Contributor: Tish Wilson Hildebrand. Tish is a wife, mother, grandmother, artist and doula. A native of Montreal who loves big city life, Tish feels most grounded and at peace in her rural Manitoba home. She feels deeply and is a profound encourager as well as a source of honesty, warmth and insight to all who know her. She delights in creativity of all kinds, especially hand-lettering, art journaling, and card-making. Tish finds herself daily in awe of the vastness of God’s love and God’s invitation to draw a wider circle. She has provided a reading recommendation for Prairie Thistle followers. Check it out!
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Kate Bowler is a history professor at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina who grew up in Winnipeg and married her high school sweetheart. In 2015, at the age of 35, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. “No Cure for Being Human” is a memoir that reflects on her life at the time of, and throughout, her long and uncertain course of treatment.
Perhaps the best summary of the book lies in the author’s raw assertion that, “I want to be alive until I am not.”
Bowler’s existential quest is open, honest and vulnerable; “I hope for a future that might not come, and in the meantime I have to make every decision count.” She searches for a meaningful framework in which to hold both her illness and the rest of her life – her husband and young son, family, friends, and her dream career. With a keen awareness of the passage of time, the author seeks to extract each drop of meaning from the mundane to the marvelous.
Bowler’s writing flows around and through her Christian convictions, but never veers into any religious or theological territory. Her faith simply adds another colour to the canvas of her life. The author, whose previous works include “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel”, throws a spanner into the works of this health and wealth dogma with her own genuine, moving Gospel of Reality.
With obvious disdain for the cliches of the self-help industry like “Live Your Best Life Now”, Bowler opens up her own life to us with honesty, hard earned wisdom and humour. References to her Manitoba upbringing leave you with the vague sense that she might have been your neighbour.
If “Good Vibes Only” is your life’s mantra, then this is not the book for you. If, however, you want to find space to breathe deeply in a life in which there is no winning formula and constant uncertainty, “No Cure for Being Human” is that breath of fresh air.
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