By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
From Grief to Grace: The Journey From Tragedy to Triumph, by Jeannie Ewing (Sophia Institute Press: Manchester, NH: 2016), pp. 207. Available from www.SophiaInstitute.com or 1-800-888-9344.
This moving, inspiring book relates the suffering of loving parents to the wisdom of the Catholic faith that offers great consolation in the midst of profound sorrow. As a mother who gave birth to a daughter with disabilities of fused fingers and a deformed face — a rare condition known as Apert Syndrome that required many surgeries and demanding care — Mrs. Ewing felt overwhelmed with grief at the plight of her child’s incurable condition. She struggled to make sense of this great tribulation that came as a shock.
She did not find great comfort from psychological treatises on the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) explained by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: “It was during those very raw and sensitive weeks and months when Sarah was an infant that it struck me how inadequate — and insulting — were the five stages of grief that I long ago memorized and to which I blindly acquiesced.”
Suddenly the world made no sense to a loving mother when she saw her friends blessed with healthy babies while she commiserated over her daughter’s plight.
As a student educated in psychology who distinguishes between depression and grief, the author treats grief from the religious perspective which the Catechism of the Catholic Church identifies as “affliction of spirit” that requires supernatural consolation rather than psychological counseling — the understanding that suffering can activate the soul and lead it closer to God for divine healing and greater understanding.
She explains how the agony of suffering in its various forms (death, divorce, infertility, addiction, chronic diseases) leads to a crisis, “a crossroads, at which we can elect to grow in the midst of the uncertainty or to succumb to it and never discover the inner strength that increases as we surge forward.”
She draws great comfort from spiritual masters like Thomas à Kempis who teaches the power of perseverance in all of life’s tragedies. In The Imitation of Christ, God exhorts the soul: “Let not your labors which you have undertaken for my sake crush you, neither let tribulations from whatever source cast you down, but in every occurrence let My promise strengthen and console you.”
In the chapter “The Grace of Redemptive Suffering,” Ewing acknowledges that, outside of Catholic teaching, this concept does not make perfect sense to a modern secular world that identifies happiness with luxury, pleasure, and comfort. Explaining the Church’s teaching that the offering of human sufferings to God contributes to Christ’s salvific work in the world, pays for the debts of sin incurred by oneself or by others, and participates in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, Ewing finds the purpose of redemptive suffering as life-giving and love-generating — a release of God’s grace and “the means by which we can win souls for Heaven.”
A major chapter reviews the first principles of the spiritual life that provide inner strength and bring healing in the midst of profound grief. The first principle Ewing cites from Fr. de Bergamo’s classic Humility of Heart: “God sends adversity to you to humble you, and He humbles you so that from this humiliation you may learn humility.”
Humility changes the inclination to bask in accomplishments, honors, and possessions and concentrates the mind on an honest self-knowledge that confronts the truth of failure, weakness, and dependence. No matter how successful or prominent a person is, humility teaches that everyone needs God.
The humble person accepts God’s will with docility, trusting that God’s wise and loving purposes surpass human plans in a way the human mind cannot fathom. Ewing writes, “Humility will have us listen and remain open to God even as we are inconsolable by human contact.” Humility also disposes a person to abandon himself to divine Providence because human weakness entrusts God to resolve the complexity of suffering and to provide the strength to rise above despair.
Ewing writes of her dilemma, “I had to make a decision to abdicate my will, my thoughts, and even my natural disposition into God’s hands.”
This “abandonment to Divine Providence” — the title of Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s spiritual classic — encompasses the second spiritual principle that gives relief to the broken heart. This virtue teaches a person “to live in the present moment as if there were nothing to expect beyond it” — a way of curing the mind of worries, fears, and concerns that produce anxiety about the future that intensifies sadness.
If a person does not master this art of living in the present moment, he is prone to overlooking the blessings and graces of each day with the beloved people in his life. By applying this principle, Ewing confesses, “I was able to enjoy each new day that God gave us with Sarah, despite the unwelcome truth that He could choose to take her home to Him any time.”
This spiritual principle provided a grieving mother the peace the world cannot give: “When we abandon ourselves entirely to God, we achieve a state of serenity and an interior sanctity that all of the saints acquired while they remained on earth.”
With abandonment a person learns confidence in God and trust in divine Providence. When these spiritual principles are lived and practiced on a daily basis, they prove their practicality as they combat depression and despair — the temptation to think that God is absent and removed from a person’s daily struggles.
The third spiritual principle that helps a person to make sense of inexplicable suffering, “holy indifference,” does not mean stoic apathy. Ewing explains this virtue, informed by St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, as “that condition of neither desiring nor possessing anyone or anything except God,” a form of detachment and a conquest of self-will. Because human beings are often unduly attached to narrow ideas, petty biases, whimsical opinions, fanciful wishes, or personal agendas, they risk the danger of enslavement that robs a person of authentic freedom.
Especially in the experience of grief a person resists the loss of a close attachment and intimate bond, but this spiritual principle teaches that some human attachments separate persons from their relationship to God. “Holy indifference” in the spiritual life recognizes that God often frees men from “unholy” attachments that have become enslavements that interfere with love of God. Holy indifference of course is not apathy but “a way in which we can learn how to surrender each moment of uncertainty and anxiety into God’s loving care.”
The fourth spiritual principle, “The Dark Night of the Soul,” contributes to the healing process of certain souls chosen for “sanctification through the darkening of the senses, will, memory, and intellect.” In their prolonged and acute grief the afflicted do not sense the presence or nearness of God and do not experience any consolation to alleviate the burden of grief or find any light that offers clear explanation for this relentless suffering. The person who endures in this state of “holy darkness” with no end in sight may question God’s love and wisdom.
However, as St. John of the Cross explains the paradox: “To come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you know not.” Ewing explains this mystery in her own grief: “We are more closely united to God the more separated we believe we are to be from Him.” During this trial a person who remains faithful and continues in a state of grace discovers that “love is always hidden in suffering.” He makes progress in the spiritual life, neither regressing by losing hope nor remaining listless by passive melancholy.
The fifth spiritual principle, “Confidence in God’s Timing,” demands patience and courage, an awareness that God acts in surprising occasions that seem “inconvenient times and in what we may deem as impulsive ways” that resemble the coming of the Holy Spirit like a fire or wind.
God’s Providence follows no man-made schedule or predictable cycle, but exercises a sovereign freedom that delivers and rescues man from the weight of sorrow and suffering in His good time. The virtue of confidence on God’s timing dispels anxiety and fear about the future in the knowledge that God orders all things for the good.
The final spiritual principle, “The Wound of the Heart,” the author explains as “the deliberate desire of one’s will to suffer for and with Jesus for the sake of love and with nothing else to gain or glean from the act of suffering.” Inspired by the example of St. Therese of Lisieux who embraced all crosses of her life, both great and small, without murmuring, Ewing realized the choice before her: either to respond to grief with overreaction and oversensitivity or “allow her heart to be a place of crucifixion for the sake of love.”
The wound of the heart, then, is a suffering “in love” that illuminates the meaning of sacrifice — the gift of redemptive suffering in which those who mourn unite their wounds to the sorrowful heart of Christ for the reparation of sin and the salvation of souls.
The trauma of life’s cruelties and injustices does not have to produce isolation, despair, or skepticism. The Church offers medicine, relief, and consolation in the midst of life’s greatest crosses and teaches the meaning of suffering through the lives and teachings of the saints.
If these heartbreaking experiences lead to humility, abandonment to divine Providence, holy indifference, confidence in God, sacrificial love, or even the dark night of the soul, then they draw persons closer to God and to an imitation of Christ who underwent all these aspects of sorrow in His Passion, agony, and crucifixion.
Suffering is not in vain or wasted but reparation for sin and redemption for many who need the sacrifices of love for their salvation — a mystery that often surpasses human understanding but which the Christian heart comprehends more as it grows in the knowledge and love of God.
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