“Since you have given Greg a share in your own passion,
help him to find hope in suffering,
for you are Lord forever and ever.”
These were words I didn’t expect to hear from my priest, certainly not words I expected to hear while lying in a hospital bed. Only two days before, I had felt fine as I gave out candy at Halloween—and ate candy that my kids procured from our neighbors. Now I was in the hospital receiving the Sacrament of Anointing, having been diagnosed with cancer of the bile ducts shortly after I came to the emergency room complaining of sudden pain in my right chest and shoulder.
It is jarring to sit in a fluorescent-lit room and be told you have cancer. I instantly ceased being a healthy middle-aged person who had never really suffered to being someone whose entire existence was now identified and threatened by a disease we all fear. But it was similarly jarring to hear a priest pray that I might “find hope in suffering,” like having cancer was something I could or should acknowledge as a good thing.
A friend asked if he could bring anything to me at the hospital from my office, and I asked him to bring my copy of Julian of Norwich’s Showings. Julian, a 14th-century mystic who lived as an anchoress in solitude in Norwich, England, is one of my favorite figures, and her book—sometimes called Revelations of Divine Love—is one I’ve read repeatedly. Although I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, I knew there was something in her book that I needed to read.
As she explained in the final pages of Showings, the revelations were entirely about divine love. As God responded when asked about the meaning of what she saw, “Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love.”
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Gregory Hillis is the executive director of the Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. He is the author of Man of Dialogue: Thomas Merton’s Catholic Vision, published by Liturgical Press.
With thanks to America and Gregory Hillis, where this article originally appeared.
