When I taste your Goodness, I shall not want.

Choose Life

No job, no plans, no possessions, no idea of "freedom" can take the place of love. So anything that destroys God's gift of motherhood destroys his most precious gift to women -- the ability to love as a woman."

Mother Teresa

The Hidden Power in Our Suffering

Making Sense out of Bioethics: June 7, 2012

In a 1999 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, patients with serious illness were asked to identify what was most important to them during the dying process.

Many indicated they wanted to achieve a “sense of control.” This is understandable. Most of us fear our powerlessness in the face of illness and death.

We would like to retain an element of control, even though we realize that dying often involves the very opposite: a total loss of control, over our muscles, our emotions, our minds, our bowels, and our very lives, as our human framework succumbs to powerful disintegrative forces.

Important spiritual journey

Even when those disintegrative forces become extreme and our suffering may seem overwhelming, however, a singularly important spiritual journey always remains open for us. This path is a “road less traveled,” a path that, unexpectedly, enables us to achieve genuine control in the face of death.

The hallmark of this path is the personal decision to accept our sufferings, actively laying down our life on behalf of others by embracing the particular kind of death God has ordained for us, patterning our choice on the choice consciously made by Jesus Christ.

Sharing in Christ’s giving of Himself

When asked about the “why” of human suffering, Pope John Paul II once stated, with piercing simplicity, that the answer has “been given by God to man in the cross of Jesus Christ.” He stressed that Jesus went toward his own suffering, “aware of its saving power.”

The pope also observed that in some way, each of us is called to “share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished.” He concluded that through his only-begotten Son, God “has confirmed His desire to act especially through suffering, which is man’s weakness and emptying of self, and He wishes to make His power known precisely in this weakness and emptying of self.”

The Holy Father echoes St. Paul’s famous passage: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Love-driven sacrifice

The greatest possibility we have for achieving control, then, is to align ourselves in our suffering and weakness with God and his redemptive designs. This oblation of radically embracing our particular path to death, actively offered on behalf of others and in union with Christ, manifests our concern for the spiritual welfare of others, especially our friends and those closest to us. We are inwardly marked by a profound need to sacrifice and give of ourselves, a need that manifests our inner capacity to love and be loved.

As no one had ever done before, Jesus charted the path of love-driven sacrifice, choosing to lay down his life for his friends. He was no mere victim in the sense of being a passive and unwilling participant in his own suffering and death. He was in control. He emphasized, with otherworldly authority, that, “nobody takes my life from me: I lay it down, and I take it up again.”

Yet we see that his life was, in fact, taken from him by those various individuals and groups who plotted his death and sought his execution. His life was taken from him by evil men, even though, paradoxically, nobody took his life from him, because nobody had power over his being, unless granted from above.

Freedom elevated to new heights

We experience a similar paradox in our own deaths: while it may seem that our life is being taken from us through the evil of a particular ailment or the ravages of a particular disease, we can reply that nothing takes away our life, because nothing has power over our being, except what is ordained from above.

In his providence and omniscience, years before the fact, God already knows and foresees that unique confluence of events that will constitute our death, whether it be by stroke or cardiac arrest, liver failure or Alzheimers, or any other means. By spiritually embracing in God that specific path to death, our freedom is elevated to new heights; indeed, we “achieve control” in the most important way possible, through willed surrender and radical gift in our innermost depths.

Immersing ourselves in hope

Jesus foresaw that his greatest work lay ahead as he ascended Calvary to embrace his own powerlessness and self-emptying. Although we may feel condemned to our powerlessness as we receive help from others in our sickness, and although we may feel supremely useless as we are “nailed” to our hospital bed, our active, inward embrace of the cross unleashes important graces for ourselves and others, and reveals a refulgent light beyond the obscurity of every suffering.

Jesus’ radical embracing of his Passion — and our radical embracing of our own — marks the supreme moment of a person who achieves control over his or her destiny through immersion into the hope-filled and redemptive designs of God.

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Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk earned his doctorate in neuroscience from Yale and did post-doctoral work at Harvard. He is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Mass., and serves as the director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

-Pablo Picasso

AMDG

A new year. Certainly, a time in which we are encouraged to make resolutions, generally with an eye to bettering ourselves: study more regularly, lose 10 pounds, be nicer to _____ (insert name of a person who taxes your patience)—and the list can go on and on. In the midst of a mountain of possible changes, I invite us to examine those lines of continuity that are important to maintain.

Think of the relationships that form the fabric of our lives: family, friends, colleagues, classmates. Think of the different roles that each of us is given to play: child and parent, student and teacher, athlete and coach, to name but a few. Finally, think of our primary purpose in life: the praise, reverence, and service of God, Our Lord.

All of these features stretch over many years, indeed, decades. True, they develop as we do; but they are with us for the long haul. Each new year offers us a chance for a resolve to cooperate with God in His perfecting the most important elements that constitute our lives. These continuities help us to decide properly the sorts of changes that we want to see in 2014, to choose the best means of growing into the persons that God has created us to be. Whether 2014 will see our sixteenth or sixtieth birthday, we ask for the grace to live AMDG and thus to allow this year to be set as another stone of a foundation that builds for eternity.

Fr. Raymond Fitzgerald, Jr., S.J. ’76
President, Jesuit High School New Orleans

It is not you who shape God; it is God who shapes you. If then you are the work of God, await the hand of the Artist who does all things in due season.

Offer the Potter your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the Artist has fashioned you.

Let your clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of the Potter’s fingers.

—St. Irenaeus, 2nd century

Help others by helping yourself.

     "When you focus on doing more, your goal is to seek always to help other people-- not yourself. But one of our power influencers offers a practical suggestion for helping other by helping yourself.

     Larry Senn--chairman of Senn Delaney, an international firm focused on shaping organizational culture-- says you can do more for the people in your life by making a stronger commitment to keeping yourself healthy.
     This may sound self-serving at first, but it's not. When you're in good shape, you're better able to take care of your family and you're more likely to be around to positively influence their lives in the future. And when you're healthy, you have more energy and mental clarity so you make better decisions both at work and at home.
     Larry practices what he preaches. At age 70, he started doing Spring-triathlons. He's now 76 years old, and runs six triathlons per year.
     He says, 'It all ties back to purpose. My highest purpose is my family. I have a huge obligation to be able to keep healthy for them, and I need to do an exemplary job of taking care of myself. I need also to do an exemplary job for my clients, and to serve them well I need to be at the top of my game, which requires discipline in terms of fitness and diet and growth and evolution as a person.'
     By the way, Larry often wins in his age group when he runs triathlons. This year he won in Long Beach, Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, and San Diego. 'I'm not fast, but there aren't many guys left in my bracket!' he jokes. 'In these triathlons they paint your age in giant letters on your calf, and I get lots of comments. It's fun to pass guys in their 20's and 30's on my bike and hear them say, 'Wow! Go for it!'"

                                                                     From Real Influence by Mark Goulston and John Ullmen