Why, God?: Suffering Through Cancer Into Faith

A nineteen-year-old chemistry major at Rhodes College is selected to spend the summer after her freshman year doing research at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Instead, she finds herself a patient there, fighting a life-threatening form of pediatric cancer and suffering through a year of aggressive chemotherapy and surgery. Refusing to believe what many tell her--that the cancer was all part of God's plan--she finds solace in journaling and begins a discussion with her grandfather, a university professor specializing in philosophy of religion. Through her experiences and writing about them, the student discovers that she may be a person of faith after all--just not in the way she expected. Her grandfather has selected and arranged the journal entries and their faith conversation and has commented on them in order to bring out the spiritual dimensions of her experience. He learns from his granddaughter that faith comes more through experience than through ideas. The coauthors hope the book will help other sufferers recognize the presence of a loving God in the midst of pain, uncertainty and death. Anyone who has ever asked the gut-wrenching question, why me? will be able to connect with Edward Henderson's book. He engages a complex question raised by his beloved granddaughter and transfers it from his head to the depths of his heart. Why, God? is a touching volley between the two that will lead the reader towards hope through God's abundant generosity. --Morris Thompson, Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana This book is for those who are appalled by easy answers to the problem of senseless pain: 'God wills it. You will benefit from it. Everything happens for a reason.' Maggie Cupit and her grandfather Ed Henderson--college student and college professor--reject such banalities. Instead, they confront the God whose creation entails chance and accident, whose crucified Son invites interrogation, whose sustaining presence bears them and everyone else through the dark night of divine absence. --Ralph C. Wood, Professor of Theology and Literature, Baylor University What we have in this book is a most extraordinary narrative not just of sheer courage and determination on the part of a young woman who continues to flourish having endured chemotherapy and major surgery on one leg, but a narrative about a truly compassionate family. . . . Granddaughter and grandfather write, pray, and use their anger at the suffering she endures to find a sense of divine presence to her, both in her own honesty about her feelings and in the depth and extent of care she received. . . . This book is indeed 'a grief observed' (to use C. S. Lewis' phrase) and a mode of thanksgiving. Not a book for the sentimental --Ann Loades, Honorary Professor of Divinity, University of St. Andrews Why God? is moving and reflective. We are given everything that goes into the human encounter with the evil of suffering--the questioning, the bewilderment, the anger, but also the faith, the reasoning, and, most of all, the people. Throughout the book is a profound, unspoken hope. Anything less is only half the story. --Eric Springsted, Interim Senior Pastor, Swarthmore Presbyterian Church Margaret Carlisle Cupit is a summa cum laude graduate of Rhodes College. Both a former patient and a student research intern at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, she is first author of a chapter in Antimalarial Drug Research and Development and co-author of End of Life Care for Hospitalized Children for Pediatric Clinics of North America. She has travelled widely to speak for St. Jude and is now a student at Mayo Medical School. Edward Hugh Henderson is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. With David Hein, he is co-editor and a contributing author of Captured by the Crucified: The Practical Theology of Austin Farrer and of C. S. Lewis and Friends: Faith and the Power of Imagination.…