My Cancer and God's Diagnosis

By Mark Judge
author

At long last, I finally understood why I could not stop watching the movie "Diary of a Country Priest." The answer came last December.

For months, indeed a couple years, I had been feeling exhausted. Blood tests and doctor's visits revealed nothing. Then, last December, I woke up with a terrible pain in my abdomen. I was sure I had a hernia. I drove myself to the hospital, expecting to get some pain killers. After an X-ray, the doctor came back. Her face was serious.

"We think you have lymphoma," she said. "We're admitting you."

Cancer. I had cancer. And until they did tests, I had no idea how bad it was, or where it was. Yes, I was terrified. Yes, I cried. But I was also relieved. Because for the previous two years, I knew that something was wrong. I knew, and God knew. Even if doctors did not. And now I knew that I had been right.

For one thing, I was sore and exhausted all the time. I'm in my early 40s, so I knew that I could not go out dancing like when I was 18 and not feel the effects -- but I also knew that I should be dragging myself home and into bed after just two dances. I was sure I had chronic fatigue syndrome, or Lyme disease, or depression. Yet all the tests came back negative -- and I didn't feel depressed as much as frustrated.

One of my only sources of solace became the film "Diary of a Country Priest." A 1951 masterpiece by French filmmaker Robert Bresson, it tells the story of a young priest who is assigned to a parish where there are few parishioners. It sits in a small town full of narrow-minded people who do nothing to hide their contempt for the priest.

Throughout of the film, the priest upholds the teachings of the Catholic Church, all the while realizing that something is terribly wrong with him -- in particular, with his stomach. He can't eat much. He wakes up in the middle of the night, stumbling to the chapel to pray. Local doctors misdiagnose him. Finally, he finds out what the problem is -- stomach cancer. It being 1951, his prospects are not good. I won't give away the ending.

Last December, as I lay in the hospital bed in Washington, waiting for test results, I realized that where medicine had failed, God had not. I thought back to the one thing that gave me real comfort through the suffering -- the country priest. I had seen a clip of the movie on YouTube, and it immediately seized me -- in the face of the young priest, I, a Catholic who had left the church and return in adulthood, saw myself.

For the next two years, the film became a touchstone for me. Without knowing that I was sharing the same illness as the priest, I mentioned it often in my YouTube vlog.

Like the priest, I knew in my soul that something was wrong with me, and that there would be an ultimate reckoning that would most likely be very serious. Over and over I watched the famous "Countess scene," in which the priest, who at this point can barely stand, battles for the soul of a bitter woman who has rejected God. I wept when the Countess admonished the priest that "God is the master of love," only to have him reply, "No Madam, God is not the master of love. He is love itself." But that love, the priest explains, has its own rules, its own law. And we should not put ourselves outside the reach of God by violating that law.

And I marveled at the priests saintly acceptance of death.

Fortunately, my diagnosis was considerably better. It turned out I have a very treatable form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma; the doctor said that if I had to get cancer, this was the one to get. He called it "slow-moving" and "non-aggressive," and declares that a "young strong guy" like me should do fine. I'm now more than halfway through chemotherapy, and feel like a new person.

And yet the country priest will always be with me. He was my healer, my guide, my inspiration when no one else was there. He taught me that, as he says in his ultimate summation, "all is grace."

Mark Judge is the author of the new book "A Tremor of Bliss," from Doubleday. He is scheduled to be a guest on EWTN's The World Over Live April 24 and at the Catholic Information Center May 6.

By Mark Judge |  April 22, 2009; 1:06 PM ET
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