Answers

I need answers.

I'm the kind of person who just needs to figure everything out - why I got this question wrong, why this person said this to me, how can I make that situation better.

It's a blessing and a curse. My scientific mind demands an explanation for anything unknown, yet those close to me have often cautioned me about being too inflexible and needing to learn to let things go.

Do we need to know the answers to everything? I recently reread one of my favorite childhood books, C. S. Lewis' The Horse and His Boy, and there is one particularly beautiful chapter (chapter 11) in which the novel's protagonist Shasta (the "boy") finally encounters the lion Aslan (Lewis' archetype for Christ):

"I was the Lion." And as Shasta gaped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. "I was the Lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the Lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the Lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the Lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you."

"Then it was you who wounded Aravis?"

"It was I."

"But what for?"

 "Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own."

"Who are you?" asked Shasta.

"Myself," said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again "Myself", loud and clear and gay: and then the third time "Myself", whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.

In this encounter, Shasta asks the Lion why He performed a certain action, and who He is, and Aslan responds to both questions very ambiguosly. But it is His first response that really gets me. CS Lewis really makes a good point here about our naturally inquisitive nature as humans and how sometimes, we just can't expect to know all the answers to everything.

The late Very Reverend Fr Thomas Hopko, in his 55 Lenten Maxims, spoke about this in the maxim for day 37:

Once and for all, we have to stop trying to figure things out. God can illumine our mind and give us insight into the nature of things, but we can't figure it out. We don't have the equipment to do it, and we should stop trying.

It's interesting how Fr Tom says "we don't have the equipment" to figure things out. I think if God had allowed our small human brains to possess the knowledge and answers to all the questions in the world, we wouldn't be able to handle it. Perhaps it's a blessing that some things are left unknown to us.

But even more importantly than that, I believe there IS an answer to all our questions. It's just not the answer we expect or are taught to seek in our society. The answer is Christ. Not anything else. Just Christ. Trust in Him and in His Word, trust that we don't always understand why things happen, but that we pray for the faith to accept it. Seeking Him and Him alone is the sole and consummate answer to all our needs and desires, and when we seek Him, and find Him, we find that all our questions disappear.

When I read the aforementioned novel, I can't help but think how the boy Shasta, in his fictional world of Narnia, echoes a question asked over 2000 years ago by someone in our own world, when he was also blessed with a life-changing encounter. He asked a question many people are still searching for the answer to, and Christ did not respond, because He Himself was the whole and consummate answer.

Of course, as always, I will leave you with what is perhaps my very favorite CS Lewis quote, and I think in this short quote he sums up everything I have been trying to say in this post:

"I know now, Lord, why You utter no answer. You are Yourself the answer. Before Your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?" 

 

"Further Up and Further In!"

Our Christian life is like a hallway. God leads us down the hallway and sometimes He opens doors for us along that hallway. We think that when He opens a door, He wants us to go through the door into the room and spend the rest of our lives there. But in actuality He opens the door for just a short period of time, long enough for us to stick our heads through and take a peek inside and learn what we can from the experience. And then He closes the door and pulls us back into the hallway and leads us further on.

Now, the problem is, sometimes we don't want to leave the room and go back into the hallway. He's opened the door for us and we've caught a glimpse of a cozy chair and a warm fire inside, and in the flames of the fire we see all our dreams manifesting before us. We'd just like to enter the room and stay there for good, thank you very much, but we feel a constant, annoying tug at our arm pulling us back into the hallway. And sometimes we waste so much of our lives struggling with God at the door of that room, repenting our sins and heading back to the hallway, then losing our resolve and turning around and walking towards that oh-so-enticing fire.

Imagine how much happier we would have been had we just listened in the first place, closed our eyes to the room, followed Him back into the hallway, trusting Him to lead us to greater riches further on.

Sometimes we don't understand why He opened the door if He didn't want us to stay in the room, but we have to trust that as long as He's leading us from door to door, He is leading us from glory to glory, and we will eventually reach the end of the hallway and go into the room that has no walls, that stretches on forever, that always goes "further up and further in." And like the Unicorn in CS Lewis's The Last Battle, in that room we will cry out, "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here! This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. Come further up, come further in!"

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The title of this post, "Further Up and Further In," is taken from The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis, and if you haven't read this book yet, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Moments of Clarity

St. John Chrysostom wrote that when we find ourselves unable to sleep at night, this is a sign from God that something is wrong and we should use our wakefulness as a "period for reflection." He wrote: "So when you cannot sleep, allow the thoughts that lie deepest in your heart to rise up to the surface. Often these thoughts are a reproach, telling you of a sin you have committed or an act of charity you failed to perform."

I had a friend who always attested that her best ideas came to her in the shower. I don't doubt that; my best ideas come to me when I wake up in the middle of the night. It makes sense, actually, because being awake in the middle of the night is kind of like being suspended in time, like being awake somewhere in the Twilight Zone. During sleep, our brains have been getting rid of all the nasty toxic waste from the day before, so we are relatively less foggy, but we are not rushing out of bed to get to work or school; there are no immediate distractions. I really do believe God uses this time to direct our thoughts towards matters of the spiritual life.

So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, don't fret over trying to get back to sleep. (Here's my chance to incorporate some sleep hygiene techniques I had to squeeze into my brain for Step 1). If you don't fall asleep within 15-30 minutes, go to another room and read, have a light snack, do some quiet activity. And wonder if there is a perhaps a reason God woke you in the middle of the night. Maybe you didn't give Him any time during your busy day and He wants to nudge you awake (literally and figuratively), and tell you something that might be kind of important.

C. S. Lewis and Medicine

The Coptic New Year is quickly approaching, and you might be thinking about some New Year's resolutions. I know I am - I resolve this year to read more. With Step 1 behind me, I no longer feel guilty picking up a good fiction book instead of poring over First Aid.

What to read? It's exciting to discover new authors, but tonight I'm feeling a longing for the warm comfort of known and loved authors. Those who know me know that I am simply obsessed with C. S. Lewis. And it's about time I dedicate a post to this mighty man of mere Christianity. I am by no means a scholar or an authority on C. S. Lewis - just an avid fan, devoted reader, and yes, subscriber to the C. S. Lewis Daily Quotes iPhone app (free!).

I envy those of you who have not yet met C. S. Lewis through his writings - what joy awaits you when you first open one of his books! (and for that momentous occasion I recommend The Four Loves, Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, or The Last Battle).

In his collection of essays God in the Dock, particularly in the essays "Miracles," "'Horrid Red Things,'" "Religion and Science," and "The Laws of Nature," Lewis touches upon the subject of the intersection between religion and science. His take on medicine is particularly interesting; consider the following quote from "Miracles:"

"The miracles of healing fall into the same pattern. This is sometimes obscured for us by the somewhat magical view we tend to take of ordinary medicine. The doctors themselves do not take this view. The magic is not in the medicine but in the patient's body. What the doctor does is to stimulate Nature's functions in the body, or to remove hindrances. In a sense, though we speak for convenience of healing a cut, every cut heals itself; no dressing will make skin grow over a cut on a corpse. That same mysterious energy which we call gravitational when it steers the planets and biochemical when it heals a body is the efficient cause of all recoveries, and if God exists, that energy, directly or indirectly, is His. All who are cured are cured by Him, the healer within."

PS: A brief introduction to CS Lewis' writings and a few of my favorites!

Fiction:
1) Chronicles of Narnia. (The Horse and His Boy, The Last Battle are my favorites)
2) Till We Have Faces - For older readers, and the source of my absolute favorite CSL quote: "I know now, Lord, why You utter no answer. You are Yourself the answer. Before Your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?"

Non-Fiction

1) Mere Christianity - a must-read. Period.
2) The Four Loves - the starting point from which to begin to understand this most crucial of all virtues
3) Surprised by Joy - his autobiography, which chronicles his conversion to Theism.
4) The Abolition of Man - a hard read, but crucial for understanding Lewis' views on mankind and where we are headed
5) God in the Dock - a collection of short essays
6) The Business of Heaven - a daily reader
7) A Grief Observed - starts with the chilling line "No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear" - a raw account of his grief and questioning of faith, written after his beloved wife's death (cancer).
8) The Weight of Glory - from which comes another favorite quote, "The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

Are there any other CS Lewis fans out there? Leave some reading recommendations in the comments below!!

Rock Bottom

JK Rowling, in her 2008 Harvard University commencement speech, said the following about failure:

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. 

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default." *

I think everyone reading this post has experienced failure in his life; in fact, I almost hope that you, dear reader, have had your share of failure. As a society, we value success so much, which is not in itself a bad thing at all. But, as I'm sure my fellow sons and daughters of Egyptian immigrants can attest to, from a young age I have been taught that hard work, diligence, and prayer is the infallible recipe for success, and as long as I stick to that, I will always have "good" things at the end of my road. Having experienced quite a few failures in quick succession over the past few months, I almost wish someone had taught me how to be ready for failure, how to thank God for it, and how to transform it into a chance for growth.

CS Lewis said, "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."** I cannot pretend to know the reason behind every single failure in my life. Surely, most have been due to my own stupidity. Perhaps some have been due to the shortcomings of those around me. And maybe some have been God's way of turning my feet back towards Him, after I consistently ignored His gentle tugs at my back. Sometimes God strips away relationships and denies us opportunities because it is the only way we will be able to see the gaping holes in our spiritual lives. Gaping holes are scary. I'd rather have the hard failures if it means I'm walking on solid ground.

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*You can read the full transcript of Rowling's speech and watch the video here.

**This quote is taken from The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis.

Medical Musings

This is inspired by a post on the blog "Not So Spiritual Words."  I cannot take credit for the original humor, but I couldn't resist borrowing the idea for a Coptic Rx post...who can deny that med school needs a little humor now and again?

You know your med school professor is a ___________ because ____________:

Psychiatrist: right before he walks into the auditorium, you sense a disturbance in the Force

Pediatrician: her stethoscope is pink and dinosaur band-aids are falling out of her scrubs pocket

Emergency Med doc: he delivers a 140-slide powerpoint lecture in 13 minutes flat

Dermatologist: upon entering the lecture hall, you think for a second you accidentally walked into the lobby of the Ritz 

Ophthalmologist: upon entering the lecture hall, all the nerds have assembled to the front  

Pathologist: his lectures run overtime by 30 minutes and could have been summed up with one slide: "this stuff's not supposed to be there"

Surgeon: he succeeds in making everyone who attended lecture feel like an idiot by the time lecture's over  

Anesthesiologist: he succeeds in making everyone fall asleep by the end of lecture...and you seem to have gaps in your memory when you wake up

Radiologist: his first words upon entering the brightly-lit auditorium are "Oh my God, this is blinding me."

Neurologist: somehow, a discussion of where the lesion is turns into a riveting argument about the meaning of life 

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

I remember being asked this question a lot when I was a kid. Every year I had a different answer - first I wanted to be a computer software engineer just like my dad, then I wanted to be an astronaut (that was my Star Trek phase), then there was a crazy year when for some reason I thought I wanted to be a doctor (hehe), then it morphed into a desire to be an architect, followed by a history teacher, then a math teacher, then a freelance artist.

I recently witnessed a dad asking his daughter the same question and she eagerly answered, "A doctor!" After giving her a high-five, I turned to my friend, who is about to enter medical school, and asked him the same question. He looked at me, surprised, and said "A doctor," and then, thinking I meant what kind of doctor he wanted to be, added, "An otolaryngologist."

But that's not what I meant. I know what he is going to do for the rest of his life. But I wanted to know what he wants to be. 

Being a medical student identifies me, but it doesn't define me. It has changed me, molded me, pushed me to grow, but it does not complete me. I will be a doctor (God willing), I will practice medicine, I will try to help people with illnesses as much as I am able. But that is not the end of what I want to be.

I encourage all those reading this post to ask this question to yourselves, right now, no matter how old you are, how settled in your career you are.

"What do I want to be when I grow up?" Or maybe a more appropriate rendition of this question is, "Who do I want to be?"

It's not about your career goals, it's not about hopes and desires for marriage and a family, it's not about a bucket list of countries you want to travel to, things you want to see, mountains you want to climb, books you want to write.

All those goals are well and good in and of themselves, but what does it all come out to? How does it help you grow? What are you going to take away from those experiences? How will you give back to the world?

I know what I want to be - I want to be a better, kinder, gentler person. I want to be wiser, more well-read, more understanding, more forgiving. I want to stop doing stupid things and conquer my pride.

So, what do you want to be?