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No Easy Answers: living with suffering by Barbara Baisley: new edition by Christine Worsley, published by Inspire pp224 ISBN 978-1905958085 £9.99
I missed this book first time round, but I am so glad I did not miss it this time. Barbara Baisley was among the first group of women to be ordained to the priesthood in the Church of England. In the first edition of this book, published in 2000, she reflected on her 14 year struggle with cancer. In 2001, when inoperable brain tumours were diagnosed she began to keep a journal for the five months left to her. This second edition intersperses the original text with extracts from that journal.
Many people, of all faiths and none, have written books and articles about their struggles with terminal cancer but this one is, in my view, different for two main reasons. Firstly, it is very theologically challenging. Barbara’s cancer diagnosis was, at its heart, a challenge to her faith and she reminds me, at several points, of Job because she is not willing to accept the easy answers she is offered by so many well-meaning people and thus to let God off the hook. Secondly, she broadens the scope of her book by seeing her struggle with cancer as a bereavement - the loss of years of life, of bodily strength, of hopes and ambitions - with the same stages of shock, anger, the need to blame, the pain of loss and depression, and, by God’s grace, some measure of acceptance as are the experience of most of us who allow ourselves honestly to grieve. It is an incredibly, even shockingly, honest book- especially in the way she lays bare the inadequacy of the way she has, as a Christian, understood and responded to suffering in the past. I winced as I recognised my own theological cop-outs in the face of my own, and especially other people’s, suffering.
Instead of telling her story chronologically, she tackles it thematically as some of the chapter titles make clear: Whose fault is it anyway? Does God heal? Is there any meaning in all of this? Carrying the cross: and the final chapter title Today I am alive.
Although, to the very last page, Barbara allows the reader no easy answers, the moving extracts from the diary of her last months reveal that she, like Job, found herself satisfied without answers.
Sheila Maxey |
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