When the phone unexpectedly rang on an ordinary day in 2016, Kate Bowler wasn't expecting news that shattered her life. Kate was thirty-five, a Christian, happily married, mother of a young son, an Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at Duke Divinity School, a published author, successful, and on a fast track to more and more success. What she heard on the phone made her feel simultaneously terrified, out of control, a failure, and a complete loser. She said in a Feb. 2016 New York Times article:
"On a Thursday morning a few months ago, I got a call from my doctor’s assistant telling me that I have Stage 4 cancer. The stomach cramps I was suffering from were not caused by a faulty gallbladder, but by a massive tumor. I am 35. I did the things you might expect of someone whose world has suddenly become very small. I sank to my knees and cried. I called my husband at our home nearby. I waited until he arrived so we could wrap our arms around each other and say the things that must be said. I have loved you forever. I am so grateful for our life together. Please take care of our son. Then he walked me from my office to the hospital to start what was left of my new life."
Today, in 20129, due to new immunotherapy techniques, Kate is in remission with what is called a chronic condition. Now she lives with more or less constant pain and difficult side-effects from her treatments, and constantly changing levels of fear and anxiety. She says,
"Cancer used to be a daily crisis of soaring highs and lows, but in the intervening years (I’m now 38) it has become something different, something chronic. Some days, my doctors talk about my cancer like there is a narcoleptic murderer somewhere in my house who is not entirely sure whether to kill me or go back to sleep. Other days cancer seems like an annoying neighbor who makes a lot of noise but who probably won’t come over again. Cancer could kill me or leave me alone, so how afraid should I be?"
This whole experience has made her - and is constantly making her - reevaluate her life, her attitudes, her faith. She doesn't want a trite faith, but a realistic and enduring faith. She questions everything: In an American society that values the "can-do, up by your bootstraps attitude," the "you can conquer anything if you try hard enough" attitude, the "mental attitude is everything" attitude, the "God wants to bless you with healing, prosperity, abundance - all you have to do is believe and ask" attitude - what happens to you when your life is shattered by an unexpected tragedy? if you're told you're about to die? Or you lose everything in a flood, or a tornado? Does the fact that you're suffering make you a loser? Do you blame yourself because you don't have enough faith? Do you believe you can reassert control of your life?
She says that we have to be careful about how we use the word "blessed":
"Blessed is a loaded term because it blurs the distinction between two very different categories: gift and reward. It can be a term of pure gratitude. 'Thank you, God. I could not have secured this for myself.' But it can also imply that it was deserved. 'Thank you, me. For being the kind of person who gets it right.' It is a perfect word for an American society that says it believes the American dream is based on hard work, not luck."
I would add that when Mary says in her Magnificat that all generations will call her "blessed," she means that she is grateful to God for God's grace, for the Presence of a God Who is continually at work in her life and everyone else's as well.
When you suffer a terrible tragedy, everyone around you will be just like you: trying to bring some meaning out of your tragedy - because at heart we're all meaning-makers. We and they will wonder if a disease is hereditary, or if our diet is to blame, or our mental attitudes, or not enough sleep, or not enough faith. We and they will obsess and drive ourselves crazy trying to figure out why this has happened or is happening. But while we can perhaps find partial reasons, no human being can ever fully understand why bad things happen to good people. And no one, no one, can blame themselves totally - or at all sometimes - for the tragedies that befall us.
We can also play the opposite mind game. After all, Kate says, before her diagnosis, she was so insanely hard-working and successful that she unconsciously believed that all her success was due to her alone. Did that mean that this tragedy was because of her actions as well? Was she at fault because she didn't believe deeply enough? Pray hard enough? She recalls,
"I spent so long studying the prosperity gospel - the idea that God wants to bless you with health and wealth and happiness - that I think I had really gotten used to it as this sort of synthetic explanation for the good and bad stuff that comes up in your life. And maybe I used it a little bit as a motivation. Like, when something good happened, it just proved to everyone how insanely hard-working I was. I was probably a secret believer in that for quite a while....and then the second I got sick, I started to realize how cruel it felt to hear someone say that when I was really struggling to understand why something so terrible could happen to me.... This is just the country of individualists, triumphalists....This is an entire country that does not believe in luck as a fundamental concept. It just assumes that people eventually get what they deserve. And I am really hoping that this is not true." (from "Kate Bowler on Cancer and Christianity," "America" magazine, June 10, 2019)
Kate's faith, purified in the Refiner's Fire of suffering, has become deeper, a walk into darkness, including the Darkness of God as Mystery. If there is any reason for suffering, it is not one that human beings can fathom. Life includes Sickness and Death; they happen to us all. For her, God is no longer the God Whom you can convince to heal you if you pray hard enough, have enough faith. She still prays for healing. But she knows that God is also the God of Job, Who says "Be still and know that I am God," and sometimes this God heals you and sometimes suffering continues. God also is one with us in the person of Jesus, God's Son, who feels totally abandoned by God as He suffers on the cross and learns the meaning of surrender to his Father. She trusts: God is a faithful God, even if we cannot begin to imagine what this God is doing, how this God is at work in our lives, even when things Just Happen for no reason.
At the time of the terrible Texas floods, she wrote a blog post "Has God Forgotten Texas?"
"What happens when no amount of bootstrapping or hard work or #blessed prayers keep the flood from your doorstep? What happens when you can no longer bear to repeat the well-worn phrase that everything happens for a reason?
"Support for those who are suffering the effects of this flood will have to begin where these theologies cannot. A frank admission– it will not be enough.
We will never be able to restore every family to their home, every community business, or, God forbid, every empty seat around the dinner table ripped away by the waters.
"I saw a news post about a Houston pastor who risked his own safety to manually check every stranded car along a freeway section for trapped passengers. No one was to be left behind.
"In tragedy, Christians unfailingly ask, 'Where is God in my suffering?' God, make yourself known, for I cannot see through the murky waters drowning me, send me a rope, a boat. Do not forget your child.
"Psalm 139 often spoke to me during my cancer treatment. It reminds us that we are all wonderfully and fearfully made with ridiculous specificity by God. The Psalmist knew our bodies, woven together in the depths of the earth, were to carry both devastation and joy.
"Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
The Psalmist sings into the deep antiquity of God’s proximity. We have always wondered if we can be forgotten by God, if we can stray so far into darkness that even God cannot see and hold us. We have always belonged to a community of strugglers and doubters who wonder whether God knows our suffering or even cares.
"Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me, but even the darkness will not be dark to you.
"What I have learned in the course of these two years is this: I can live in the space of not knowing why this horrible thing is happening to me, and still know I am held somehow loved by God. All the charity in the world cannot, and will not, restore the lives of people affected by Harvey. So few things can ever be made whole by the well-meaning of others.
"As my Duke Divinity colleague, Dr. Ellen Davis, writes in her book "Getting Involved with God", the psalms have language for moments like these. She writes, 'It seems that Israel believed that the kind of prayer in which we need the most fluency is the loud groan,' and 'sometimes the only act of faith that is possible – for those who suffer… is to name our desolation before God.'
"No one needs to protect God from the truth: it will not be enough. Tragedy has come home. But somewhere in the midst is a promise. We are not forgotten."
Today (2019) Kate says, "I have tried to embrace it - like, I am a loser; I am absolutely on the losing team. But now I just kind of think, you know, Christianity is on the losing team, Jesus' life was certainly a bummer. All the 'kingdom come" and 'not yet,' that we are waiting till God's reign comes. And in the meantime, we're going to be on the losing side. So come join me."
What has most helped her during these years of struggle?
First, the way people have responded to her. She says,
"Maybe the most confirming is that there is absolutely nothing special about a thirty-five year old getting cancer.....It felt so good to get those emails and letters that just said: 'I'm in it with you. Life came apart for me too.'"
The most wonderful people in her life, she says, are these: "People who hug you and give you impressive compliments that don’t feel like a eulogy. People who give you non-cancer-thematic gifts. People who just want to delight you, not try to fix you, and make you realize that it is just another beautiful day and there is usually something fun to do."
Secondly, cancer has opened her up to the reality of other people's suffering. She says,
"...it did feel like cancer was like this secret key that opened up this whole new reality. And part of the reality was the realization that your own pain connects you to the pain of other people. I don't know. Maybe I was just a narcissist before. But like all of a sudden, I realized how incredibly fragile life is for almost everyone. And then I noticed things like - and that felt like a spiritual - I don't know - like gift.
"It's like you notice the tired mom in the grocery store who's just like struggling to get the thing off the top shelf while her kid screams, and you notice how very tired that person looks at the bus stop. And then, of course, all the people in the cancer clinic around me. That felt like I was cracked open, and I could see everything really clearly for the first time. And the other bit was not feeling nearly as angry as I thought I would. And, I mean, granted - like I have been pretty angry at times. But it was mostly that I felt God's presence." (from her interview on "Fresh Air," for NPR)
Third, in rethinking her experiences, she says she is an incurable optimist because while Life is so hard, Life is also so beautiful...It's both.
"It's just this little loop that my brain goes on. I mean, like you can see - because it's the two things at the same moment. Like when you're in the hospital, and you've got a face mask on, and you can taste that like brine of the awful fluids that they've just pumped into your body, and you look around, and you just see something so beautiful - like the way an old man reaches over to like adjust his wife's hair as she gets her treatment. And their love just makes you stop for a second. And, like, I see it every day - like something that is just heart-stoppingly beautiful."
Fourth, by sharing heart to heart experiences with other people suffering tragedy, she received new insights into how to overcome fear with love. She talked to Jayson who lost a first child but decided with his wife to have a second child even though they understood the deep pain that comes with loving.
She says, "Speaking with Jayson made me realize that the locus of my greatest fears — leaving behind my son and husband — could also be that daily nudge, asking me to stay as awake to my love as to my fear. To say, 'I know the world is full of things to fear, but our love will make a path. We will learn to plod ahead even though love itself makes us terrified that we cannot be without each other.'”
Fifth, Kate knows that exercising our creativity while we suffer can enlarge our world which has been narrowed by our pain. She has won a Christopher Award for her book "Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved."
When everything falls apart, Kate Bowler says, it's OK to Fall Apart, over and over, feel anxiety and fear, get wiped out by pain, as long as we get up over and over in-between. Suffering can also break us open so that we re-examine our faith and our assumptions about life, and find out what is really important to us.
Kate has learned that we can't assign reasons to the terrible things that happen to us: God, Who is Mystery, is the only One Who knows Why tragedies happen. And God created our fragile bodies to carry both devastation and joy. If, with brave faith, we walk into the darkness of suffering, we will always find God there waiting for us, because God knows our suffering and cares; God will never leave us. And, sometimes, the best prayer to God is a groan, a groan that names our desolation before God.
Trusting a God Who never forgets us, we can live safely in the space of not knowing why horrible things happen to us. Because we know that somehow we are still held and loved by God. A God Who shows us that Life is hard but it is also beautiful. A God Who says, "Stay awake to the love in your life." A God Who shows us that although the world is full of things to fear, Love - our love for others and God Who is Love Itself - will always make a path for us.