Is This All There Is? (Bernice, nearly 100 and mostly blind, provides an answer.)

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In his weekly column, America Magazine editor Matt Malone writes about visiting, as a young Jesuit novice, a woman named Bernice in a hospital in Boston.

Nearly 100, Bernice had been in the geriatric ward for years because she had nowhere else to go. She no longer spoke aloud and was mostly blind, but was always smiling. In Bernice’s early days on the ward, nurses told Malone, “she was known for her folksy wisdom and quiet piety, which she generously shared with her fellow patients.”

Malone asked a nurse who was particularly close to Bernice why Bernice always seemed happy.

“Bernice knows Jesus,” the nurse replied, then with more emphasis, “Bernice. Knows. Jesus.”

A Much Deeper Kind of Knowing
When I read this, I thought, “Wow, she knows Jesus like you would know the person next door or the woman who works in the next cubicle.” But, of course, the nurse was talking about a much deeper kind of knowing, maybe like you know your children or your spouse, but even deeper than that, even more personal and “spiritual.”

Some people would simply say that Bernice is delusional, that Jesus has been dead for 2,000 years and that her “friendship” with him is simply a matter of magical thinking.

That’s a presumption with which I can’t agree. But it brings us squarely to the nature of faith, the principal topic of this blog. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I have frequently expressed my opinion that faith is mainly a relationship to God and others. But it’s also a way of knowing, distinct from science – as literature, art and music are – but no less reasonable.

Faith, like a plant, comes in seed form and you generally spend a lifetime nurturing it. To have faith, you have to accept uncertainty, just as you accept it in every other area of life. And you need persistence and patience.

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“Faith is not easy,” writes Malone. “It is just easier than the alternative.”

So if uncertainty isn’t the great enemy of faith, what is?

"Fear,” says Malone. “It is the fear, known or unknown, that this world is ultimately all there is, that there is no life beyond the here and now.”

Her faith freed Bernice from this fear. It also allowed her to be free of the walls of her hospital room, her near-blindness and all of her many deprivations. Could that be what Jesus meant when he said, “The truth will set you free?”

There’s a really meaningful song from Colombia called “Los Caminos de la Vida,” or “The Roads of Life.” Here are the lyrics, in Spanish for those of you who speak it, and the English translation.

Los caminos de la vida no son como yo pensaba

Como los imaginaba, no son como yo creía.

Los caminos de la vida son muy difícil de andarlos

Difícil de caminarlos, yo no encuentro la salida.

The roads of life aren’t what I thought they would be.

They’re not what I imagined, not what I believed them to be.
The roads of life are very hard to travel,
Hard to walk, and I haven’t found my way.

The song is an expression of disillusionment, one of the most common of feelings for many adults, sometimes leading to depression and even suicide. At some point, many people ask the question, “Is this all there is?” And no answer satisfies.

Makes Sense of an Otherwise Senseless World
Faith is the definitive answer. A relationship to God makes all the difference. It provides an anchor. It makes sense of an otherwise senseless world in which hopes, dreams and ambitions are swallowed by death.

Of course, you might say. You fear death so you make up an afterlife. How honest is that? But is it any less honest than rejecting faith as a way of knowing mostly because many others are doing so, or ignoring the question of God and insisting that life is meaningless?

Malone ends his essay by imagining how Bernice may have expressed to him the choice between faith and the fear that results from giving up on the search for God.

“Choose faith,” Matthew, she tells him. “Life is hard. And there ain’t no sense in makin’ it any harder than it needs to be.”