This Calls for a Feast

I am still recovering from the emotional toll of spending a lot of the last year supporting a dear friend through chemotherapy. We took turns sitting by her side as nurses and doctors injected a cocktail of sickly bright fluids into her frail body.

The worst drug looked like a red fruit punch gatorade that was so poisonous it had a maximum lifetime dosage. The nurse would start by putting on two pairs of rubber gloves, sealing his own hands shut with tape to prevent any possibility of contact with his body. He would read out the amount they were injecting and compare it to the total limit that my friend could withstand over the course of her life. It's a bit of a well-trodden cliche that cancer medication kills parts of someone to save them, but it had never felt more true to me than in that moment, watching the fruit punch enter my friend's bloodstream and feeling her grip weaken in my palm as the light left her eyes.

I am grateful that modern medicine saved her and our time together can be planned out again in relative normalcy. The day that pronouncement was made, we gathered at the oncology ward at the hospital to watch her ring the bell marking the end of her treatment. Friends dialed in from around the world as she sobbed and screamed, throwing the bell back and forth with such vigour.

We often misinterpret the concept of an apocalypse. While we now think of the rapture or the end times, the original Greek definition of apokálypsis is simply a revealing of a truth. My friend's cancer was an apocalypse. When someone close to you brushes past death and is granted a new lease of life, truths are revealed that last way beyond the treatment itself. This chapter fundamentally altered the way I view friendship and love. I've altered what I look for in friends and I've changed how I spend my time. This is worth a different blog post.

At its best, cancer treatment is a linear progression. As long as your body can stay relatively healthy and move from appointment to appointment, you are making progress. No one prepared us for the unknown that came after the end. You ring the bell and then what? It would be a shame to have watched a friend be saved by modern medicine and to continue to live your own as if nothing had happened. I wasn't prepared for the empty vastness that awaited us after the bell was rung. Treatment was hard, but it had direction. The clumsy directionlessness afterwards was a surprisingly difficult adjustment.

One of my favourite sermon series at Forefront Church last year was about Discipline. Last year, our teaching pastor, Reverend Venida, gave a fantastic sermon about the importance of celebration as a discipline. The first thing I noticed about the completion of my friend's treatment is that we were responsible for marking it. The hospital will give you the bell to ring, but anything beyond that was up to us. A "I beat cancer" party doesn't magically appear out of thin air. It is a decision by someone and the people surrounding them to engage in the discipline of celebration.

Unfortunately, the apocalyptic truths from cancer led my friend on a path away from New York City. We gathered at a steakhouse to mark her departure. It was there that I reflected on Reverend Venida's sermon about the discipline of celebration. All throughout scripture and history is the concept of a "feast". This language seems archaic, backwards even. We live in an era of potlucks, dinner parties and the occasional banquet, or gala. But there is something specific about the language that is important to me. To feast is to match the abundance of joy with the plenty of food. The physicality of indulgent eating is a form of exuberance.

We are responsible for marking our own moments. If we haven't cultivated this muscle to celebrate ourselves, maybe we'll have to do it for each other. In that moment at the steakhouse, I proposed a little exercise for us. We took turns pointing out something that someone else had done that deserved celebration. We ended each celebration with "this calls for a feast", and we clinked our glasses together. It was messy and a little awkward and contrived, but the more we leaned into it, the more meaningful it felt.

Life is full of apocalyptic events. Breakups teach us truths about how we love. Sickness teaches us about what matters when we are in health. There are many difficult moments we push past that are much more ill-defined than cancer. As I get older, I feel like the palette we have to paint individual celebrations with is shockingly limited. Ours is a fast-moving culture, one that treats jubilance as a luxury. Victories must be short-lived because the next battle demands our immediate attention.

Gather some close friends. Make a big, big meal. Go to your favourite restaurant. Raise a glass. What do you have to feast for?