Faith and Its Fluctuations

From the beginning of this whole process, Kay and I have been ready to rejoice, only to find our hopes disappointed. The first month we tried to get pregnant, Kay was late with her period. She was never late, she’s rarely been late since, but she was not pregnant. For well over a year we tried, but nothing happened. Finally, they went in to take out her ovarian cysts, not having anything else to try (various fertility drugs, such as Clomid, had failed) only to find that she had endometriosis. At first, that seemed like a good thing: we knew what was wrong and had heard it could be cured with hormone treatment (I think I’m remembering this correctly), not to mention the scraping they had done already. It turned out that it would not be so easy – endometriosis is infinitely more complicated, and as we found out later, the scraping did possibly more bad than good, as it left behind adhesions as effective as endometrial tissue at physically isolating and damaging, through inflammation, the reproductive organs.

We finally began the process with Dr. Hilgers and the Pope Paul VI Institute, well over a year ago (perhaps a year-and-a-half ago), and things seemed to go well in the operation, though we knew it would be a difficult one, and by no means guaranteed success. But these last two weeks have been full of nothing but setbacks, it has seemed: a good first day followed by the somnolence of atalectesis; her revival and subsequent eating followed by vomiting and diarrhea; a bowel revived from ileus followed by fever and renewed coughing; plaintive hopes for pneumonia followed by revelation of the pelvic abscess. Now the less harsh procedure of the catheter and a dose of antibiotics is our hope, against which is juxtaposed the six-month colostomy. (This is not to mention the damage this kind of inflammation can do to ovaries, tubes, and uterus, which, along with the coughing, is for now a secondary worry.) I hope our beleaguered troops hold the line here.

The military metaphor arises because I have been reading the first volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War. I am not alone in having Lincoln as my favorite president because of his thoughts, expressed in his profound and serious words. I was too poor a philosophy student to say whether Lincoln’s thoughts were particularly original, but the humility and cadence of their expression is moving in the extreme. There are two writings that Foote quotes, in each of which Lincoln addresses situations of much greater extremity than that in which Kay and I are embroiled. In speaking to a Quaker woman who called on Lincoln to show her support for his having issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he said,

We are indeed going through a great trial – a fiery trial. In
the very responsible position in which I happen to be
placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our
Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out
his great purposes, I have desired that all my works and
acts may be according to his will; and that it might be so,
I have sought his aid. But if, after endeavoring to do my
best in the light which he affords me, I find my efforts
fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to
me, he wills it otherwise. If I had had my way, this war
would never have been commenced. If I had been
allowed my way, this war would have been ended before
this. But we find it still continues, and we must believe
that he permits it for some wise purpose of his own,
mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our
limited understandings we may not be able to
comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe that he who
made the world still governs it.

Kay and I are not so much instruments here, not so much operating as being operated upon (quite literally, in her case), but still her subjection to treatment and my support for her can be said to be our “efforts,” and certainly our “war” would have ended before this had we been allowed our way. And our little case is as worrying to us in its threat to the world for which we are responsible – our parents, our marriage, each other – as the horrendous losses of Antietam were in their threat to the vast arena for which Lincoln was so tragically and movingly responsible.

Lincoln also wrote a private piece, left on his desk but apparently not intended for publication. It was rescued by his secretary John Hay, being published later. In it, Lincoln attempts in effect to reconcile the existence of men such as Bishop-General Pope, and his prayers, with the equally fervent Northern clergymen, and their many prayers:

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party
claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may
be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and
against the same thing at the same time. In the present
civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is
something different from the purpose of either party;
and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as
they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose.
I am almost ready to say this is probably true; that God
wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By
his mere quiet power on the minds of the now
contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed
the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest
began. And having begun he could give the final victory
to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

This passage is perhaps less applicable to Kay’s and my situation: there is no one, after all, praying against us. But the enemy that (or who) has entered the field has not been prevented from bringing his soldiers against us. The contest proceeds. We can merely fight by our best lights and pray that, supposing it is His will on earth and in heaven, we receive our daily bread, and that our trespasses will be forgiven us. Father, if Thou wilt, remove this chalice from us: but yet not our will, but Thine be done.
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Thanks, by the way, to The Abraham Lincoln Association, as well as to that perfidious academic institution holding the electronic version of their The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. As their version contained some confusing punctuation – perhaps in the manuscript sources? – I have made some changes to match Foote’s version, on pp. 709-10 of Volume I of his work.