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Surrender the Choosing

Posted by Marion Fernandez-Cueto on March 09, 2010

Lent began for our family last June. That’s when rumors of a third round of layoffs started circling at my husband’s company,
which had already bled jobs for a year. We tightened our careful budget yet again, decided that chairs for our new house could
wait. So could a desk and a piano. And blinds. And a TV. When the axe finally fell two weeks before Christmas, delayed
gratification was getting old.

By February, it was spreading to necessities. When a friend asked me what I was giving up for Lent, I almost bit her head off.
“The kids barely have shoes!” I felt like shouting. “What more am I supposed to give up?”

Quite a lot, it turns out.

I hadn’t planned for a Lent like this, you see. My mortifications were supposed to be pre-screened for quantity, severity and
duration. More importantly, they were going to be selected by me. A layoff had no part in my holiness project. Neither did the
nail-biting wait of my husband’s job search, or endless months of penny pinching while our savings drained. I had counted on
praying more, but in a nice way, an admirable way, not as a blubbering ball of dread or a distracted harpy. This Lent, I had wanted
to “run the good race,” as St. Paul says, not convulse with spiritual cramps before the finish line even came into sight.

But that’s exactly where I am mid-Lent, and it’s disorienting. It’s also revealing: “Many people feel they could achieve heroic
sanctity if they could do it in the way that appeals to them,” writes Catholic mystic Carryl Houselander. “They can picture
themselves going cheerfully to the stake; they can positively revel being hanged, drawn and quartered; but if God makes no
revelation but just lets them go on carrying out an insignificant job in the office day after day, or asks them to go on begin gentle
to a crotchety husband or continue to be a conscientious housemaid, they are not willing. They do not trust God to know His
own will for them.”

It is a terrifying thing to contemplate trusting God. Our doubts and fears clamor nearby (“What if He lets you fall through the
cracks?” they shriek. “What if He lets terrible things happen?”) Yet trusting God doesn’t mean trusting He won’t let tragedy
strike, writes Houselander; the truth is, He may. Real trust means knowing that even when catastrophe falls, God still cradles
you with absolute love, with a divine purpose that fathoms every life, every frustration, every heartache, every fallen hair from
our heads. “Surely He has born our grief and carried our sorrows,” Isaiah tells us. Trust in God experienced—not
contemplated—is the most liberating thing in the world.

As I write, I have just received news that my mother is dying. In Australia to spend a year with some of her grandchildren, Mum
suffered a stroke that will take her life in a few days or weeks, doctors predict. Unable to rush to her side right now, I can only
cast myself into the arms of God, knowing that He carries Mum and our whole family with the tenderest mercy.

As I do so, I realize God doesn’t want us to parcel out our chosen sacrifices to Him piecemeal — He wants us to surrender the
choosing itself.

Most Christians are willing to suffer a cross, I think, but we want them to be crosses of our own designation, not Christ’s. Thus
the saints have always taught that a small suffering imposed by circumstance and embraced for love for God can be worth far
more than the strictest voluntary penance. However virtuous the latter, it is often marred by the stamp of self-will. In contrast,
the unsought burdens of life present marvelously pure opportunities for grace; our self-will, which recoils from them, is utterly
absent from their origin. In the vacuum left by own designs, God waits to flow in. It is Him alone we must choose.

I have no more plans for my Lent. It is not “mine” anymore at all. And in the measure I relinquish control — spiritual or practical
— I find I relinquish my fears as well. In their place, inexplicably, comes a strange and tremulous joy. “Do you remember the
first time you learned to float?” my maternal grandmother asked me before her own death. “How, when you stopped thrashing
around and just let the water buoy you up, you suddenly realized you were totally carried? Such will be our experience when we
truly trust God.”

I’m not there yet, but it doesn’t matter. God remains constant, this Lent and forever, and beyond the agony of Good Friday, the
awful emptiness of Holy Saturday, gleams the dawn of an Eternal Easter.

“What do you seek upon earth, save God, and you have Him!” wrote St. Francis de Sales to his spiritual daughter, Jeanne de
Chantal. “If fears seize you, cry loudly, ‘Lord, save me.’ He will give you His hand: clasp it tight, and go joyously on. Do not

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philosophize about your trouble, do not turn in upon yourself; go straight on. No, God cannot lose you, so long as you live in
your resolution not to lose Him. Let the world turn upside down, let everything be in darkness in smoke, in uproar, God is with
us!”

“The Good Jesus is entirely ours,” St. Francis concluded. “Let us be entirely His.”

—Marion Fernandez-Cueto writes from Houston, TX. She was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2000. Her mother
passed away yesterday. Please pray for the repose of her soul.

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