While lately I’ve been feeling a little sad about the fact that couples my age all around me are moving on to having their 2nd children while we are still pleading with God for our first, a beautiful elderly woman at mass this morning stopped me in my tracks. She was clearly in pain throughout the entire mass. Every time we knelt or stood from kneeling, she was a few steps behind because she had to move so slowly. Her quivering hands would squeeze the pew to keep her from falling, and she often used her other hand to help lift her legs up. Yet she kept on going. Despite her obvious suffering, she genuflected at the appropriate times, she did all the up-downs throughout the mass, and she even remained kneeling for the Consecration. For those of you unfamiliar with Catholic mass, particularly the old rite (Traditional Latin Mass), which we attend, then you should know we kneel for a long time at this point in the mass. I’m young and even my knees get a little sore after this time. But she knelt before our Lord with such grace. It was really beautiful to see.
This woman was sitting in the pew in front of us this morning, so we had to wait for her to leave her pew for Holy Communion before we could go. In a Traditional Latin Mass, everyone goes forward and kneels at an altar rail to receive the Eucharist. People just go forward and kneel in a row, and the priests go back and forth distributing the Eucharist as people come and go. It took this poor woman so long to put up her kneeler and stand to leave the pew that the right side of the kneeling rail (where all of us were supposed to be) was empty.
Image from sanctamissa.org
My husband offered to help her forward, so she held his hand tightly and grabbed a hold of each pew to balance herself on the way up. He helped her kneel for Communion, and then he helped her back to her pew after we had all received our Lord. She was sitting in the 4th pew from the front, but Communion was completely over by the time they made it back (which is really saying something since there were probably 600 people there and we were all sitting in the 4th and 5th pews from the front). She slowly knelt back down to pray, and she even knelt after mass for some time to pray before leaving.
I was incredibly inspired by this woman, because her faith gave her the determination she needed to push through her pain, overlooking her suffering, in order to give God the reverence due Him. Her faith and dedication must be so beautiful to God. And it reminded me that there is something much bigger than my suffering. God deserves much more than my complaining. I need to shift my focus in order to glorify God with my life, because the suffering of this world will not last forever. This world is only a temporary home, so it is far more beneficial to focus on those things which will last into eternity–such as my salvation and the salvation of those around me, or fighting for those without a voice in this world, or serving the least of these. Those are the things that will matter in eternity, not the suffering that comes with infertility.
This Luminous Road I Travel 