Kate Bowler finds good news in hard truths
No Cure for Being Human offers a model for negotiating suffering with honesty.
In Review
No Cure for Being Human
(And Other Truths I Need to Hear)
Christians regularly look to Jesus as an exemplar of the good life; likewise, readers of the New Testament frequently notice how the preponderance of the Gospel stories which narrate that exemplar’s life in fact focus not on his life but on his suffering and dying. It’s curious, then, that we seldom regard Christ’s Passion as providing an example of how to face our finitude and die a good death. After all, Jesus not only forgives those who’ve wronged him and secures care for his mother, he names his grief, making audible the anguish crashing over him. By refusing the invitation to come down off his cross, Christ accepts this life as his own and, in so doing, dies to the other alternative futures otherwise available to him. In submitting to his arrest, Jesus forsakes any illusion that his life is under his control and not contingent.
Like so many who suffer illness today, Jesus finds himself at the mercy of the machinery of a bureaucracy, “made up,” as Kate Bowler puts it in her new book, “of people who must choose each and every day whether their job will require any of their humanity.” Scripture records that Jesus suffered on Calvary from noon to 3 p.m., reminding us that our lives are composed of not moments so much as minutes. None of us is getting out of life alive, yet none of us has ever before died, so none of us knows how to do it well. It’s an unexamined gift, therefore, that the one who became fully alive has shown us how to suffer and die.
To recommend the Passion story as a pattern for our own suffering and dying risks exactly the sort of prescriptive, one-size-fits-all formula Bowler resists in No Cure for Being Human. She narrates her grim struggle with colon cancer with a bracing candor and a frank wit, refusing any cheap optimism or sentimentality along the way—virtues, I think, that are only intelligible in light of her Christian convictions. In so doing, she does not follow the example of Jesus so much as she incarnates it, within the uniqueness of her own circumstances.
