Confident Abandonment 

During this season of Lent, we take up the three disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. As concepts, fasting and almsgiving seem less appealing than prayer, but are relatively easy to do. Prayer, on the other hand, is something most people would like to do, but find difficult. 

For Lent, I’ve been re-reading a book called I Believe in Love, by Fr. Jean d’Elbee, which is a series of conferences on the spirituality of St. Therese of Lisieux. In one section, he writes about the importance of confident abandonment in prayer to the will of God, who loves us and even delights in us. Confident abandonment is important because, as finite creatures, we will always have a very narrow perspective on the world. We cannot see all things as God sees. Fr. d’Elbee encourages us to ask the Lord to grant the important things we believe we need – health, protection from harm, success in our endeavors, “but always with the thought that if Jesus does not grant it, it is because His plan is more beautiful than ours.” 

To illustrate this, he uses a passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions, a book in which the fourth-century saint gives the account of his conversion. A brilliant young scholar, Augustine decided as a young man to leave his native Carthage to become a professor in the imperial city of Rome. Augustine’s mother, St. Monica, was a Christian who was very worried about her son’s lack of faith. Upon hearing his plans, she tried desperately to dissuade him from leaving, for she thought this would be the end of her influence on him and that he would be lost. Determined to go, however, Augustine decided to give his mother the slip, boarding a ship for Rome after deceiving her into thinking he planned to wait. Looking back on those events years later as an unlikely Christian convert and Catholic bishop, Augustine writes: “That night I stole away without her; she remained praying and weeping. And what was she praying for, O my God, with all those tears but that You should not allow me to set sail! But you saw deeper and granted the essential part of her prayer. You did not do what she was at that moment asking, that You might do the thing she was always asking.” Monica, devastated by her son’s departure, did not know that by leaving for Italy Augustine would eventually meet St. Ambrose of Milan who would bring him into the Faith. Fr. d’Elbee explains: “God refused to grant St. Monica the prayer she prayed on that day, in order to grant her the prayer she prayed every day…. This happens so often in our lives, doesn’t it? We ask, without knowing it, for the very thing which is the contrary of our greatest good, of our true happiness.” Thus, the need to pray with confident abandonment to God, who always wills our greatest good and our true happiness, bringing it about in often unexpected ways. 

posted 2/17/24