Tag: Faith in Everyday Life

5 Psalms for When You’re Sick

For many of us, as we move through January, our thoughts turn to getting healthy by watching what we eat and hitting the gym. But the reality of winter presents us with some health challenges, as contagious illnesses like colds and the flu make their annual rounds. When we get sick in the winter months, darker days and colder weather can compound the misery of the experience.

Whether you’re laid low with something acute, like the flu, or something chronic you struggle with all year long, it can be tough to find comfort for your soul when your body feels so wretched. Thankfully, the Bible offers a wealth of encouragement for such times. If you’ve ever read the Book of Psalms, you know that these ancient prayers of praise (and sometimes even anger or despair) resonate on a deep level even today. Though you may have read the psalms in the midst of other trials in the past, perhaps it’s time for a fresh look at how they can serve as a source of hope and comfort for illness. Here are five psalms to turn to when you’re sick.

Psalm 6: God hears us

Sometimes when you don’t feel well, don’t you just want someone to commiserate with you? If you can’t call upon loved ones to share the pain of your illness, try praying along with David, the author of Psalm 6. This biblical “man after God’s own heart” knew well the burden of unrelenting affliction. In this totally relatable cry for mercy, he pleads with God, “O Lord, heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in anguish. How long, O Lord, how long?” The psalm ends with the helpful reminder that “the Lord has heard my cry for mercy; the Lord accepts my prayer.” We, too, can rest in the knowledge that no matter how God may choose to answer, he does hear and accept our prayers.

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Psalm 38: You’re not in this alone

Though most psalms point to God’s enduring faithfulness and eventual deliverance, they don’t all end neatly tied up with a bow. But that doesn’t mean they don’t still bring comfort. I personally find enormous amount of encouragement in Psalm 38, where David offers up a litany of his sufferings. “There is no health in my body,” he laments. His wounds “fester and are loathsome,” his back “is filled with searing pain.” To me, it’s good to read that my suffering is not unique. There’s solidarity in remembering that even (or especially) God’s beloved saints have endured illnesses just as bad—or far worse—than mine.

Psalm 41: God is Healer

Psalm 41 contains perhaps the most comforting verse in all of Scripture for anyone struggling with sickness: “The Lord will sustain him on his sickbed and restore him from his bed of illness.” While we know that God doesn’t heal every illness—and when he does, it’s always on his own timeline—this psalm testifies to the sustaining grace he offers our souls when our bodies fail us.

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Psalm 35: Fight back against illness

In Psalm 35, David asks the Lord to “contend with those who contend with me”—meaning King Saul’s army that pursued David as he fled through the desert. But in my own life, I like to use this psalm as a rallying cry against the invading agents that assault my body during a sickness. I picture the “attackers gathered against me when I was unaware” as the bacteria or virus that’s making me sick. And I pray that, like David’s pursuers, they may they be scattered far away. In a final, beautiful affirmation, this psalm ends by declaring that God loves it when his children are healthy: “The Lord delights in the well-being of his servant.”

Psalm 73: Don’t compare and despair

When I’m sick, it’s all too easy to look at others who feel fine and get jealous or resentful. Why am I the one stuck here suffering?, I wonder. It’s not fair! The writer of Psalm 73 apparently felt the same way. “They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong,” he notes about those around him. Still, by the psalm’s end, he circles back to the truth of God’s perpetual presence: “Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand.” He even finds peace in detaching from the comparison trap: “But, as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge.”

The psalms not only offer encouragement for recovery from sickness, but remind us that suffering is part of the human condition. God’s understanding of—and compassion for—sickness comes through loud and clear in these ancient poems. May you find comfort and healing as you read them during an illness.

(Originally published January 23, 2019)

January 15, 2024
Community Service: How You Can Act on Catholic Social Teaching Every Day

Photo by Aaron Doucett on UnSplash

During my many years of volunteer service (primarily in hunger relief organizations), I’ve witnessed a frustrating phenomenon. While people (admirably) tend to focus on opportunities to give of their time and resources around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, they often seem to disappear come January. I still remember Martin Luther King weekend the year I lived and worked full-time in a soup kitchen through the Catholic Volunteer Network; an entire volunteer group simply didn’t show up, leaving our skeleton crew to manage on our own. Other times, volunteers would seem more interested in showing off, taking selfies, or making assumptions about the guests they served. When talking with fellow Christians, I seemed to spend a lot of time defending our work as a necessary effort year-round — providing a safe space, steady nourishment, and a type of community to vulnerable people.

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One of the many elements of my Southern Baptist evangelical upbringing that has stayed with me is an ongoing commitment to serving others. Growing up, I often tagged along with my grandmother on the weekends to volunteer at the food pantry that she helped run at her church near downtown Tulsa. In retrospect, it’s fascinating to me that I took those weekends for granted as a normal way to spend my time, even as a child. Although I’ve also had my share of one-time or other brief stints of community service over the years, the memories of serving with my grandmother remain a foundation on which to understand the ways that the Church calls us to embody a true spirit of service on an ongoing basis.

Catholic Social Teaching is rich with resources about providing corporal and spiritual works of mercy. The seasons of the liturgical year also offer a helpful framework for how to engage with these practices. While Advent and Lent naturally lend themselves toward reflection and penance, the Church reminds us that these acts should constantly sustain our faith. In “Evangelii Gaudium” (“The Joy of the Gospel”), Pope Francis offers these reflections on the gospel’s plea to include poor people in our social concerns:

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“The Church has realized that the need to heed this plea is itself born of the liberating action of grace within each of us, and thus it is not a question of a mission reserved only to a few….[I]t means working to eliminate the structural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor, as well as small daily acts of solidarity in meeting the real needs which we encounter. The word ‘solidarity’ is a little worn and at times poorly understood, but it refers to something more than a few sporadic acts of generosity. It presumes the creation of a new mindset which thinks in terms of community and the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few.”

The pope’s emphasis on “small daily acts of solidarity” that lead to “the creation of a new mindset” seems simultaneously humbling and inspiring, as it reminds us of the constant work required of us as Christians while also encouraging us to cultivate service through simple means.

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By developing a mindset that tends naturally toward an attitude of serving others, we can learn to integrate works of mercy into our daily lives throughout the year. Before starting my own family, I volunteered regularly at another local soup kitchen and worked at a food bank, which gave me the opportunity to learn about the needs unique to hunger relief organizations. Many of them, for example, gladly take plastic bag donations, an item often overflowing in our own pantries in these days of grocery pickups and deliveries. Local grocery stores often sponsor fundraisers at the register where you can round up your total or purchase a food item to donate. Parishes sometimes share a “wishlist” of items that their local nonprofits especially need; if yours does not, maybe this could be a chance to encourage them to start.

These acts of service do not require a large sacrifice but enable us to keep the needs of others at the front of our minds in the midst of our everyday activities. As a mother with two toddlers, I’ve had to adapt my approach to community service to the new types of giving that now fill my days. In some ways, motherhood has helped further deepen my perspective about the “small daily acts of solidarity” being a parent requires. As my children help me continue to develop this sense of service as a spiritual practice, I look for simple opportunities to model those practices for them beyond the scope of our immediate family. Our parish, for example, has a “Blessing Box” in the church parking lot, so I regularly do an inventory of our pantry and take my kids with me to load up the Blessing Box with extra food we have on hand. On Sundays, we hand my son a dollar bill to place in the collection plate — a nod to childhood weeks in church with my grandma, when she’d hand me one out of her purse.

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We also make a point to talk and read about the saints as additional models for how to incorporate service into the regular rhythms of our lives; observing these saints’ feast days throughout the year is a natural way to utilize the liturgical calendar to aid our spiritual growth. Through developing such practices into liturgical habits, we can move beyond an occasional mindset and integrate service into our lives more holistically. While part of me sometimes misses the season of my life when I could live more immersed in an outward-facing kind of service life, I am grateful to continue learning how to embody the Domestic Church as I try to give my whole self to my family every day.

Originally published January 14, 2023.

January 12, 2024
3 Ways to Deepen Your Faith by Reading the Saints’ Diaries

While struggling to find bright spots of hope and light in a world of uncertainty during the pandemic, I had the happy fortune to stumble upon a treasure trove of spiritual reading: I picked up a copy of Saint Teresa of Avila’s “Story of Her Life,” and began to read. Before long, I noticed that I felt much happier and whole after reading her diary than I felt after reading dramatic novels. I haven’t abandoned the novels, but I have begun to appreciate the beauty of the diaries of such female saints as Saint Maria Faustina, Saint Therese of Lisieux, and Saint Teresa of Avila. (If this has sparked your interest, there are other saints’ diaries, as well as saints’ letters, that are widely available.)

The diaries are spiritual reading, and they confer all the benefits of spiritual reading: meditation on God, theological food for thought, and so on. Yet in addition to the obvious benefits, I would like to share three less-obvious reasons why the saints’ diaries can be such a valuable asset to our modern faith life:

1. Faith-filled foundations

Unlike modern movies and novels, in which I intentionally try to discover the producer’s worldview in order to better assess the story’s message, the diaries’ worldview is refreshingly straightforward. The undercurrent in these saints’ diaries is: faith! It’s a faith that’s so different and so much deeper than what we commonly see today that it’s absolutely fascinating. Unlike a story set against the backdrop of nihilism, these diaries focus on themes of faith, hope, and love as part of everyday life, such that reading them feels like theology by immersion, rather than step-by-step instruction.

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After her father’s death, St. Teresa of Avila “suffered much in prayer; for…I was not able to shut myself up within myself — that was my whole method of prayer.” She prayed like this for years, but what strikes me most (in addition to her transparency and relatability) is her conclusion. When reflecting on her own surprise that she didn’t give up prayer (despite her suffering), she concludes, “I know well that it was not in my power then to give up prayer, because [God] held me in His hand…that He might show me greater mercies.” I read her words and wonder with desire at the strength of her belief. When I read the saints’ diaries, I hope to discover the faithful assumptions that the saints made about God’s presence on the world — even through suffering — so that I might try them out, and perhaps have the privilege to believe them too.

2. Relatable and humble

The diaries tell the stories of the saints’ lives through their own eyes. Moreover, each autobiography was written (obviously) before the saint was canonized. She didn’t write to tell others, “Here’s my success story; do what I did.” Instead, most of these diaries were written in obedience. For example, St. Therese of Lisieux never intended to write about her life. But when her superior asked her to do just that, she obediently picked up her pen. What this means for us readers is that these books are not didactic tomes, but rather real women’s accounts of God working in their lives.

As an example, St. Therese doesn’t wax on about hefty theology willy-nilly. Instead, she shares tidbits from her happy early childhood, when her father and mother taught her the faith. On learning of the splendor of heaven, she told her mother, “I wish you were dead!” out of sincere desire that her mother should have such joy as eternal life with Jesus. When her mother died young (St. Therese was 4 years old), it changed Therese’s life forever, and in her diary she shares the progression from that grief to begging to enter the convent as a teenager. She writes of God in a very personal and emotional way, her writings born from lived experience and a true and sincere relationship with Christ. She is a young woman to get to know through her diary, someone relatable, accessible, and completely honest.

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St. Faustina writes about awkward moments, such as, on at least one occasion, the difficulty of keeping silence when she had been instructed to do so during a retreat. It was hard! One of the visiting sisters came to her room with something to tell her, but St. Faustina didn’t answer her. “I didn’t know you were such an eccentric, sister,” her visitor said, and left. Yikes! If this is not relatable theology, what is?

3. Digestible

Like just about everyone today, my free time is limited. Often, I pick up a book with good intentions and never get around to finishing it. It sits at my bedside or on my shelf and I feel like I should finish it, but the timing never works out. The saints’ diaries are wonderful in this regard because they are spiritual and uplifting, but they were never written to be read cover-to-cover in a short period of time (or at all!). There are sections of these diaries that fizzle into a collection of thoughts or notes taken day-by-day that weren’t designed to be consumed like a novel. In a sense, this structure gives the reader “permission” to put the diary down. Unlike other theological texts, such as those of St. Thomas Aquinas, in which one paragraph and one chapter leads logically to the next and the next, the saints’ diaries can be disjointed in a wonderful way. I like to pick them up and read enough to uplift my soul and give me food for thought, and then — if I wish — set the book down until a future week, month, or year, when I’d like to “pick the brain” of Saint Teresa of Avila or Saint Maria Faustina. Of course, there are some sections that truly are engrossing, in which the story of the saint’s life compels me to keep turning pages. In that case, I go for it! My point here is simply that the diaries are flexible enough to healthfully work with the life of the reader, just like a good friend.

RELATED: Lessons from St. Teresa: How to Be the Eyes, Hands, and Feet of Christ

If you haven’t given the saints’ diaries a chance, pick one up and start reading. You may be surprised how much you learn and how much your heart moves. Then, when you set the book down, you may observe your day-to-day life and see — as the saints saw in theirs — God’s hand at work.

January 10, 2024