Around this time of year, conversations about sacrifice tend to increase, and in Catholic circles, we look that whole business of "offering it up" - that once common phrase and practice, not so frequently heard any longer.
Unless you're me over the past three and half weeks.
You can find lots of articles discussing, justifying and explaining "offering it up" from a theoretical perspective.
I have no apologetics or extended argument to present today. All I have is gratitude.
Over the past weeks, I have been graced with innumerable gifts.
There have been very real concrete gifts of food and money. I've been sent gift cards to restaurants and grocery stores. I've received checks. And I am the awed recipient of a collection that the wonderful, already busy Danielle Bean organized, which collected enough money to pay for fully 2/3 of the funeral expenses.
How can I thank you? Danielle is going to be sending me the emails of those who donated through Paypal, so each of you will receive a note from me - as will those of you have emailed and sent cards. It will take a couple of months, but it will happen.
In addition to the financial assistance, every day, I have received word of a few more people praying for Michael and us - praying in various forms and ways.
Including offering it up.
Priests have offered Masses. Those going to Mass have offered their participation and prayer at Mass. People write saying that they offered their Communion for us. Rosaries. Holy Hours. An acquaintance wrote to say that she offered 6 hours of unmedicated childbirth labor for Michael's soul. Two people are - and this just humbles me beyond words - offering their Lenten disciplines for Michael and for our peace.
And there are many more.
As I said, it is humbling. It is a reminder to me - a very strong reminder - to work towards being exponentially more generous in my own spiritual life. Why do I do what I do? What are my prayers for? Just for *me* and for the sake of my own personal journey? Or am I explicitly tying them into something more generous, more cosmic, more sacrificial?
Don't ask me how it "works." I don't know. All I know is that once you accept the mysterious efficacy of prayer, it seems as if everything can be included, not just the words, "Lord, please help him." It breaks open a whole new way of envisioning and living in this Body of Christ for me, and for that, too I am grateful.
And I can't help but sense that it is bearing fruit for me. For us.
A reason why:
I have really been tortured - and that is not too strong a word - by an intense fear of death since my early teens. I have a vivid memory of the moment, when I was about thirteen years old, when the fact of my mortality struck me. I have struggled with this because I know that is not the way a Christian should be - but taking comfort in even St. Therese's apparent fears before her death, and such.
I've always worked myself out of it intellectually - do I believe that Jesus rose from the dead, that the disciples' testimony is true? Yes I do. I mean - I really do. Then, I just keep thinking, walking along that road, logically, and I am eventually okay, placing my faith in Jesus, the reality of the Resurrection and my share in that - well, until the next time something hits me as I pass a cemetery, consider the obituaries or even consider the reality that in 50 years I'll be gone and the world will turn without me and I won't be journeying with my children on earth any more.
I was driving yeseterday morning and I realized something.
That fear is gone. I mean...GONE.
I even tried to get scared. I thought about my grave, about my body in a casket, about obituaries, about not being here to see, say, little Michael's children (which is a possibility - I'm 48..he's 4. Well naturally it's a possibility anyway, no matter how old each of us are, as I have learned the hard way this month) if he has any...about not knowing, as my father said last summer, "how it all turns out" for everyone.
I thought about all the things that have, for 35 years, made me tremble with a fearful anticipation and a desire to avert my eyes and distract myself...
I tried. But none of it worked. I was totally at peace.
It wasn't a Ghost and Mrs. Muir thing going on, where I imagined being with Michael again - although I do think about that at times, cautiously, not wanting to fall into wishful thinking. No, it wasn't that.
It was really just this:
"Well, all right " I thought. "Michael went on that road and he is okay - more than okay. I know it. I can go too because he led the way."
It was odd and striking, somewhat expressive of our entire relationship and, I'm going to say to you, pretty much a miracle.
Who knows where it came from, who knows why. Ultimately God, of course - God's grace. But working in those mysterious ways, through earthen vessels ready to be poured out, generously and sacrificially, moved by Love.
I am opening comments. I would like the conversation to be limited, if possible, to the idea of "offering it up." Not arguing about it, necessarily, but simply discussing how it has worked in your lives.
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Louisey,
Thanks for sharing your beautiful story. It made my day.
I'm sure that the joy that your recovery has brought to others has more than compensated for whatever hurt may have come from your past. Prayers are promised for your continued peace, and congratulations on defeating such a formidable foe.
Amy, my prayers have been with you and your family. I never understood what offering it up meant until my son Joseph was diagnosed with autism five years ago. After a string of misdiagnoses between 2-5 years of age, we finally were told that Joseph had far more than a severe language delay with related sequelae. It was a moderately severe form of autism. I was shattered. So were all of my hopes and dreams for his success. My first child and only son was destined to live on the margins of society long after my wife and I were gone.
For the first time in my life, I joined my suffering and Joseph’s to Jesus’ suffering on the cross. I offered my broken heart as a sacrifice for Joseph’s healing. Against all odds, mystifying the experts at one of the leading autism centers in the nation, Joseph has come up to speed on his language, most of his social skills, is mainstreamed in third grade, straight A student, now with a small circle of non-autistic friends. He looks and behaves pretty much normally, though he is still a work in progress. He excels at bowling and is a fair player in baseball. Kids love him.
When we first assembled the team of therapists, we just managed to get Joseph in immediately with people who normally had 1-2 year waiting lists. When I needed in that first year a special education teacher with a good background in speech pathology for ten hours per week on top of what the Board of Ed. would pay (and we didn’t have the money) a young woman who contacted me to tutor her for the Medical School Admission Test (and couldn’t afford me) turned out to have a degree in Speech Pathology as well as another MS degree in Special Ed, working with pre-K students with Autism. This after seven days before the Blessed Sacrament, telling Jesus exactly what we needed and could not afford. She came from a very devout Catholic family. We bartered to everyone’s benefit!
In prayer, the Lord has led me to peace. In Joseph’s life, he thundered his love, power and glory. He has taken my love for Joseph and my broken father’s heart, laid down at the altar in prayer, and honored that in a healing that nobody can explain.
I understand now the power of redemptive suffering, having seen Joseph’s life redeemed. In honor of the great work that you and Mark have wrought through your sacrifice of love for one another, I offer up my Lenten sacrifices for your intentions and Mark’s, though to quote Pope Benedict on Pope JPII, I am certain that, “He stands at the window in the Father’s House.”
God Bless.
Offering it up to me means standing with Mary at the foot of the Cross trusting that God will bring good out of what is incomprehensible even when you you can not fathom, imagine, or understand how this will happen. It's fundamentally a lived act of faith. And it can be a faith that moves mountains.
When I am in a situation that I know is part of God's will but that is not pleasant to me (or, even, miserable), I lift this situation up to God. When I feel I can make little or no good come from it, then I offer it up to ask that he can.
Hi -- Amy. My first time posting here. Heard about your loss on Internetmonk.com. You have my prayers for you and your children.
I had a Lenten "offer it up" moment a couple of years ago similar to your story, with a variation.
I, too, fear death. Not what's coming after, but what I perceive as the painful transition from the body to spirit. Like Woody Allen, "I'm not afraid of dying -- I just don't want to be there when it happens."
My divorce was final for a couple of years, my kids were grown and out on their own and my fiance had broken up with me. I'm a commercial fisherman and I spend many hours alone. I was taking classes at the time, but I was much older than most of the students and didn't do any "hanging out."
I contracted the flu and was pretty sick for a week, but worked when I could and went to school. But it kept hanging on and I was spending sleepless nights in a fetal position, my heart pounding. One night it got so bad I thought that was it. But I wasn't going without a fight. I grabbed my Rosary beads and proceeded to aggressively offer up my suffering to Mary and to Her Son.
Nobody else was in the house and I don't sleep close to the neighbors, so I was praying very loudly in the dark. About halfway through the third decade (don't remember which Mysteries) it was like a light bulb broke or something -- I heard a pop. Suddenly there was quiet and peace. The aches and pains were gone, my breathing was soft and regular, and my heart was quiet. And then it hit me -- I had died and was having an out of body experience. I just wasn't accepting that I was dead. I began to finish the prayers, and fell asleep.
When I woke up I was still in the state of unknowing "grace". I wasn't sick, had God's peace but it was so different to what I had been living in I still thought I had died and was in a fantasy that I wasn't. Still having no human contact I had my breakfast and got ready to trailer my boat down to the bay to dig clams, as I do in early spring. I dug clams on this cold blustery day in the bright beauty of the white caps and water fowl in their pairing off nesting mode, still wondering if I had actually passed on and this was the preliminary to purgatory.
After I sorted my clams I went to the dock and then it happened. "Joe", one of the local retired gentlemen who hang out at the dock all day in their pick-ups and SUV's to read the paper and solve the world's problems, was there to greet me with his mundane and much repeated questions and comments about the clams and the weather. And I knew I was alive. I was no longer waiting and wondering what comes next. it was all too familiar, but welcome.
I came to realize that I wasn't spontaneously healed from a virus -- I was over that. I had fallen into the fear of being sick and dying alone. It was acute anxiety I had been suffering from, and Mary gave it to her Son, because He has a use for such things.
I am now much less afraid of death and much more grateful for plain old life.
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