I’ve been thinking lately about how these things are both physical and spiritual, how they ask everything from the body and the soul.

My mother’s battle with Carcinoid/neuroendocrine cancer began as something identified in her body—a physical malady verified through tests conducted by needles that invaded her skin and scans that presented images to the eye. The physical aspect of this battle has continued during the four years since then—more needles (although ‘shot’ seems more accurate to the experience of Sandostatin treatment), more scans, more gastrointestinal ailments, increased back pain, fatigue. These things are physical in the way only pain can be.

But from the moment of the diagnosis in 2005, the battle took on a spiritual dimension, too. Would she choose to have hope in the face of numbers, survival rates, and physical pain? Would she share her struggle with others? What tasks would she adorn and for what would she pray?

It seems to me that these two sides, of the physical and the spiritual, of the body and the soul, are ultimately inseparable. Birdsong—one of my mother’s great loves—is heard through the ears, like all music; poetry is also taken in by the ears, or the eyes; similarly, an embrace is felt by the skin, the aroma of spring flowers sensed by the nose, and a crisp white wine drunk by the mouth.

And so while it was a physical illness that awakened her—and our—spiritual resistance, there are also moments in this broken, material world that give life to the soul.

I hope wherever you are, whoever you are, that this mystery lifts your spirits as it does mine.