Beyond gratefulness

“The inevitability of death is what makes us love life”
–Dianne Rayson

The Rt. Rev. Geoff Woodcroft is the 13^th bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Ruperts Land in the Anglican Church of Canada having served from 2018-2025. Diagnosed with terminal cancer in October 2024 he went on immediate medical leave then considered palliative. He formally retired a few months later. Bishop Geoff published the note below a few days ago, a testimony that could well be called “Gratitude.”

My final chemotherapy of this cycle will mark the anniversary of my very first treatment. How does one mark such an anniversary?

Although the treatments are rough, the answer to the above question seems quite easy, Gratitude, and this is how I mark the anniversary, as it has been every day since my diagnosis.

I am grateful for all who have treated, comforted, challenged, empowered and listened to me, particularly my wife Jenn, my family and friends, Cancer Care Manitoba, and the many people that I have met because I have cancer.

This posture of gratitude has gone beyond words of thanksgiving and gratefulness toward embracing every day and giving reverence and time to as much as I can take in. It’s not about me; it’s about the staggering beauty that is in life. There have always been opportunities to really see that beauty, and now I understand just a little better what it means to actually choose that.

Every day is a gift.

All of this living, even in the midst of suffering and great struggle is a gift.

All of this beauty needs all of creation to be that beautiful.

All of my choices can be about choosing to embrace the entirety of astounding beauty, and a posture of gratitude through this last year has made it possible to choose wisely.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas once wrote:

“To learn to be God’s creature, to accept the gift, is to learn to be at home in God’s world. Just as we seek to make a guest feel “at home” in our home, so God seeks to have us feel “at home” by providing us with the opportunity to appropriate the gift in the terms it was given – that is, gratuitously.”
–(Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom: A primer in Christian ethics. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame, 1983)

I wish you holy beauty.

[Ken Gray] Thanks Geoff for your poignant and timely words. May each and every day be, in some measure, beautiful. Happy Christmas to you and yours.

Visit the takenote.ca HOME page for a colourful display of hundreds of other blogs which may interest or inspire you