Two days ago, one of my sons graduated from a Catholic high school. We gathered with great joy in the Cathedral to celebrate Holy Mass and in the evening in the auditorium, where each student received their diploma.
It was unusually cold, almost wintery, even though it was late spring. When we arrived at the Cathedral, a torrential, freezing rain fell on all the students crossing the street from the high school to the sanctuary, and on all the relatives who ran soaking wet from the parking lot. The same thing happened during my walk the few blocks from the high school to the auditorium that night. I hated having wet shorts and jackets, but the excitement of the event made me forget the discomfort.
I was feeling pretty healthy, but when I got home, around 10pm, I suddenly got a really sore throat, burning nose, full body aches and an overwhelming feeling of weakness. It was as if I had been hit by some kind of illness all of a sudden. My suit got wet twice that day so I thought maybe I had caught a bad cold.
That night, I felt increasingly sick. I had similar symptoms when I had coronavirus two years ago. Not wanting to take any risks, I took a test at home. Within 15 seconds, I found out I had a mutated strain of COVID.
So yesterday I was in bed all day with a high fever, waking up at times with a terrible headache.
The sick person’s never-ending night
As always when you get sick, the nights are the worst. No part of my body hurt. It felt as if a hammer was hitting my head rhythmically and nonstop. My throat hurt and I felt like I was drowning. At times I couldn’t breathe. I also had a fever and the worst part was that I couldn’t sleep at night because I had been in bed all day. There was no way I could escape to sleep to avoid the discomfort.
Suddenly, I saw the clock. It was 11:20 PM. I thought that the long and endless night had just begun. I looked at the clock again, and it was 11:41 PM. Only 11 minutes had passed, but it already seemed like an eternity. Then the clock showed 1:10 AM. I just hoped for dawn, as if the sun would come out and the horrible night would end, and all my discomfort would disappear.
At that moment, I was reminded of the psalmist’s anguished words. My soul seeks the Lord ” (Psalm 130:6) I thought of the sentinel who kept watch all night until he grew weary and waited for the dawn to bring him rest and peace. In the same way, my soul also waited for the dawn to come, hoping that it would make me feel better.
Using Illness as a Moment for Prayer
This brief reflection on the psalm made me want to pray. Surely prayer would help me relax in the midst of such pain. I tried one of my most favorite forms of prayer, the prayer of the heart, also known as the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God…have mercy on me, sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God…have mercy on me, sinner.” It is called the prayer of the heart because the rhythm of this prayer is characterized by the breath, which ultimately synchronizes with the heartbeat. The first part is saying “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God…” while breathing in, and the second part is saying “…have mercy on me, sinner” while breathing out slowly. It is a beautiful ancient form of prayer created by the Desert Fathers.
But to pray I need to be able to breathe, and with my stuffy nose I can’t breathe, and with my headache I can’t think clearly, so praying was impossible.
The ability to sacrifice illness and pain for a greater good
This was not a complaint for me, because there was another way to make this night of pain and discomfort into a night of spirituality and encounter with the Lord: by virtue of the fact that, when baptized, Catholics are anointed with chrism in the same ceremony as priests (and prophets and kings), we can offer as a sacrifice to God everything we do in life and everything we suffer.
So I decided to unite my pain with that of Christ on the Cross and offer all the discomfort I felt that night in sacrifice to my mother, who suffered from an illness that was difficult to treat and caused unavoidable physical pain. I offered all my pain to help my mother recover and asked God to help me not to despair during that endless night.
Finally, dawn broke. The clock struck 5:30 a.m., and sunlight was already streaming through the window. The exhaustion from enduring the pain all night overcame me, and I fell into a deep sleep.
It is important to know how to transform every moment of our life into a personal encounter with the Lord. Recalling his words in the Bible and understanding the different ways of prayer that are part of our spirituality will help us to achieve this. Thus, our life will take on a different meaning.
When we get sick, we have the choice to complain, despair, and curse the pain. The other choice is to make sense of our suffering by transforming it into prayer and offerings to God.
