Upstairs in the office of Bethel A.M.E. Church, located several blocks from recent rioting, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake waits for a Tuesday news conference to begin. She vents about the self-destructive nature of the violence — attacks on businesses that were hard to attract to low-income neighborhoods — and the sad irony that many of the places targeted were frequented by Freddie Gray. She rehearses for me the difficult choices involved in an appropriate but not overmilitarized police response. Pressures come from every side. The Maryland government, she says, denies needed education funding while watching over her shoulder on law and order. The schools were closed that day, in part because teachers were refusing to come to work.

Down in the sanctuary, to the accompaniment of helicopter noise and sirens, Christian and Jewish leaders announce an effort to help feed poor children who won’t be getting meals at school that day. Bethel’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Frank Reid III, adds a mild corrective for the mayor, who is standing beside him. Early in the crisis, Rawlings-Blake (D) had referred to those involved in violence as “thugs.” “There are no thugs in Baltimore,” says Reid. “There are abused children” who “become abusers.”

After the news conference ends, I sit with Reid in the front pew. Now 63, he has seen or participated in almost every stage of the civil rights struggle, becoming one of the most respected religious figures in Baltimore and an important leader of the broader movement.

Reid is tired from the exertions of the late night before. After Gray’s funeral Monday at New Shiloh Baptist Church, hundreds of pastors marched in the midst of violence, in what Reid called “a demonstration of love and fearlessness.” Returning to the church, religious leaders held a two-hour dialogue with gang leaders.

“One young man said to me, ‘You Frank Reid. My grandma made me go to your church when I was little.’ I felt like a failure. How did I let this brother get away? But then it hit me. He remembered, and it was a positive memory.” Reid continues: “There is an opening in many young lives. There is an opportunity to touch a new generation — not to use them for church purposes but to empower them to fulfill their purpose in life. That’s exciting. Is it dangerous? What isn’t dangerous?”

This is one of the most distinctive contributions of faith-based institutions to discussions on poverty and crime. Their vision of social healing is required to include the victimizers as well, who will remain in communities, or return from prison, after the cameras leave. “Everyone should have a second chance, even a third chance,” says Reid.

He locates the Baltimore violence in a broader context, quoting sociologist Robert Putnam on a growing “opportunity gap” in American life. “When the opportunity gap gets as vast as it is,” Reid says, “it is filled with frustration, fear, powerlessness.” Reid is hoping for political leaders with the ambition of Lyndon Johnson “on the big issues of education, housing and the redistribution of wealth.” But he is not hopeful about the state of American politics. “Left and right have put on blinders and ear plugs. They are not listening to each other. Everything reaffirms a preexisting policy position.” Public discourse, he says, has become “violence without a gun.”

Reid, in obvious frustration, raises some uncomfortable questions. “If the marchers here had gone to the Inner Harbor, would we have seen that looting? The police would have prevented it.” The Inner Harbor is the tourist district. Some communities seem more expendable than others.

And Reid poses “a question for the black community.” “Do we now have a black political class,” he asks, “out of contact with the personal needs of the people they serve? In the white community, there is an attitude of ‘you people.’ Is there a ‘you people’ idea in the black political class? I don’t know.”

Our conversation loops back to hope. “We need to turn to each other, not on each other,” he says. “A moment can become a tipping point, and it doesn’t always tip to the negative. The funeral yesterday was a positive tipping point, a foundation for the future. Romans Chapter 8 says that creation is moaning, groaning, giving birth. What we are seeing in urban neighborhoods is groaning and pain. If we stay focused, we can give birth to something positive and powerful.”

Why Religion Matters: The Twinned Life of Family and Faith

This essay on family and faith is the third in a five-part series about the value of religion

SALT LAKE CITY — “Congregations erect a sacred canopy of meaning over the great chapters of family life: birth, childrearing, and marriage.” — W. Bradford Wilcox[1]

For all its progress and possibilities, our modern world has difficulty seeing beyond itself. Every age has to struggle against its blind spots. In ancient Rome, for example, the span of a person’s influence was reckoned at 100 years. Within that horizon individuals could remember two generations back and care for two generations forward. Then, as the custom went, that influence stopped, and a new century, with new people and new concerns, would reset itself.[2] But lasting societies need a broader vision.



The pull of the present is strong, but so are the tugs to the past and the future. Family and faith — our two great bridges beyond the here and now — stretch far past 100 years, in both directions, and expand the purpose and meaning of our lives.

None of us is born a mere individual. We come to this world with a network of pre-existing ties, bonds and obligations. These family relationships shape our worldviews, instil our values and form our identities. And families of all kinds thrive when they join a community of believers. The benefits go both ways — churches strengthen families, and families strengthen churches. Working together, family and faith reinforce norms of right and wrong, teach us how to love our neighbors and provide a support base where children and parents navigate life’s challenges. In other words, family and faith keep us from being alone. They enlarge our circles of responsibility beyond the self and help us turn strangers into friends. Families then pass this spiritual and social capital across generations.

Marshaling extensive social science research, author Mary Eberstadt shows how closely these forces are intertwined. “Family and faith are the invisible double helix of society,” she writes, “two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another.”[3]

This partnership can be seen at church on Sunday afternoons. Eberstadt points to broad sociological agreement that participation in the family rituals of “being married and having children is linked to higher levels of churchgoing and other types of religious practice.”[4] Another factor is the effect children have on the religious lives of their parents. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox puts it simply: “Children drive parents to church.”[5] It’s a common story — kids grow up in a church, leave home for college and drift from the faith, only to return when they get married and have children. What explains this phenomenon? The decisions we make about our deepest beliefs and closest relationships are never simple. But Wilcox adds an important insight: “The arrival of a child can awaken untapped reserves of love, recognition of the transcendent, and concern for the good life.”[6] These things matter because family and religion are among the most basic human institutions. When together, they connect society; when apart, society weakens.

The sacred relationships between kin and church, church and kin, tie us to the past, present and future. Such continuity helps us situate ourselves in this big universe. We find out who we are. The poet Wendell Berry gives expression to these aspirations: “The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to Heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds.”[7]

The fortunes of family and faith will continue to ebb and flow, as they have in various periods throughout history, but experience shows they will do so joining hands. As the one rises or falls, so will the other. The course of history is not predetermined; it is chosen. And those choices have long trajectories — much too long, indeed, to fit in 100 years.

 [1] W. Bradford Wilcox, “As the Family Goes,” First Things, May 2007.


[2] See Remi Brague, “The Impossibility of Secular Society,” First Things, Oct. 2013.


[3] Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God, 2013, 22.


[4] Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God, 93.


[5] Wilcox, “As the Family Goes.”


[6] Wilcox, “As the Family Goes.”


[7] Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992.

Bill Irwin dies at 73; first blind hiker of Appalachian Trail

By Zach C. Cohen

Published: March 16

As he walked the length of the Appalachian Trail for eight months in 1990, Bill Irwin estimated that he fell thousands of times. He cracked his ribs and suffered from hypothermia as he climbed mountains and forded rivers. The pads he wore didn’t protect his scabbed knees.

Mr. Irwin, then a 50-year-old medical technologist and corporate manager from Burlington, N.C., did not use maps or a compass. He was blind, and he relied solely on his German shepherd guide dog, Orient.

The pair became known as “the Orient Express.”

Mr. Irwin was feted as an inspiration to hikers and disabled people when, on Nov. 21, 1990, he became the first blind man to traverse the Appalachian Trail, which stretches more than 2,100 miles, from Georgia to Maine.

Admirers across the country watched news reports of him dropping to his knees to pray after ascending 5,269 feet on Mount Katahdin, Maine, the northernmost end of the trail. Members of his home church were there to greet him and sang “Amazing Grace.”

For Mr. Irwin, who died March 1 at 73, the hike was an act of salvation.

“When I was a sighted person I was an alcoholic, a dropout as a husband and father, a guy who lived only for himself,” he later wrote in the publication Guideposts.

“The first clear-eyed thing I had ever done was as a blind man, when I asked God to take charge of my life,” he wrote. “I had never spent much time in his vast outdoors, but after I quit drinking I couldn’t get enough of it. I learned wilderness skills and became the first blind person to ‘thru-hike’ the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. I made a point of telling fellow hikers about the God who guides me.”

Mr. Irwin completely lost his sight in 1976. Eight years earlier, doctors had removed his left eye after a misdiagnosis of malignant melanoma. Meanwhile, his drinking became worse and he smoked five packs of cigarettes a day.

His unintended recovery was sparked by his son Jeff’s entry into a substance-abuse treatment center because of an addiction to cocaine.

“To my dismay, I was asked to spend a week there in family therapy sessions with him — without a drink,” he wrote in Guideposts. “I scoffed but I went. I lashed out at counselors and was my usual arrogant self. But by the end of that week it became painfully clear to me that I was an alcoholic, and I had to stop drinking or I’d die.”

He said he became sober in 1987 and developed an intense devotion to Christianity. The first verse he learned was from Corinthians: “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” He soon decided that the walk on the Appalachian Trail would be a powerful example of living his faith.

On March 8, 1990, the third anniversary of his sobriety, Mr. Irwin unceremoniously left from Springer Mountain, Ga., the southern terminus of the trail, in a heavy rain.

To cross rivers swelled with winter rain, Mr. Irwin would use the sound of Orient barking to find the shore.

“As I came out of the water, I could just feel the freezing take place in my hair,” Mr. Irwin once said, describing crossing a river at the end of his journey. “There was ice formed. By the time I got out, a solid sheet of ice had begun to form on my clothes. I knew that if I didn’t get to a safe place soon, hypothermia would overcome me and it’d be curtains for me.”

Along the way, Mr. Irwin would stop at grocery stores and laundromats to buy provisions and wash his clothes. He would also talk to local children about God and promise them personalized copies of the Bible if they agreed to read a verse a day.

“By the time I got to Maine I had furnished over 500 Bibles for kids along the way,” Mr. Irwin said.

He claimed he made the trip with no intention of drawing publicity. It didn’t work out that way. Reporters and TV crews would descend on him as word leaked out of his journey.

Dealing with journalists often tested what he called his God-
given patience. One New York City cameraman ordered him around for hours, while Mr. Irwin was wearing a 60-pound backpack and had a timetable to keep.

As he wrapped up, the cameraman asked why Mr. Irwin had been so helpful. Mr. Irwin confessed that he had wanted to throw a punch at the cameraman all day but that his faith helped him cope with such urges.

“When I said that, he fell on his knees [and said], ‘I want that in my life,’ ” Mr. Irwin later told the Charlotte Observer. “There wasn’t a higher moment on the trail.”

William Howard Irwin II was born Aug. 16, 1940, in Birmingham, Ala., where he graduated in 1964 from Samford University with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology.

At 24, he founded a lab business that eventually became part of North Carolina-based LabCorp of America.

His first four marriages ended in divorce. In 1996, Mr. Irwin married Debra Messler. They moved to Sebec, Maine, from North Carolina and bought property with a view of Mount Katahdin. He died at a hospital in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. The cause was prostate cancer, his wife said.

Besides his wife, survivors included three children from his first marriage, to Patricia Armstrong; a daughter from his marriage to Messler; a brother; a sister; and four grandchildren.

After the publicity from his trek, Mr. Irwin made a living as a motivational speaker and as a marriage, sex-addiction and family counselor. He also wrote a memoir, “Blind Courage,” written with David McCasland, with whom he walked parts of the final stretch of the Appalachian Trail. It sold more than 100,000 copies and was translated into Spanish, Chinese and German, the Charlotte Observer reported.

Mr. Irwin’s guide dog became the subject of “Orient: Hero Dog Guide of the Appalachian Trail,” a children’s book by Tom McMahon with illustrations by Erin Mauterer.

Several other blind hikers have since completed the length of the trail. Mr. Irwin’s advice for those trekkers: “The toughest thing on the trail is controlling that 41 / 2 inches between your ears.”

For the online version, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2013/11/22/i-need-god-more-than-ever/

It was a clear summer day, but Shawn Kuykendall could feel a storm brewing somewhere deep inside. He wore shorts and canvas sneakers, his hair shaved but noticeably patchy in areas, like islands on a globe.

“How’s it going?” one of the young men asked.

“Uh, you know,” Kuykendall replied.

Soon, they were all there, gathered in front of the massive building. Kuykendall had invited part of his support network – family, friends and some of the soccer players from American University, where he had coached until recently — to meet in front of the Washington National Cathedral at noon.

They walked inside as a group, single file down cement steps to the crypt level, finding seats in a cavernous room where colorful mosaics decorate the walls.

As friends and family scattered to different corners, Kuykendall turned a chair to face one wall. The bright tiles above him depicted a scene of Jesus after the resurrection. Kuykendall pulled out his notebook and flipped past the first page, where just a couple of weeks earlier, on July 20, he’d scribbled out an initial entry:

I’ve been diagnosed w/ cancer. It stinks. I’m 31, fit and my body is failing me. I can’t tell you how to feel or what to feel. I can hardly tell you how I feel.

He’d taken to the journal to help organize his thoughts. There was no other way to process the storm. In the spring, he was working out with the soccer team at American, where he was a four-year star before playing professionally with D.C. United and the New York Red Bulls. He was competing in a couple of rec leagues and exercising daily. He was in peak physical shape. At least, he thought he was.

A tumor had quietly rooted itself inside his chest, growing to the size of a small apple. He started to feel fatigued. Then one day a sharp pain pierced his back and midsection. There was blood work and doctor visits and more questions than answers. Eventually, that first week of July, doctors broke the news: thymic cancer, an extremely rare form. Stage IV, which meant it had spread. There was no known cure.

Praise Be to God, Kuykendall wrote in the journal. You’re gonna see me write this a lot. Especially when I don’t know what’s going on.

He was facing a half-dozen chemotherapy treatments and beyond that — uncertainty. Kuykendall had no idea how to make sense of it all, what exactly would lie in store or how he’d keep his spirits up. There are 1.6 million people who have cancer diagnosed each year in the United States. Who among them knows?

In the Resurrection Chapel, Kuykendall’s mother and sister were just a few feet away, kneeled before a wall that featured Jesus and Saint Thomas the Apostle. Others had opened Bibles. Sports might be why the family name resonates in the soccer community – all five Kuykendall children played Division I soccer and their father played professionally for the Washington Diplomats more than three decades ago — but they all know Shawn as an extroverted jokester. How many pop songs did he sing with his acoustic guitar and then upload to YouTube? How many goofy photos had he shared on Instagram? How many times did he know just the right thing to say to lift someone’s spirits?

And now, with a medical death sentence shadowing him, he had no choice but to confront everything head-on. Why am I here? Why do these things happen? Why did God do this?

“Clearly when you get diagnosed with cancer, especially one as rare as this, it immediately comes to mind, really got to come to grips with it because you don’t know how long you’re going to live, you don’t know how fast it’s going to progress,” he said. “It’s really taken me to a crossroad with my faith.”

The doctors had a plan. They’d start with chemotherapy, six treatments from July until November, one every three weeks. They hoped the chemo might stop the cancer’s progression and shrink the tumor. Maybe they could eventually cut the mass away and give him more time.

The Kuykendalls had their plan, too. They avoided reading about the disease on the Internet. Faith would guide them.

Doctor and patient weren’t necessarily at odds.

“If there’s something that helps keep stability, keeps the mood up, that is usually a positive. Faith is one of these things, so I’m all in favor of it,” said Kuykendall’s doctor, Giuseppe Giaccone, head of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center’s lung cancer program at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. “On the other hand, you may have situations where people do not accept the reality and that can be problematic because you need to be able to speak openly with the patient and plan together the further treatment. So you also need people to understand what’s going on and accept it when necessary.”

Armed with their Christian faith and buoyed by Kuykendall’s fighting spirit, they staked out every corner of the dim chamber. ”The Resurrection Chapel gives expression of Jesus Christ’s victory over death,” reads the cathedral literature. It would become a weekly appointment. Gather. Descend the cement steps. Bow heads. And close their eyes in preparation for the biggest fight of their lives.

‘Our new normal’

A curtain closed Bay 14 from the rest of the world. Kuykendall, wearing sweatpants and a white T-shirt, sat in the corner, a clear plastic tube running from a port in his chest to a bag hanging overhead. The Lombardi Cancer Center can be a lonely place, a drip-by-drip reminder of what’s at stake.

The second round of chemo just happened on the 25th, Kuykendall wrote in late July. It’s really hard to pray and to focus, to read or to meditate on God at this moment, on His word while I’m in pain.

Six weeks later, on a warm August day, Kuykendall was back, and Bay 14 was crammed with family and friends, enough to prompt a neighboring patient to complain about the noise. Kuykendall and his support team couldn’t help themselves. The medicine was serious — a crippling cocktail of menacing names: cisplatin, doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide — but spirits remained light.

They talked pop stars and TV shows, soccer and celebrities. Everything but cancer. A small machine — an IV pump, not larger than a shoebox — hummed nearby, pushing chemicals through the tube. But the medication was treated like something to be monitored casually, like the air conditioner.

Kuykendall told bad jokes — “What did the fish say when he ran into the wall? Dam.” — and the whole room erupted in laughter.

“Hate to break the party up,” said Allison Whitt, an oncology nurse. She pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and swapped out the empty plastic bags. Soon a new red fluid crawled through the tube and Kuykendall sat back in the cushioned chair and submitted to the medicine.

He had tried in the past to control his body. Growing up, he was always shorter than the others. He’d step into the bathroom, close his eyes and plead with God — always disappointed to flip the switch and see the undersize boy in the mirror.

Years passed and his body was suddenly an even bigger mystery. Kuykendall could rub his chest and feel the tumor, a small rubbery bump. Life was different now — “Our new normal,” as his mother called it — and every day brought fresh reminders.

Kuykendall knew the prognosis wasn’t good. Because thymic cancer is so rare — about 500 new cases are diagnosed in the United States each year — there was a lot of guesswork involved. His doctor said he might have two years left. Maybe more. Maybe less.

The thymus is a gland located in the middle of the chest, just behind the sternum. It is vital to shaping the immune system early in life. By adulthood, it’s mostly fat tissue with no real function.

Kuykendall sought out Giaccone, one of the few doctors in the country who specializes in thymic cancer. The doctor said chemotherapy typically shows about a 50 percent success rate in shrinking the tumor.

“I think he’s in the good part of 50 percent,” Giaccone said.

‘Take it as it is’

Because of his treatment, Kuykendall isn’t supposed to be in the sun too long, so on a cool September Saturday afternoon he found a seat in the shade of Section 308. D.C. United was suffering through a terrible season and was hosting the Los Angeles Galaxy at a mostly empty RFK Stadium.

“When I was here, we’d just won the [MLS] Cup so it was 24,000″ fans, he told the friends who’d accompanied him. “The whole lower bowl was full.”

Kuykendall was drafted by United in 2005, appearing in two games before he was traded to the Red Bulls a year later. A torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee derailed his career, but he never actually walked away from soccer. How could he? Along with their Christian faith, the sport had been pillar for the Kuykendall family.

His father, Kurt, discovered soccer as a student at American in the early 1970s. Within three years of first kicking a ball, he was selected for the U.S. national team and was drafted by the Washington Diplomats of the North American Soccer League, the highest level of pro soccer in the United States at the time.

Kurt was a goaltender. He learned to be stoic. Even if his team was scored on, he felt it was his job to be the rock, the team’s stabilizing force. “You have to pretend that things are going well, and we’re going to get out of it,” he said. It was a skill set that would suit the family patriarch for years to come.

When the game finally passed Kurt by, he and his college sweetheart, Sherry, returned to the Washington area. He became a licensed Realtor and began a family. Together they raised five kids and built a comfortable life in the Virginia suburbs.

Growing up, the Kuykendall children were always allowed to play ball in the house — encouraged, actually — but there was a 25-cent fine for hitting a wall or knocking over a lamp. Kurt called it the “Family Room League,” and he taught his three boys and two girls soccer skills and quick indoor training lessons on a large area rug.

The couple home-schooled their children. Each morning would start with an hour of soccer before the daily devotional and then classroom work. Shawn always raced his siblings, treating everything like a competition. “He didn’t care if he did it right or wrong, he just wanted to be the fastest,” his mother said.

Juggling five kids and their busy schedules wasn’t easy. Plus, Kurt coached and Sherry played in adult leagues. There was an order to everything. The family had “Dollar Appreciation Week” and all the kids had to earn enough money through chore work to earn daily “rent.”

Years later, though, any sense of order suddenly felt shattered. Kurt knows his family has been blessed but says he’s had to accept that things like wealth and power were “illusions of control.”

“It’s actually very freeing because I can’t control the outcome for Shawn,” he said. “I can’t control the outcome for me. I thought I could — and I certainly have tried — but I now know I can’t.”

For both mother and father, when Shawn wasn’t around is when they worried most. They stayed home with their thoughts the day their son returned to RFK Stadium to watch his old team. Midway through the game, a fan club across the field unveiled a 12-foot-long banner in Kuykendall’s honor, featuring the words “once United, always United.” At halftime, Kuykendall was eager to go visit.

“How are you doing?” one fan asked.

“Doing good,” Kuykendall said. “Four cycles in. . . . Some people live a long time with this, some people don’t. . . . A lot of it is my faith and trust in God. He’s got a plan for this. Just take it as it is. It is what it is, right? Can’t do anything about it. I’m not gonna waste my emotions wallowing in self-pity.”

He returned to his friends in Section 308 for the second half. Feeling his energy level fading, he couldn’t have been further removed from the field and from his playing days.

‘I’m pretty drained through the process’

As the weeks passed, Kuykendall had to grow comfortable with what he saw in the mirror each morning. His skin ran the spectrum from pale to yellow. He missed having hair to comb. He’d taken to dyeing his disappearing eyebrows darker.

He prayed often about what good could come from his situation.

I realized that I’ve spent a lot of time on things that maybe don’t matter too much, he wrote in his journal, whether it was a text or a stupid iPhone game or TV. I’ve gotten really good at things that don’t matter. Oh, Lord, please forgive me for even in these times for putting these inconsequential things before you. Gotta tighten my game up.

He continued with his weekly visits to the cathedral, praying for others more than himself. Some friends helped launch a nonprofit called Kuykenstrong. The fundraising was intended to help with medical bills, but most of that had been covered by his COBRA insurance. He’d hoped the foundation, which had raised about $60,000, mostly through the sale of #Kuykenstrong T-shirts, eventually could be used to help others.

One morning in late September, Kuykendall woke up in particularly good spirits and was back at American wearing a blue practice jersey. He was part of a team again, joking, laughing and talking soccer. Before practice, the squad squeezed into the campus salon, Tigi, where the coaches agreed to get their heads shaved, a symbol of solidarity with their former star.

“Look at them,” Kuykendall cooed. “They’re nervous.”

Todd West lowered himself into a chair, and Kuykendall took the clippers and buzzed a line down the middle of West’s scalp, sending wisps of dark hair to the tiled floor. West is in his 14th year as American’s coach and is the man who recruited Kuykendall to play at the school and later hired him as an assistant coach.

“If anything, his competitiveness was something you wanted to tone down,” West said of Kuykendall’s playing days, “which is better than having to dial it up.”

Players assured their newly bald coaches they’d look more intimidating on the sideline, and everyone laughed as they walked out of the salon and toward the nearby field. Kuykendall practiced with the team, partaking in an up-tempo keep-away drill. He was the most animated player on the field. “Let’s go! . . . Your feet are garbage. . . . Really, Charlie?!”

As the practice session wore on, his breathing became labored and his hands found his hips. When players took a water break, Kuykendall called out to coaches, “An IV for me.”

When he woke up early the next morning, he logged onto Facebook and wrote:

Chemo. . . Round 5. . . And while I have certainly been gaining strength and feeling better after each round, I must admit I’m pretty drained through the process. This is the first time I’m really dreading going in for treatment and the subsequent awful days to follow. . . . It’s not easy to fight and I certainly can put on a brave front. Today, I want to say how difficult it is and I need God more than ever.

Kuykendall had a short meeting with his doctor and then went through the familiar routine. He was stationed in Bay 16 this time, chained to the humming machine by the clear plastic tube. Friends came and went throughout the day, and the group swapped embarrassing stories about ex-girlfriends, college hangovers, shared hijinks. They teased Kuykendall plenty.

“You can’t do that!” he’d protest with a smile. “I have cancer.”

Eventually, the medicine caught up to him, and his eyelids became heavy. Melanie Menditch, a childhood friend who accompanied him to each treatment, tried to keep the mood light.

“Shawn, what was the best day of your life?” she asked.

He was silent for a moment, thinking.

“I don’t have one,” he said. “Not yet.”

‘Argh! That taste!’

Shawn’s mental state was often dictated by his physical condition. He had gained about 15 pounds from his springtime weight of 175. He couldn’t exercise as much as he’d like and his appetite only grew. A whole pizza was not out of the question, as food was one of the few comforts readily available.

“People always want you to go to dinner, too, which is great,” he told Giaccone during one appointment. “But I eat too much.”

He was usually the youngest patient at the Lombardi Cancer Center, always among the first to arrive and last to leave. Each session felt more draining than the last, and since late summer he’d been spending more nights at his parents’ home in Oakton. He had recently started a new job with Montgomery Soccer Inc., the governing body for one of the country’s most robust and active youth soccer communities, but was unable to work steady hours. There were headaches and temperature changes and nausea.

His condition seemed to worsen following the most recent treatment. At night, he’d sweat through two or three shirts. He had difficulty sleeping and spent full days in bed. And even when he was feeling fine, he knew everything could change within an hour. ”Just a constant state of discomfort,” he said.

Kuykendall woke up one Sunday in mid-October with pain shooting through his lower back and stomach. By the next day, it had spread to his hip, leg and knee. It felt similar to the pain that first sent him to the doctor four months earlier and all he could think was: Is cancer taking over my body?

Doctors encouraged him to dip into his pain medication and the next morning he visited Giaccone, who couldn’t link the pain symptoms with the cancer. Kuykendall stuck with the Percocet and struggled through the week, finding some comfort in routine. He wrote in his journal:

I need to be more purposeful. I’m at Prayer Wednesday here and we’ve had 6 people show. I need to be pouring into their lives, I need to be calling to them more, I need to be investing in them, coming before God, humbly bringing things to God.

When he met with Giaccone next, he heard a bit of good news: The tumor that had previously been the size of a small apple was now about the size of a golf ball. The doctor was optimistic that surgery might be an option but wanted to wait until the PET scan following the final chemo treatment.

At treatment No. 6, Kuykendall was assigned to Bay 10.

“When does my hair start growing back?” he asked a nurse.

“Month or two months,” she said. “But it may begin sprouting a little sooner.”

Another long day rotating through colorful liquids. The machine started beeping late in the afternoon and a nurse quickly appeared. He was almost finished, needing just a final injection of saline to clear the line and flush the port in his chest. Even though the solution is fed directly into his bloodstream, the effects quickly find his mouth.

“Argh! That taste!” Kuykendall said, grabbing his nose.

The unit was quiet and mostly empty when Kuykendall finished. His eyes were half-closed when it came time to leave.

“You’re good to go,” a nurse announced.

He slowly rose from the chair and shuffled out of the building.

“I think you should dance out or something, Shawn,” his mother said.

Soccer is a sport dependent on structure. There are rules and boundaries. For anything good to happen, several parts must move in sync, each piece giving the larger unit purpose and mission. In the Kuykendall family, everyone processed Shawn’s sickness separately but also together.

“You hear other stories of families going through it, you’re praying for them, but until it actually hits you, you don’t know how hard it is,” Sherry said.

“We’re hopeful,” Kurt said. “We realize, it could be one answer, could be another answer. We’ve resigned ourselves it doesn’t matter. We’re going to miss him if the Lord takes him home early. If he doesn’t, we’re grateful to have him around more.”

As the days grew colder in November, Kuykendall spent most nights at his parents’ home. Even on days he couldn’t bear to leave the house, he stayed connected through social media. Friends could tell that the bad days began to outnumber the good. “Oh hi throw up. 3rd in 4 days. #ChemoProbs,” he tweeted, 2 1/2 weeks following his final chemo treatment. It was followed a few days later by the simple update: “This is getting worse.”

Though his hair seemed ready to return, his energy level was less willing. Something was wrong. With the first five chemo treatments, his condition and spirits improved with each passing day. But several weeks had passed and Kuykendall was still vomiting, struggling to sleep through the night and short on energy. He missed a couple of his midweek pilgrimages to the cathedral, and at night, the cold sweats would get so bad that he’d wrap a towel around his head and wake up to find it drenched.

Doctors ordered PET and CT scans and would compare the results with his initial scans before making a final determination on surgery. At the hospital, Kuykendall prayed as a laser passed over his body. Between scans, he grimaced with pain and shivered with discomfort. At the end of a long day, he went straight to the emergency room.

He waited and waited, and before long, the on-call physicians were able to look at the scans from earlier in the day. That’s when his worst fears were confirmed.

On the drive home, he pulled out his iPhone and began texting updates to those who’d been checking in on him.

“Just leaving ER. Not much to say. Scans came back. Mass is larger. Spread more aggressive.”

“Disheartened to say the least. Will keep fighting. And praying to find peace.”

“Its ok. God has a plan. Live or die. I win. Will continue to fight. But can’t lose hope.”

The next day, he logged onto Facebook and broke the news to his larger family of supporters, those who prayed, who bought T-shirts, who called every day.

I’m scared. I want to live. But I’m here to say that God is sovereign and good. When I can see the good. And when I can’t see the good.

Two days later, accompanied by his parents, Kuykendall arrived at Giaccone’s office to discuss the next step. The doctor explained that even though the mass grew only a half-centimeter, any growth was a bad sign. Giaccone feared Kuykendall’s body had begun to reject the chemotherapy.

Surgery felt like a near-certainty only a couple of weeks earlier. It was now off the table for the time being. Radiation, too, could do more damage than good at this point. Hoping to bring the tumor back under control, Giaccone decided to put Kuykendall on another round of chemotherapy, a new mixture called carboplatin-taxol, typically used to treat ovarian and lung cancers.

Kuykendall had hoped so badly that he was finished with chemo and ready for the next stage of his battle. The physical torment made it more difficult to stay upbeat, but generally, Kuykendall still managed to keep his biggest fears at bay.

“I don’t feel as captive by them,” he said. “I don’t feel as enslaved by them, if that makes sense. . . . Getting bad news doesn’t seem so bad anymore. It’s just sort of part of the process.”

Despite the setback, Kuykendall’s plan didn’t change — Please pray first and foremost that I can find an unparalleled peace from God through this, he urged his Facebook friends. He maintained a positive outlook. After all, he had his faith, he had his family and he had no qualms continuing his battle with his eyes closed.

Cancer might not hear prayers. But he was still confident God does.

Big Man of Faith
by Michael Lee

The moment will never be forgotten, because it represented a possible detour — or end — to the life and career of a man who had already overcome such hardscrabble beginnings. But the dates, the feelings, the struggle had mostly been buried into the crevices of Nene’s memory, a chapter in his life that doesn’t require any special celebrations or recognition years later.

For Nene, surviving a diagnosis of testicular cancer at age 25 only serves as a reminder of how much the Washington Wizards forward has been blessed, and how he believes God chose him to handle yet another seemingly insurmountable obstacle to serve as an example for others.

Nene, 30, didn’t even realize that last month he had reached the fifth anniversary of his surgery to remove the tumor because he was more concerned about fighting through a stomach virus to help the Wizards defeat the Orlando Magic that evening. Still feeling the effects of his stomach ailment a day later, Nene simply reacted with a smile and surprise when told of the milestone as he munched on a grilled cheese sandwich and sipped soup in his hotel room.

“Wow. I don’t keep track,” he said. “I don’t keep track.”

But when the Wizards made a surprise visit to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis a few weeks later, Nene was forced to confront his toughest physical challenge as the players walked through the patient care center and medicine room, where children received cancer treatment. There, Nene was suddenly overwhelmed by the sensations of his own chemotherapy treatments — the burning in his limbs, the goose bumps, the taste on his tongue that he described as “salty and spicy,” and the fear that his organs would eventually shut down.

“It was like, amazing. A long time I don’t feel like that,” Nene said, before reflecting on that difficult period. “For four weeks, I was sick, I was weak. I could feel the liquid moving in the veins. I feel like a science fiction movie, where the liquid comes all over your body. It was like that.”



‘God is going to provide’

Nene credits his deep faith for helping him become the first player from Brazil to be drafted into the NBA and for giving him the strength to get through the many physical and emotional hurdles that have followed.

Before cancer, there was the torn anterior cruciate ligament, sprained medial collateral ligament and torn meniscus in his right knee suffered two minutes into the 2005-06 season. Before the knee injury, there was leaving tiny Sao Carlos as a teenager and adjusting to a different culture while speaking little English. And before moving away from all he knew and loved, Nene had to prove himself as a worthy basketball talent, playing in cheap shoes covered in duct tape after they had completely splintered and surviving on what little scraps his poor family could provide.

“I always remember what I’ve been through to be here,” said Nene, who was born Maybyner Rodney Hilario before having his name legally changed to the Portuguese word for “baby” in 2003. “I have no shoes, I have no clothes, but I was blessed. I remember my mom. She have money to buy the food or give to God like you’re supposed to, because we’re Christian. She give to God and say, ‘You know, we don’t have food today, but God is going to provide our future.’ ”

Nene’s future is set financially: He has earned more than $70 million in his first 10 seasons in the NBA and is in the second year of a five-year, $65 million contract. Those riches were a fantasy for Nene when he first began playing professional basketball at age 15. He was motivated by a trading card of former NBA great Shawn Kemp that was given to him by a friend, and by a former coach who told him that a man of his size would have a career as a nightclub bouncer or grocery store bagger if he didn’t stay committed to the game.

Faith in the Face of Destruction By E.A. CARMEAN JR.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal ran a photograph of the damage the monster storm Sandy had inflicted on the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens, N.Y. This beachfront community had been hit hard by air, water and fire, leaving the fourth classic Greek element, earth, strewn with rubble and ashes. The front-page photo, reproduced five columns wide, was taken by Natalie Keyssar. Its most striking feature was the centered presence of a wholly intact and upright sculpture of the Virgin Mary, still placed in an equally unharmed shell-crowned niche. Spread out behind the statue were blocks of devastation where private homes had once stood.

The stunning survival of this statue soon earned it the name of the Virgin Mary of Breezy Point. The sculpture and its setting of ruins were also featured on news coverage by Fox, CNN and NBC, among others. Not surprisingly, this statue's dramatic appearance has been linked to the discovery of the "9/11 Cross," the horizontal and vertical beams found standing amid the ruins of the World Trade Center in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Both have been viewed as miracles or divine signs.

The idea of the holy being imperishable to fire or other forces has deep roots within the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the Book of Exodus, Moses encounters God speaking from the Burning Bush, which although it is on fire, "is not consumed." In the Book of Daniel, when Babylon's ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, seeks to make a public example with his execution of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, he places them in a fiery furnace. When the three (there is also a protective angel with them) emerge untouched by the blaze, the ruler grants them freedom of worship.

And St. Paul, whose own travels were marked by episodes such as being run out of town by an angry mob and being in a shipwreck, evokes trial by fire in his first letter to the Christian faithful at Corinth.

Stories of saints or relics and sacred objects surviving fires and other destructions are legion across the Christian West. Hagiography accounts tell of saints who walked away from torture by fire, and relics are described as saving buildings around them. When the Chambery Chapel in Savoy, which then housed the Shroud of Turin, burned down, the shroud itself emerged with only slight scorching.

The most famous episodes of survival are those linked with Chartres Cathedral in France, today celebrated for its soaring Gothic architecture and luminous stained-glass windows. Around 876, Charles the Bald, the grandson of Charlemagne and the ruler of Western France, gave Chartres the Sancta Camisa, a tunic said to have been worn by the Virgin Mary at the Nativity. Three days after fire destroyed the building in 1020, the Sancta Camisa was found intact in the ruins of the cathedral's treasury. Bishop Fulbert considered this a miracle and a sign, and rebuilding was soon begun. The whole population, from nobleman to peasant, and from Court Ladies to milkmaids, pulled wagons filled with materials to the cathedral's construction site, singing hymns as they moved along. The Sancta Camisa is still at Chartres Cathedral.

Even earlier, in the sixth century, Gregory of Tours describes in his "Eight Books of Miracles" how the workers on his mother's estate had set some straw on fire to keep warm, only to see the blaze rapidly spread: His mother, with holy items of St. Eusebius, "sprang from the table and lifted up the holy relics against the masses of flames and the fire went out." Later, with the same relic, Gregory defeated an approaching storm cloud, which "immediately divided into two parts and passed on the right and the left and did no harm to us or anyone else thereafter."

The Patron Saint of Firefighters is St. Florian, a third-century Christian martyr who was a member of a fire-fighting bucket brigade in the Roman army. Florian's profession of Christian faith over pagan idols led to his execution by drowning, being thrown in a river with a stone tied around his neck. This martyrdom lead to his also being a saint to receive prayers for victims of water and hurricanes.

Other Marian objects—not relics, but the Virgin's representation in art— while perhaps susceptible to destruction were still accorded extraordinary powers. During the English Reformation, Thomas Cromwell and Sir Roger Townshend seized the wooden statue of Our Lady of Walsingham in 1538 and took it to London to be ceremoniously set ablaze. After the Walsingham sculpture had made its journey, one woman loudly pronounced that miracles had occurred in its wake; she was put into stocks as a public example, but to little avail; Sir Roger wrote to Cromwell, "I cannot perceyve but the seed image is not yett out of the sum of ther heddes."

Far closer to our own time is the Leaning Virgin and Child of Albert, as discussed by Paul Fussell in his "The Great War and Modern Memory." Albert was a French town located amid the Battle of the Somme during World War I. Attacked and held back and forth by German and Allied forces, Albert saw the shelling of its church, Notre Dame de Brebières; a gilded sculpture of a Madonna and Child placed atop its tower fell, but only to a near-horizontal position. This "miracle" soon made the town and its sculpture famous; in October 1915, a Allies chaplain described it as the statue "that has never fallen." By the following July, it was becoming a sign of hope or of extraordinary presence; one soldier wrote home: "Marched through Albert where we saw the famous church with the statue of the Madonna and Child hanging from the top of the steeple, at an angle of about forty degrees, as if the Madonna was leaning down to catch the Child which has fallen."

Two years later, the statue would eventually be destroyed in a British attack on the town. A measure of its fame then is found in a New York Times headline: "Albert Now Death Trap: Town of former Leaning Virgin and Babe a Target for British Guns." Postwar, the town was renewed and its church rebuilt. A second version of the Madonna and Child now stands again atop the steeple.

Even more akin to the story of the Virgin of Breezy Point is that of the Madonna of La Gleize, told by Robert M. Edsel in "The Monument's Men," his account of soldiers dedicated to the preservation and recovery of important art and architecture during World War II.

In touring La Gleize in December 1944, protector and sculptor Walker Handcock observed that this small Belgian town's cathedral had only two things of note: a view, from its tower, over the Ardennes Forest and, in its nave, an extraordinary 13th-century wooden Madonna.

Two months later, Hancock returned after the Battle of the Bulge had swept through the region. La Gleize lay in ruins, including the cathedral. Bodies of soldiers from both sides lay frozen in nearby snow. But the Madonna remained standing in the nave, untouched. As Mr. Edsel writes, "the town was abandoned, but not entirely." Hancock oversaw the sculpture's move to safe storage in a nearby cellar.

Like the continuing presence of the Madonna of La Greize, the survival of the Breezy Point sculpture will be dismissed as coincidence by atheists, who—as they have with the 9/11 Cross—would have it banned from public property. Agnostics will perhaps pause at the sequence of two religious images emerging out of New York's two most destructive events some 121 months apart. Believers may have their faith in signs or miracles affirmed.

Mr. Carmean is an art historian and a canon in the Episcopal Church. He lives in Washington.

A version of this article appeared November 6, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Faith in the Face of Destruction.