Book of a lifetime: Blessings by Mary Craig

From The Independent archive: Peter Stanford on why he keeps returning to this remarkable memoir of suffering and faith

‘Holocaust survivors showed me another possibility: one could live with pain precisely by not fighting it,’ Craig writes in ‘Blessings’ (PA)

Suffering poses the toughest questions for religion. How can you believe in a loving God/gods when some people suffer so grievously and disproportionately?

The glib answers of my Catholic childhood – that “God moves in mysterious ways”, as my Christian Brother teachers would intone, or that “God sends the heaviest burden to those strong enough to bear it” – seemed only to mock my growing up with a mother with multiple sclerosis. The real landmarks of my childhood were not the usual ones – holidays, school exams, first kiss – but the stages of her long, bitterly fought and ultimately failed battle to keep walking.

Chance rather than faith led me to my first job at the Catholic weekly The Tablet. One of the paper’s star names was the broadcaster and biographer, Mary Craig. I was initially reluctant to read Blessings, her bestselling memoir published in 1979. Its title suggested “offering” pain and suffering to God with a beatific smile. But when I did pick it up, I devoured it at a sitting, and have returned to it regularly ever after, when those age-old questions about suffering have resurfaced in and around my life and threatened to overwhelm whatever frail faith I have.