Surgery on my heart
Groggy is the word for it. This illness at various times leaves one groggy with little ability to think clearly about things. Also, listless, which teams up with groggy to create what appears to be an ineffective human person. All I want to do at such times, and even all I can do, is to stare blankly out the window, look vacantly at a computer screen, or take a nap, which may involve staring thoughtlessly at the ceiling for a time.
That, in turn, brings to mind a short story by the American Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor. In this story, a 25-year-old young man, who has studied art somewhere up North, has returned home having lost his job in a bookstore due to sickness. Seeing no other goal in life but to lie down and die, he is convinced that everyone else in his life is responsible for his sad state.
However, a doctor’s examination reveals that he has contracted undulant fever from drinking raw cow’s milk. At that time, there was no cure for undulant fever, but for sure, he wouldn’t die from it. His own foolishness had brought him to this point where he will have little to do other than lie in bed a lot, undergoing a terrible purification by God.
In all this, he will finally have to face the truth about himself, a truth that will set him free despite himself.
Confirming this, he looks once again at a sign on the ceiling of his room, one that has been there since childhood. Just beneath a hole in the leaky roof of the house, a water stain of the Holy Spirit appeared in the form of a dove, but with a face fierce as a hawk seeking its prey and holding an icy-looking cross in its beak. It hovers over him with relentless determination and is about to descend. The story is entitled The Enduring Chill.
Are you one of those who, like the bedridden character just described, are the proud owners of a hard little heart? When things are going well with you, particularly health-wise, you go about your duties cheerfully, even generously by most counts.
But if God takes away or at least diminishes greatly this outlet for your energies so that you don’t have much left for either mischief or mercy, something not so pretty is revealed! All you can do about it is endure. Such enduring can lead to still greater bitterness.
But if, somehow, prayer can be injected into the situation, slowly, imperceptibly perhaps, the heart begins to change. God’s grace works deeper and deeper within, in its own mysterious way, and a change is noticed. The Holy Ghost begins to hover over you and to work the miracles of grace he has in mind.
The transformation that the Lord is working inside is to open you to a more constant prayer so that you not only accept better what his will might be at a certain time, but so that your heart can be changed into a heart of flesh that is thankful to God for all things, even a bad day with Parkinson’s or with whatever malady you are called to live with.
I don’t know yet, really, what it means to “pray always,” even if I have read books on the topic through years of living in Madonna House. I guess you could say I have learned how to pray in this situation and that, but this illness is inviting me to look at praying in ways or at times that I have not had to face until now.
I have a friend who is much more likely than I, apparently, ever will be to accept the trials that life sends, even the big ones, with a certain equanimity. How he manages this is a complete mystery to me, but I like being around this person simply because he is such a contrast to me, who has to fight out every difficulty with God before I can surrender it, if I ever do!
Slowly, drop by spiritual drop, the graces of God are working on the sinner, the one whose heart goes stonelike in the face of this next trial illness might offer, and not just illness, but all kinds of trials that life dishes out to us in the course of a week or month or year.
Our response: “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me a sinner,” over and over again. Or, “Hail Mary, full of grace…. pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” Repeated over and over again.
And after awhile, when I get tired doing it and would rather gaze blankly out the window (in a foul mood), thanking the Lord all the same, before dozing off for a bit. Thanksgiving is a powerful antidote to bitterness.
Through all my failures and rebellions, and fighting it one way or another, I know that the Lord who is Spirit is hovering over me, not shouting aloud, not breaking the bruised reed, but quietly doing his surgery on my heart.
I have noticed, too, that he is doing the same on other hearts as well. Somehow or other, it has to happen to each one of us. How slow we are to learn, but how patient is the shepherd of our souls!
He sees resistance deep inside where we are only aware of all our “achievements” done at his bidding. And so, he finds ways to open what is deep in us to the gaze of truth about ourselves, and we learn over and over that without him we can do nothing good. But that surrendered to his merciful heart, our hearts, too, can become like his.
At least we hope for this before the day comes when he calls us home, and we see what we really are without his grace.
Hopefully, before then, we will have learned the need to call on his grace constantly, confident that his love for humankind is far beyond our reckoning, hope, or even understanding. Such is our need of his infinite mercy to soothe and cure the fever of our foolish rebellion.
[Photo by ©Patrick Stewart, Madonna House]
