to see the face you love more than any other leering demonically. The image stains your memory like the Shroud of Turin, and it doesn’t fade. By now, Samie’s eyes—those beautiful, summer-blue eyes—had turned to moons of white and her whole body seemed to be shaking. I hoped she was unconscious, but then, with superhuman effort she forced out a single, desperate word: “P-p-p-pray.”

  And so I did. I prayed like I’d never prayed before, helplessly convinced that I was watching my wife die. I begged God to make the convulsions stop so that she could at least draw breath. I prayed in the name of Jesus. I tried to have faith. I invoked the power of His blood. I rebuked and renounced everything I could think of rebuking and renouncing. This was not prayer for a parking space or a sunny day. This seemed to me to be a matter of life and death. Samie was turning blue, and bloodied spittle was blotting the pillow. The ambulance was taking forever. My prayers weren’t working.

  In fact, it was probably only a matter of minutes before the paramedics strode into the house, their boots clomping loudly on the exposed wooden floorboards of our bedroom. They assessed the situation and carried Samie noisily down to the ambulance parked in the road outside, lights flashing like a cheap disco. Somehow, Danny slept peacefully through the whole ordeal, still blowing those tiny kisses of comfort, still dreaming no doubt about the milky warmth of his last feed. Would it, I wondered, be exactly that-his last feed?

  • • • •

  The lights of the hospital were reassuringly bright, and the seizure soon exhausted itself. Samie slumped to sleep like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Concussed, I just stood there gazing at my wife, watching her breathing. Breathing slowly. Breathing softly. Her face was white, bleached like a flash photograph, and her blond hair was brown against the brightness of the pillow. I blinked. Everything seemed without shadows, overexposed.

  My mind swirled back to the previous evening. Climbing into bed, I had prayed as usual for Hudson, asleep in the room next door, for our tiny new baby beside the bed and, yes, I had prayed for Samie too. “Watch over us, Lord,” I’d whispered as I always did. We turned out the light that night, trusting God’s protection implicitly. How, I now wondered, could we ever turn it back on?

  But such doubts seemed dangerous in these hostile wards. Somewhere, they were doing tests. The chrome instruments, the beeping monitors and the smell of ether made prayer seem naïve, so I grabbed my phone and shuffled outside.

  Cigarette butts lay strewn around the entrance to the hospital like soggy confetti at the door of a church. It was a miserable dawn at the dog-end of winter, but out here, standing in the smokers’ ash under a gray sky, I felt closer to God and talked to Him as best I could. I told Him I trusted Him, repeating the same childish little phrases over and over again like a monk muttering the rosary: “Please make her better … heal her, Lord … don’t let there be a problem …”

  I went back inside, and a nurse assured me kindly that “Everyone’s allowed one seizure in his or her lifetime.” She was right. Loads of people go through stuff like that—and worse, by far. Anyway, if, for some strange reason, Samie had developed epilepsy, we would cope. People do. But what about our two children asleep at home with a babysitter? Why, I wondered darkly, hadn’t my prayers made any notable difference when Samie and I needed God’s help more than ever before?

  Here I am, one of the leaders within a prayer movement that (according to one overexcited commentator) is “taking the world by storm,” and (dare I admit it?) my deepest prayers are impotent. It’s scarcely comforting that the disciples had the same problem when they prayed for a boy with epilepsy and that Jesus put it down to their lack of faith. No wonder the boy’s father wept when he said, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). It’s a line I have tried myself (sometimes with the tears) many times since that night. But as subsequent seizures continued to assault Samie’s body, I confess that it eventually became easier not to pray at all than to endure a minor crisis of faith after each episode.

  Bad News

  Eventually, a doctor invited me to sit with him on a row of gray plastic seats attached to the wall in a corridor right next to an automatic door. “Bad news,” he intoned. I chose to leave a seat between us, and so we sat there side by side, a little apart, as he began to say the words: “The CAT scan shows a growth in your wife’s brain.”

  An ambulance man came through the automatic doors. It was a cold day in March and an icy breeze followed him in. “It’s very large, I’m afraid … the size of an orange … it might have been growing very slowly over a protracted period, or it might be fast-growing and aggressive.” I remember thinking that a row of plastic chairs in a corridor was the wrong place to be telling me this. And why an orange? The doctor said something about sending the scans electronically to a consultant at another hospital for analysis. He didn’t know if it would be operable. He stood in his white coat, and I in my jeans. “Shall we go tell Samantha?”

  I persuaded the doctor to delay breaking the news until Samie awoke. Her parents and sister had arrived at her bedside, but for more than an hour, as she continued to sleep peacefully, I didn’t tell them the diagnosis because—for some old-fashioned reason—I thought Samie should be the first to know. Waiting with this terrible secret ticking in my mind like a time bomb, I willed my wife not to wake. I watched her. I watched the clock. I watched her family, who were talking low and reading celebrity magazines. I was lonelier than I had ever been before; yet strangely, I was also becoming aware of a kind of inner warmth. It was the comfort of huddling into a thick coat with deep pockets on a bitterly cold night. Doctors would probably call it shock, but to me it felt a lot like the presence of God.

  I have talked to others about their experiences of trauma, and it is remarkable how often the crisis throws us upon God-whether or not we had faith in Him before. Suddenly, we are jolted into a state of intense vulnerability and instinctively reach for the Father’s hand. Trauma itself rarely creates a crisis of faith. I guess hospital lights are just too bright to house the dark night of the soul. During the initial trauma of a car crash or a betrayal or a diagnosis like ours, we are simply too shocked and too scared to ask grave theological questions about unanswered prayer. For me, at least, those questions would come in the weeks, months and years of weary believing that lay ahead.

  When Samie awoke, she immediately realized that something else was wrong. I took her hand, drew a deep breath and paused. I have no idea what words I used to tell my 29-year-old wife that she had a tumor the size of an orange growing within the confines of her skull, but I do remember her response vividly. For a moment she just stared at me in blank denial, her eyes pleading for a punch line, searching my face for a glimpse of absolution. Then a moaning sound began in her belly and she cried “NO!” so loud and so long that the entire ward heard her grief. It was the saddest, angriest sound I have ever heard, like the groan of a wounded animal. The doctor was shaking when he left the room.

  • • • •

  After several hours, the news came back that the tumor was operable. We gasped with relief and began to prepare Samie for the ordeal that lay ahead. Kind relations cared for Hudson and Daniel, and each night I would leave the hospital to bathe them both and read Hudson his bedtime story. Would the words and pictures some day describe a mother he couldn’t recall? Night after night I banished such thoughts and cuddled the kids a little too tightly. For me, putting Hudson and Danny to bed was the hardest thing of all during those days awaiting the operation. I would often tiptoe out of their bedrooms choking back the tears.

  Samie didn’t want to be left alone for more than a few minutes. Something was growing in her head. Seizures could assault her body at any moment. Her children had been taken from her. And soon a man would saw away a section of her skull and cut something from her brain. For a long time, she was too scared to sleep without sedatives. Then, one evening, a group of strangers drove two hours from Reading, near London, to pray all night in the hospital chapel just for Samie. That was the first night she slept peacefully without pills. The following morning when we found out about this covert prayer vigil, we recognized the evidence of God’s love embedded in their extraordinary kindness.

  As the day of the surgery approached, we also found great comfort in the promises of the Bible. I’m not just saying this because it’s what Christians are supposed to say in situations like this. The Bible addressed our fears in a way no person could and gave words to things we were struggling to express. Almost every night we went to sleep clutching a verse for dear life. One of our favorites came from the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians:

  Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus (vv. 6-7).

  We also gleaned hope from some less predictable sources. When we learned that actor and former pop star Martin Kemp (he was in the ’80s rock band Spandau Ballet ) had survived a brain tumor, we cut out a picture of him frolicking on a beach in Barbados from Hello! magazine and stuck it to the mirror above Samie’s basin. The blessed icon of Saint Martin of the Most Sexy Six-Pack smiled benevolently down on us from above the sink, promising the possibility—however distant it seemed—of life after brain surgery.

  Praying Like a Man Falling Down Stairs

  Outwardly, I tried to give an impression of stoic endurance, and there were times when I did feel very calm. But I was also scared that Samie might die if I didn’t pray enough, or if I didn’t have enough faith, or if I didn’t fast enough, or if I didn’t bind some disembodied principality, or if I didn’t repent of some root sin, or if I didn’t strap her body on a stretcher bound for Lourdes, or if I didn’t agree with Benny Hinn. Surely, I thought, God would not disqualify her on a technicality?

  I’m ashamed to admit that this was how my prayer life looked when it really counted. Samie’s faith frequently amazed me, but I prayed at best like a child and at worst like a charlatan looking for snake oil. There were times (should I admit this to you?) when Samie’s diagnosis merely stirred up the murkiest shallows of my soul, bringing to the surface my inner cravings for sin, sympathy and back-to-back Big Macs. What a contrast to the One who endured grief infinitely worse than ours yet somehow gouged the words from His heart on which human history would turn: “Not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

  When our souls, like Christ’s, are overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, we do not necessarily pray like Jesus. In fact, we may barely pray at all. I’ve noticed that one of the common defense mechanisms against suffering is to glorify it by beatifying any person who manages to endure pain with some modicum of dignity. We are quick to describe such people as heroic. We consider them deep. We frequently declare them saints simply for having suffered. Our subconscious motive in doing this is, perhaps, to distance ourselves from the dreadful possibility that it really could be us in that wheelchair, or caught by that tsunami, or in danger of losing that baby. Of course, many saints do suffer, but in my experience there is nothing glorious—and far less that is glamorous—in the soul’s response to profound trauma. Lying half naked and vomiting with fear in an MRI scanner does not automatically grant you a hotline to heaven.

  The psychological trauma experienced by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane was extreme. Symptomatically, according to Doctor Luke, “his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44). Jesus, we now know, was probably suffering a rare physiological condition called haematidrosis in which, under extreme anguish, capillaries may rupture in the subcutaneous layer of skin near the sweat glands so that the sufferer emits sweat tinged with blood. Here is a man caught in the extremes of mental and spiritual torment. “My soul,” He tells His disciples without exaggeration, “is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Mark 14:34).

  One of the most touching aspects of Christ’s prayers at this agonizing time is how very simple and honest they are: “Abba, Father … everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me” (v. 36). The great theologian Karl Barth said that true prayer is primarily simple. “In the first instance, it is an asking,” he said.1 This is reassuring for those of us who struggle to issue anything more than six-year-old “Dear God” type requests when we are under intense pressure.

  Sometimes we wonder why these prayers are not being answered, and well-meaning people tell us deep things about prayer not being a slot machine, or about the transforming inner power of contemplative prayer, or about fasting, spiritual warfare and the importance of gratitude. We nod and say, “Aha, that’s really helpful,” but our prayer lives continue to be a staccato succession of yells and groans like a man falling down stairs. And as we gurgle and bounce down the steps of life, these people seem to glide serenely past us on the escalator bound for heaven. Secretly, we may sometimes suspect that we’re not really praying at all. So these words from Barth are reassuring:

  It is the fact that [a man] comes before God with his petition which makes him a praying man. Other theories of prayer may be richly and profoundly thought out and may sound very well, but they all suffer from a certain artificiality because they miss this simple and concrete fact, losing themselves in heights and depths where there is no place for the man who really prays, who is simply making a request.2

  In that hospital ward, awaiting Samie’s surgery, I couldn’t manage long, impressive prayers and complicated spiritual techniques. In fact, after many months, I ran out of words altogether. My prayers—if that’s what they were—merely amounted to thinking about Samie, the kids or our bank account with a heavy sigh and groaning two words that might have been mistaken for blasphemy: “Oh, God.” I didn’t know if this even counted as prayer, but at that time it was about all I could manage. I have since come to find enormous riches in other forms of prayer—some of which we will touch on later in this book. But Karl Barth kindly reminds us that it’s okay to pray like a six-year-old or a man falling downstairs. In fact, it’s more than okay; it’s possibly the most important kind of prayer there can be.

  Nostalgia for Normal

  The day before the operation, Hudson and baby Daniel were brought in to see their mother, and photographs were taken for reasons we dared not voice. That night, as I slept on a mattress beside her bed—beneath the blessed icon of Saint Martin—Samie secretly wrote her goodbyes. She wrote a letter to me and a letter each for the boys to have and to read when they were older, telling them that their mummy had loved them utterly, that she had never wanted to leave them, and that Jesus loves them still.

  Danny’s letter was the hardest of all to write, because Samie realized that she didn’t yet know anything about him. Who would this little bundle grow up to be? Mourning for memories that might never happen—family photographs in which she might not appear—the letters became shorter with every rewriting, until eventually she knew that she was done. She sealed the three simple messages neatly in three envelopes and hid them where she knew I would find them. There was peace in the completion of this task, and soon Samie too was able to sleep beneath Saint Martin’s gaze.

  The following day when they eventually called Samie to the operating room, we killed time by playing the quiz game “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” The truthful answer to the rhetorical question was “not us!” We wanted more than mere millions. What greater prize could there possibly be than to be ordinary again? What riches to live in a house, go to the supermarket on Thursdays, and simply to tuck the kids in their beds one more time, pink from the bath and smelling of soap.

  Somewhere in the hospital, the surgeon was preparing for his third operation of the day. The orderlies came to take Samie down. Would she ever return? And if she did, would she still have her movement, her speech and the ability to understand? Silencing such thoughts, Samie held out her wrist—the one that had first convulsed—and allowed a man to put a needle in it. Her eyes closed and, in less than a minute, she was gone.

  Chapter Two

  SEEKING MAGIC FRUIT AND FINDING TEARS

  Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.

  JESUS , MARK 14:36