Lent is a beautiful opportunity each year to enter into deeper prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. These practices should lead us to greater repentance and conversion. There is a stripping away of our sins and worldliness when we dedicate ourselves more seriously to the spiritual life. What many of us find as we progress through Lent, however, is that God has other plans for us than our own. It may turn out that our willed penances may have to give way to a deeper unwilled suffering, which if endured in union with Christ Crucified will produce even greater fruit in our souls. This has been the lesson for me during what has already been a rather long Lent and Christ used two holy souls to show me the way.
On Ash Wednesday, my husband grew very weak for reasons we didn’t understand at the time. After what we thought was a normal cold, his energy began to weaken over the course of a few weeks. By the time we drove 2 hours away to my godson’s baptism on the Monday before Ash Wednesday, he was too tired to drive, which is abnormal. At the baptism itself, I noticed at one point that he went to sit in a chair off to the side. He was there to support me and our friends since the godfather is a priest.
As he sat in the corner, the priest who celebrated the baptism sat next to him afterwards, and seeing how sick he was, gave him Anointing of the Sick. My husband knew something was seriously wrong because even when he was sickest with his rare autoimmune lung disease, Wegener’s Granulomatosis (GPA) he never felt as weak as he did that week. By Ash Wednesday, I stood over him with growing concern as he tried weakly to eat a McDonald’s fish filet sandwich and could barely finish a few bites. He had no appetite and dropped 15 pounds in two weeks.
It was providential that he received Anointing of the Sick because we found out two days later that one of his immunosuppression drugs started suppressing the creation of new white blood cells in his body. His white cell count dropped to a critically low 2 and he was high risk for infection and illness. We also discovered two days later after I brought him Holy Communion from Sunday Mass that he had a fever and needed to go to the hospital. He was admitted for a couple of days for what his pulmonologist believed to be viral pneumonia, which is particular dangerous for severely immunocompromised patients.
Thus, our Lent began with intense unexpected and unwilled suffering. The penances we all agreed to in the beginning gave way to reality as we dealt with sleepless nights in the hospital and multiple weeks of him needing to rest and work from home because he wasn’t strong enough to drive or make it more than a couple of hours without needing a nap. Thanks to the miracle drug, but double-edged sword of prednisone—a drug that induces Hulk-like tendencies in those on it—he began to feel better and was able to finally return to week on Monday of this week.
His white cell count is slowly climbing since his rheumatologist discontinued the immunosuppression drug causing the problem and dropped him to only taking his bi-annual antibody infusion drug. We will see how his lungs look in a couple of weeks, so the pulmonologist can definitely rule this was only pneumonia and not his chronic illness waking up from remission.
In the midst of all of this, my own chronic health issues of debilitatingly painful gastritis and esophagitis from bile reflux disease began to flare up from the stress, random eating patterns, and over reliance upon coffee to function. I had to surrender my own plans to eat vegetarian and only one meal a day throughout Lent to the reality that my body simply could not handle this level of fasting, especially in light of the need to care for my husband. The Lord is asking something greater from me than bodily mortification despite my great desire to grow in bodily mortifications.
He is asking me to surrender to His will and to bear the interior mortifications of this season in our lives. To examine the areas where I cling to pride, self-reliance, frustration, unforgiveness, and a whole host of other sins by relinquishing my grip to Him. He does not grasp on the Cross. He opens his palms freely and accepts the nails because they are the Father’s will for our redemption. He asks the same thing of each one of us.
To further this lesson, the Lord sent me two holy guides: one a servant of God and the other a canonized saint. The first is Father Walter Ciszek, S.J. who my spiritual mother told me to read about in his book He Leadeth Me, which is making the Lenten rounds through Hallow and Fr. Mike Schmitz. This book is life-changing. It is about surrendering to the will of God in all things. To see the things outside of our control as the means by which He unites us to Himself and sanctifies us.
Light flooded into my soul reading his story and the spiritual wisdom he gained from 23 years as a prisoner in the Soviet Union. The Lord brought me to an even deeper understanding of how much He desires our daily surrender in all things that happen to us each day. This is where holiness happens. The Lord uses the good and the evil in our day to bring about our greater good. The more we surrender, the greater the work He can do in our souls.
I’ve grown in this understanding over the years, but this book brought it into sharper focus and plunged me into the depths of this reality and the joy that comes from this type of surrender. The Lord’s will for us this Lent has been to surrender to these illnesses and what they require of us. To set aside our own plans—as good as they may be—for His plans, which are so much greater than anything we could come up with on our own.
The second holy guide is St. Frances Xavier Cabrini who is gaining greater notoriety through this Friday’s release of Cabrini from Angel Studios. In Theodore Maynard’s book, Too Small a World: The Life of Mother Frances Cabrini, he writes:
It is one common enough to religious enthusiasts in their youth: she applied to herself bodily mortifications of a sort that she afterwards discarded in favour of those that were interior. Not of course that she would ever have said that great good cannot be derived from such practices, but she conformed with the trend of Catholic asceticism in attaching much less importance to these than to others. But at this time we hear of her sleeping on a couple of boards instead of in bed, with the result that her already weak health nearly gave way. Her mature conclusion as the founder of a religious order was that the perfect observance of the rule provided not only all the mortifications anybody needed but the most thorough-going of all mortifications.
St. Frances had a great desire initially to offer bodily mortifications, but she came up against the reality of her ill health. The Lord would mortify her through her physical, emotional, and spiritual sufferings along the way, but most of all through her total obedience to the rule of her community. The same can be said for us in our particular vocation. Her path would be union with the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the Cross through obedience to His will in all things.
Regardless of our deep desires to mortify the flesh, the Lord knows the penances we need to embrace this Lent and every day. In my own life, I found that interior mortifications are intensely more painful to embrace than bodily ones. They require a crucifixion of the ego, which like a tyrant, rebels under distress. For those battling illnesses or weakened bodies who cannot fulfill bodily mortifications, the Lord seeks to mortify us interiorly through seeing our weakness, humiliations, rejections, betrayal, and the reality of our sins. The Lord wants us to “rend our hearts not our garments” as He says in Joel 2:13.
Times of great suffering are a reminder that as good as bodily mortifications are for our spiritual development, the Lord often works even more profoundly through our willing acceptance of unwilled suffering. These are not somehow lower than strict bodily fasting. Great saints like St. Francis Xavier Cabrini and St. Therese of Lisieux show us this well-trodden path to holiness. Despite the immense bodily mortifications forced upon Father Ciszek, he found the interior mortifications to be the most spiritually efficacious.
Perhaps like our family, your Lent has not gone as you planned. As we near the halfway point, it is essential that we turn to the Lord with our whole hearts and ask Him what His plan is for us during Lent and in the future. He knows what will make us truly holy. For some it will be great bodily mortifications and for others it will be the hidden humiliations, frustrations, and agonies of illnesses, relationships, or other forms of unwilled suffering. Servant of God Father Walter Ciszek and St. Frances Xavier Cabrini show us that ultimately what matters most is that we surrender fully to the will of God each day. This is where holiness is ultimately found.
Photo by Taylor Wright on Unsplash
