Obedient Unto Sickness

A Reflection by Mother Petra

During the Great Fast, we were blessed to visit the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania.  We arrived in time to join the nuns for prayer in their chapel at noon, then joined them for lunch, spent the afternoon in conversation and sharing, prayed Vespers with them, and departed for our own monastery. 

In these nuns, who have decades more experience than our young monastery, we saw a mirror of the beauty and significance of our own monastic life.  A friend recently said to me, “Sometimes, while I’m driving around running errands, I remember all of you here, praying in your chapel, and I think—that’s why the world continues to exist.”  Of course, being immersed in our life, I don’t have any such sense myself!  Yet as I stood in their chapel, I looked upon these beautiful nuns and glimpsed the same reality:  Faithfulness like this upholds the world.  Like Abraham before the Face of God, interceding for Sodom (“Will You spare it for ten righteous men…?”).

We were moved by our conversations with the nuns, and grateful to receive spiritual wisdom and insight both from Mother Christophora, their abbess, and from the other nuns.  At once point, the topic of sickness in community emerged, and I asked Mother Christophora if she would speak about illness in the monastic life.  She explained that, upon entering the monastic life, it is a common experience to become ill.  Perhaps this is an attack of the evil one to discourage a young monastic, perhaps it is trial permitted by the Lord to try her vocation or purify her motivations, perhaps it is simply the natural result of the real intensity of our monastic life which takes a toll on the body.  But then she shared words of Fr. Thomas Hopko which deeply impressed each of us:  “In this country we don’t have elders, so our illnesses are our elders because they teach us obedience.”  She concluded with her own observation, “Afterall, He [Jesus] didn’t say ‘Take up your cross and fight it’!”

So often, it can seem that illness is an impediment to “real” life—keeping us from fully participating in liturgical prayer or other forms of asceticism, from fasting or keeping vigils to the extent we would desire, from accomplishing as much work as we would prefer, from accepting invitations to give talks or spiritual direction.  Yet isn’t this thwarting of personal expectation, desire, and preference the very definition of asceticism?  Bishop Benedict Aleksiychuk of Chicago recently commented to us that illness is an asceticism the Lord is giving us; we are not choosing it.  Therefore, it is a better asceticism because there is no self-will in it, but rather has the purity of coming direct from the mind of God. 

As a nun who has poor health, I am often pained to see the strain my illnesses place on my sisters.  But what a paradigm shift if we came to see each of these limitations, not as arbitrarily imposed by circumstances beyond our control, but rather as an invitation to deeper surrender and obedience in conformity to the will of the Father!  Since our visit, we have begun referring to our diagnoses as “elders” and “eldresses,” coming to recognize the necessities and treatments (all of them inconvenient!) as an obedience—an asceticism—given by the Lord to the whole community. 

I hope those of you who suffer from illness in the world will also be granted grace to trust that nothing touches you that does not pass through the hands of the Father, and that He knows what He is asking of you:  Perhaps not the service or work you desire to do, but trustful rest, slowing down, the willing sacrifice of pain offered to the Lord with faith in His goodness and power to transform our suffering so that it, like Christ’s, becomes a source of redemption in the world and in our own souls. 

I was recently reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the Sacrament of the Sick.  It teaches that “in a certain way he [the sick person receiving the anointing] is consecrated to bear fruit by configuration to the Savior’s Redemptive Passion.  Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning; it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus.” Further, the sick Christian “contributes to the sanctification of the Church and to the good of all men for whom the Church suffers and offers herself through Christ to God the Father.” (CCC, 1521-1522, emphasis mine).  Sickness is not useless, not meaningless!!!  Our surrender to the Father’s will in our sickness is tremendously significant work!  This does not mean we do not seek to alleviate suffering (we should!), but when our efforts fail, or when the treatments themselves prove to be a form of suffering (or, at the very least, inconvenience), let us pray for deeper faith to bow in obedience to the will of God revealed in our circumstances.  Let us cry out with Jesus in the Garden—after pouring out our pain and distress to our good Father, Who attentively gathers all our tears and holds us as we weep—“Yet not my will, but Your will, be done.”  May we be so conformed to Christ, the Obedient One Who was “obedient unto death” (Phil. 2:8), that we consent to be obedient unto sickness, as long as the Lord allows.

Mother Petra praying at the grave of Mother Alexandra (born Princess Ileana of Romania), the foundress of The Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration, whose life and writing were significant in her own monastic formation.