Comments on: Offering it up – From the other end

By: Surfnetter

Surfnetter — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:36:43 +0000

Hi — Amy. My first time posting here. Heard about your loss on Internetmonk.com. You have my prayers for you and your children.

I had a Lenten “offer it up” moment a couple of years ago similar to your story, with a variation.

I, too, fear death. Not what’s coming after, but what I perceive as the painful transition from the body to spirit. Like Woody Allen, “I’m not afraid of dying — I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

My divorce was final for a couple of years, my kids were grown and out on their own and my fiance had broken up with me. I’m a commercial fisherman and I spend many hours alone. I was taking classes at the time, but I was much older than most of the students and didn’t do any “hanging out.”

I contracted the flu and was pretty sick for a week, but worked when I could and went to school. But it kept hanging on and I was spending sleepless nights in a fetal position, my heart pounding. One night it got so bad I thought that was it. But I wasn’t going without a fight. I grabbed my Rosary beads and proceeded to aggressively offer up my suffering to Mary and to Her Son.

Nobody else was in the house and I don’t sleep close to the neighbors, so I was praying very loudly in the dark. About halfway through the third decade (don’t remember which Mysteries) it was like a light bulb broke or something — I heard a pop. Suddenly there was quiet and peace. The aches and pains were gone, my breathing was soft and regular, and my heart was quiet. And then it hit me — I had died and was having an out of body experience. I just wasn’t accepting that I was dead. I began to finish the prayers, and fell asleep.

When I woke up I was still in the state of unknowing “grace”. I wasn’t sick, had God’s peace but it was so different to what I had been living in I still thought I had died and was in a fantasy that I wasn’t. Still having no human contact I had my breakfast and got ready to trailer my boat down to the bay to dig clams, as I do in early spring. I dug clams on this cold blustery day in the bright beauty of the white caps and water fowl in their pairing off nesting mode, still wondering if I had actually passed on and this was the preliminary to purgatory.

After I sorted my clams I went to the dock and then it happened. “Joe”, one of the local retired gentlemen who hang out at the dock all day in their pick-ups and SUV’s to read the paper and solve the world’s problems, was there to greet me with his mundane and much repeated questions and comments about the clams and the weather. And I knew I was alive. I was no longer waiting and wondering what comes next. it was all too familiar, but welcome.

I came to realize that I wasn’t spontaneously healed from a virus — I was over that. I had fallen into the fear of being sick and dying alone. It was acute anxiety I had been suffering from, and Mary gave it to her Son, because He has a use for such things.

I am now much less afraid of death and much more grateful for plain old life.

By: N.B.

N.B. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:58:58 +0000

When I am in a situation that I know is part of God’s will but that is not pleasant to me (or, even, miserable), I lift this situation up to God. When I feel I can make little or no good come from it, then I offer it up to ask that he can.

By: Therese

Therese — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:14:15 +0000

Offering it up to me means standing with Mary at the foot of the Cross trusting that God will bring good out of what is incomprehensible even when you you can not fathom, imagine, or understand how this will happen. It’s fundamentally a lived act of faith. And it can be a faith that moves mountains.

By: Gerard Nadal

Gerard Nadal — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:57:58 +0000

Amy, my prayers have been with you and your family. I never understood what offering it up meant until my son Joseph was diagnosed with autism five years ago. After a string of misdiagnoses between 2-5 years of age, we finally were told that Joseph had far more than a severe language delay with related sequelae. It was a moderately severe form of autism. I was shattered. So were all of my hopes and dreams for his success. My first child and only son was destined to live on the margins of society long after my wife and I were gone.
For the first time in my life, I joined my suffering and Joseph’s to Jesus’ suffering on the cross. I offered my broken heart as a sacrifice for Joseph’s healing. Against all odds, mystifying the experts at one of the leading autism centers in the nation, Joseph has come up to speed on his language, most of his social skills, is mainstreamed in third grade, straight A student, now with a small circle of non-autistic friends. He looks and behaves pretty much normally, though he is still a work in progress. He excels at bowling and is a fair player in baseball. Kids love him.
When we first assembled the team of therapists, we just managed to get Joseph in immediately with people who normally had 1-2 year waiting lists. When I needed in that first year a special education teacher with a good background in speech pathology for ten hours per week on top of what the Board of Ed. would pay (and we didn’t have the money) a young woman who contacted me to tutor her for the Medical School Admission Test (and couldn’t afford me) turned out to have a degree in Speech Pathology as well as another MS degree in Special Ed, working with pre-K students with Autism. This after seven days before the Blessed Sacrament, telling Jesus exactly what we needed and could not afford. She came from a very devout Catholic family. We bartered to everyone’s benefit!
In prayer, the Lord has led me to peace. In Joseph’s life, he thundered his love, power and glory. He has taken my love for Joseph and my broken father’s heart, laid down at the altar in prayer, and honored that in a healing that nobody can explain.
I understand now the power of redemptive suffering, having seen Joseph’s life redeemed. In honor of the great work that you and Mark have wrought through your sacrifice of love for one another, I offer up my Lenten sacrifices for your intentions and Mark’s, though to quote Pope Benedict on Pope JPII, I am certain that, “He stands at the window in the Father’s House.”
God Bless.

By: Cathleen

Cathleen — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:55:21 +0000

Louisey,

Thanks for sharing your beautiful story. It made my day.

I’m sure that the joy that your recovery has brought to others has more than compensated for whatever hurt may have come from your past. Prayers are promised for your continued peace, and congratulations on defeating such a formidable foe.

By: Monica

Monica — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 21:39:32 +0000

My ten year old daughter was in the hospital with a seriously fractured femur (sledding accident). Before her four hour surgery and during her five days in the trauma unit, I reminded her from time to time to offer it up for her four year old cousin who was in critical condition due to bacterial pneumonia a mile away in another hospital. My daughter would remember from time to time during her ordeal to “offer it up for Sophie”. Sophie recovered (even with the removal of part of her lung) and is perfectly healthy and my daughter and I remind each other from time to time about how good God has been to us in helping her through her ordeal and for healing her cousin Sophie!

By: Emily

Emily — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 18:51:24 +0000

My (non-Catholic) mother, as she was dying of cancer, said something that years later I still find profound.

She told me that she was too tired to say prayers anymore. But, she said, her entire life was an offering by that point. Just getting up in the morning, no matter how long it took her or how painful it was, was her offering of prayer to God, her daily affirmation that she believed.

My mother wasn’t Catholic, so she didn’t use the phrase “offering it up.” But she understood suffering and its role in Christian faith very intimately.

—
You, Michael and your entire family remain in my prayers.

By: gb

gb — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:58:54 +0000

Amy, I know its a bit early but I hope at some point you put your reflections of the last month together in one book or audio. I’ve been with many patients who have died & their families & I think these would help some of them…

By: artandsoul

artandsoul — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:09:12 +0000

Hi Amy – I, too, am having a renewed and deeper awareness of “offer it up” this year. And it is speaking to me at many of the same levels you write about. Mostly in my own fear of death too.

“Offering it up” is becoming my way of staying in the present moment with God. My fear (any fear really) is about the future, not about an imminent death. I mean, I’m not in the hospital and I don’t have a disease and I don’t see a car coming head on – so it is some undifferentiated time in the future. If I focus on that – at all – I am outside of my present moment with God in which I am really okay.

So for me “offer it up” is becoming my way of turning back to God in the moment that I realize I’m caught in a fear, or a pain, or some other future-facing thing. And I offer up my ability to indulge in that thinking, and instead choose to turn my attention and my mind back to right here, right now, to God.

Love,

Cindy

By: louisey

louisey — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 09:34:33 +0000

For almost 30 years I was alcoholic and kept relapsing, hurting and disappointing others, losing jobs and oblivious of almost everything around me.

I converted to Catholicism in my 20s in part because I hoped the discipline of church attendance would help me control my drinking. I did not understand why God could not do for me what I would not do for myself.

Finally in desperation I realised I could not do this on my own and went to AA. I stopped drinking but was horrified by the waste and damage of past decades. I made amends to everyone I had hurt, but knew there was so much I could not restore. I had no real faith, just the hollow shell from years of drinking, and had to begin learning all about God from scratch, just trusting and inching forward in dark faith. Rejoining the human community is a very slow process.

When I was about six months sober I did a retreat and spoke to a priest there about how haunted I was about all those lost years, the suffering I had caused others. He was a recovering alcoholic himself, a very gentle and humble man. He told me to offer up my bitter regrets and sorrow, that God would find some way of using that waste and shame. His words changed my life.

Prayers to you, Amy.