Concerning People, Laughter, Love and Faith

Make Sense of Life — and Keep Suffering in Perspective

When she was dying from cancer at the young age of 52, an interviewer asked Sr. Thea Bowman (1937-1990) how she made sense of suffering. She replied,

I don’t make sense of it. I try to make sense of life. I try to keep myself open to people and to laughter and to love and to have faith. I try each day to see God’s will.

A native of Jim Crow Mississippi, Thea Bowman was a nun of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration based in Wisconsin; in her short life, she became a face of African-American Catholic spirituality. Both an activist and a contemplative, she did not leave behind an extensive literary corpus, but her writings neverthless contain plenty of jewels. As a woman who lived the last six years of her life with cancer, many of Bowman’s later writings reflect both the reality of living with a life-threatening illness and the resilience and even joy that she marshaled through her vibrant faith.

Suffering is something that many religious traditions speak to; the core teachings of Buddhism are largely organized around the human desire to mitigate or eliminate the suffering that naturally occurs due to old age, illness and death. In Christianity, a variety of messages (some contradictory) can be found to address the questions raised by suffering; on the one hand, we are exhorted to confidently lay our suffering at the foot of the cross, trusting that Christ will eventually “wipe away every tear” (Revelation 21:4); on the other hand, a Catholic folk tradition suggests that we can actually participate in Christ’s suffering by becoming a “victim soul,” whose extraordinary suffering is seen as both a type of solidarity with the crucifixion and a gift to God on behalf of the spiritual needs of the world (needless to say, this is not official Catholic teaching, nor is it found in any other tradition; but it’s a fairly widespread notion in some Catholic circles).

I think Thea Bowman hits the right note, though: we’re not called to “make sense” of suffering,, but rather of life. In the immortal words of Johnny Mercer, we need to “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” — in other words, however we think about life’s unavoidable pain and suffering, it only makes sense in the light of a higher purpose: of celebrating the life that has been given to us by the Spirit. Suffering, no matter how devastating or unfair it may be, is never more than just a small part of the greater whole: the gracious gift of life.

Quotation Source: “Sister Thea Bowman on dying with dignity,” interview in U.S. Catholic. Online link: uscatholic.org/articles/202009/sister-thea-bowman-on-dying-with-dignity/

Photo of Sr. Thea Bowman by Katie Hutchison, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.