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Dykema, Book Review   111 

 

Book Review 

 

A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer 

Taught Me About Faith and Resilience  
By Jamie Aten 

 
Reviewed by Eugene Dykema 

 
 

 
 

West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2019. 

$15.95 

 

Some stories are immediately compelling, such as 

“Doctor becomes ill, experiences being a patient, and 

learns the other side of the story.” Jamie Aten’s story 

has a plot like that. 

Jamie Aten is an academic disaster relief 

researcher and the founder of a disaster relief research 

institute. If the academic pattern formed his disposition 

toward disasters—and there are at least hints that it did—

things changed on the day he received the news of his 

own personal disaster: stage 4 colon cancer. Aten was 

35 at the time. His job was now to make sense of his 

own disaster and its suffering. He tells the story in his 

memoir, A Walking Disaster. 

At much of its core, Jamie Aten’s memoir is not 

about disaster relief. It is about what happens when 

relief doesn’t come, at least not on hoped-for terms. It 

is also about the how of making sense of disaster. How 

can one make meaning out of radically altered 

circumstances? 

He tells his struggle in often excruciating detail. In 

shock at his circumstances, he nevertheless feels 

somewhat prepared. After all, as a disaster researcher, 

he “had a box with which I could organize my 

experience.” He would discover he needed a bigger 

box. Fatigue and discouragement would require that he 

change his mental and emotional models of how to 

cope with disaster.  

One problem is that his disaster doesn’t follow 

script. Most of the disasters he was familiar with pass 

quickly, blow over, if you will. He is not prepared for 

the protracted suffering he will have to endure. Neither 

his personal strengths nor much of the received wisdom 

about how to cope with disaster are up to the challenge. 

He finds that optimism is not enough, that resilience 

can’t go the distance, and that many of the concepts he 

learned don’t work. On the latter, he already knows to 

avoid “critical incident debriefing” and the “just world 

hypothesis.” But when he tries to apply “second wave 

cognitive behavioral therapy,” he finds it useless. And 

awareness of survivor guilt does not prepare him to 

recognize it when it occurs. “…implementing best 

practices while weathering a disaster was easier said than 

done,” he concludes. 

He is aware that suffering is far worse if it appears 

meaningless. The struggle to find meaning, however, is 

fraught. If gone about the wrong way, the abyss yawns. 

To seek and fail to find meaning is to be set up for true 

despair. The path matters. His story walks the edge of 

that abyss. 

His reliance on his strength at the outset means that 

it is difficult to let go of the role of helper and accept 

being helped. He finds all gifts to be mixed blessings. 

He easily becomes indignant over what, in his opinion, 

is the insensitivity of others. All the usual types of 

questions occur to him: Where is God? What is he 

doing? Should I ask God for healing? Does he 

intervene? But other implicit questions shadow his 

path. What should I ask for other than relief? What is 

the greatest asset for recovering from disaster, strength 

or weakness? Perhaps above all: where is the meaning 

in the suffering that disaster brings? 

It seems that the how of finding meaning in 

suffering is the central issue here. Aten’s story is up 

close and personal and the detached, academic pattern 

of making sense doesn’t fare well. Instead, it is the 

human touch, sometimes literally, that really matters. It 

is the subjective, not the objective, that rescues him. He 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 1(2),  Winter 2020 

Dykema, Book Review   112 

 

admits that the strength of his lifetime religious path 

went from emotion, to intellect, and then back toward 

emotion. By the end of the story, it transcends both. 

The book does not finally answer his big questions 

about suffering. It doesn’t really try. In short, he doesn’t 

find answers; he finds God. God gives him not answers, 

but himself, and it is enough. At both the transcendent 

and the human level, it is not learning, technique, or 

strength that answer. It is relationship, as is said, “all the 

way down,” though here “all the way up” might serve 

better. And the thing that seems to prepare us for 

relationship is more likely to be weakness than strength. 

On a personal level, the story ends relatively well 

for Jamie Aten. Saddled with a permanent colostomy, 

he is daily reminded of his wounds. But he is a better 

person for his experience, and he knows it. He 

celebrates this with gratitude. And he even celebrates 

the struggle, in fact lauds it, as the thing that reconciles 

for us our sometimes-grim reality with hope stretched 

from now to eternity. In this light, ironically, relief is not 

the highest good and can potentially come too soon. 

But what about professionally? As a researcher he 

wants to build on what he learned from his own 

experience. He rediscovers the Christian virtue of 

fortitude, names it spiritual fortitude, and makes an 

index number out of it so that “scientific language” can 

be applied. Is an index number the best way to carry his 

experience back into his research? I am skeptical. The 

pattern of the formation of spiritual fortitude in Jamie 

Aten’s life looks radically different to me than can be 

described in scientific language.  

I wonder if research can be conducted on a basis 

that is more faithful to the holistic, formative process 

that Aten went through. Formation of his spiritual 

fortitude was dynamic and evolving, embedded in a 

context of communal belief and practice. Investigation 

of what this looks like on a broader scale cannot be 

contained by an index number approach. If I were 

attempting this, I would begin by looking in a direction 

involving the tendencies of both sides of the brain, such 

as suggested by Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His 
Emissary (2011). I would also seek to retain more of the 

contextual and relational such as suggested in Esther 

Meek’s Loving to Know (2014). Meek refers to her 

approach to knowing as covenant epistemology, 

expressing the depth of the knowing relationship. As 

the title suggests, love is seen as central to knowing, a 

proposition that seems to echo Aten’s experience.  

Through a horrifying experience, Jamie Aten 

found a path toward what we all seek: the reconciliation 

of reality with hope. He came away with greater 

knowledge of God, of himself, of the importance of 

community, and of the spiritual meaning of disaster. As 

a memoir, it is a deeply personal account of his journey, 

but everyone can benefit from looking over his 

shoulder. 

 

 

References 

 

McGilchrist, Ian. 2014. The Master and His Emissary: 
The Divided Brain and the Making of the 

Western World. New Haven: Yale University 

Press. 

 

Meek, Esther Lightcap. 2011. Loving to Know: 

Covenant Epistemology. Eugene: Cascade Books. 

 
 

 

 

 

Eugene Dykema taught economics at Calvin College 

for eighteen years, then started an MBA program at 

George Fox University. He is currently retired and 

writing on economic methodology. He has survived 

cancer and attempted murder. He is familiar with 

suffering and with grace. 

 

Author email:  gene@dykema.net  
 

 

 

mailto:gene@dykema.net

