How Julian of Norwich’s writings on suffering have helped me as a cancer patient

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.