What do Saint Hildegard, Saint Teresa, Saint Thérèse, and Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity have in common? Aside from being reliable teachers and guides (three of them are Doctors of the Church), they all suffered life-long or life-destroying ill health. Hildegard suffered from severe migraines; Thérèse suffered greatly from tuberculosis; Elizabeth died of Addison’s disease; and Teresa wrote as if she could hardly remember what it would be like to be physically well for an extended period of time.
Oh, and what else do they have in common? They were contemplatives. To be sure, Hildegard and Teresa had a lot of activity in their long lives also. But they were contemplatives, indeed cloistered contemplatives, first and foremost.
Based on such a small sampling of data, we should be forgiven from making a hasty correlation between illness and contemplation.
But what, if there is any correlation, is the cause? Is it that contemplation is not contemplation, but a by-product of illness? No. Is it that contemplation is unhealthy and leads to illness? No. The cause of all this is that we are weak, and in our weakness, God’s strength can be manifested. God delights in showing his strength in human weakness. He loves to do it – because he loves us.
This is a not uncommon emphasis of the saints. Especially when talking to anyone with a contemplative bent or an inclination for mortification, many saints like to stress human weakness. Even great ascetics like Saint Catherine of Siena like to stress human weakness! In a letter to a friend who was placing too much emphasis on her own penances, works, and healthful actions, she writes,
It may happen that a sick body is obliged to give up its habits in life; then it falls at once into weariness and confusion of mind, deprived of all gladness; it thinks itself condemned and confounded, and finds no sweetness in prayer, such as it seemed to have in the time of its penance. And where did this sweetness go? It’s been lost, with the personal will on which it was built.
Catherine points out that certain sweetnesses are felt because of our self-will. We find delight because we seek it, whether bodily or spiritual. And the spiritual delight sought, by choosing one’s own penances and works to suit one’s fancies, is something we need to lose. Illness, Catherine attests, allows us to do just that: lose the desire for these spiritual consolations that are self-willed. Illness requires abandon: abandoning ourselves into our Providential Father’s hands.
That’s the focus Saint Francis de Sales gives, too, writing to a woman with a crippling and painful condition:
What do you think a bed of suffering is? It is nothing else than the school of humility where we learn all about our misery and weakness, and how vain, delicate, and weak we are… One of the great benefits of suffering is that we come to see the depths of our own nothingness.
Illness can be an opportunity. And elsewhere, speaking more generally:
God’s will is as much in sickness as in health, and ordinarily almost more so; wherefore if we love health better, let us never say that this is in order to serve God the better, for who sees not that it is health that we look for in God’s will, not God’s will in health.
If God prefers our weaknesses to manifest his strength, why should we prefer something else? Likewise, in a pastoral but dense letter to a friend who was lying in bed ill, Saint John of Ávila writes,
Call on Him for aid with all your heart, that as He has weakened your body by His touch, your soul may run to Him the more swiftly.
It is a grace. It is an opportunity. It is just human weakness, and that lets us throw ourselves with more abandon into the hands of our Father. Indeed, even if our mind is weakened, our will in weakened, our imagination, our memory, all of our faculties – this too can be, in Christ, a gain:
Although you cannot now keep up your customary reading and meditation as you would wish, still, do all you can without serious injury to your health. Our Lord is so good and so powerful that He gives strength to those He sees to be doing their best. Sometimes He bestows more favours on people who lie ill in bed and are unable to pray than on others who spend hours in prayer. Perhaps He will show you this mercy, which depends solely on His will.
That’s the simple Gospel: God wants us, and our weakness is no impediment. It’s just the opposite. Get up – not literally – and pray. God will come to you in your weakness. Say, “Abba, Daddy!” Try to focus on him, and if you can’t, just rest in a general loving knowledge that you are in his hands.
Some related posts:
Contemplative in the Mud 