When I was a kid, my sister’s favourite biblical passage was from the gospel according to Luke. “Suffer little children to come unto me,” Jesus told his disciples, “for of such is the Kingdom of God.”
My sister had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and she understood Jesus to be saying that children like her, who felt pain, would inherit paradise. Her favourite saints were the youthful martyrs – Angela of Fatima, Bernadette of Lourdes, Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower. Every week my parish gathered to pray for my sister and the priest offered up her suffering, everyone’s suffering, all the suffering of the world, to God.
