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Anger Management with St Bridget

8/21/2012

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Anger with each other is a waste of energy - and lonely, too.
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A harmonious relationship is much nicer than holding grudges!
A truly wonderful lady where I volunteer once a week, who has become my spiritual mentor/supporter, gave me a little booklet called “The Pieta Prayer Book.” It contains a vast number of terrific prayers, one of which I began praying daily.

The Anger

One evening my husband said something really hurtful to me. I spat some suitably angry remark back at him then stormed off.

Just to ‘show him’ I grabbed a pillow and blanket from our bedroom, and resolved to sleep in the spare room, perfectly happy to let the sun go down on my anger.

Before laying down my resentful head, I sat down in my usual spot and began to read my daily prayers.

They are the Fifteen St. Bridget Prayers.

Our Lord appeared to St. Bridget of Sweden and told her that she would have honored each of His wounds if she recited the above prayers daily for a whole year.

There are also 21 St. Bridget Promises, traditionally associated with her prayers. You will find them at the end of the page I've linked. There is some confusion here. The booklet states that their supernatural origin has not been proved, and they are not covered by an imprimatur, whereas Bill Richer states at the end of the list of promises that they are covered by two imprimaturs.

Regardless, God will grant anything we ask Him, if it be consistent with His will. Matthew 21:22: “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”

The Management

The prayers take about fifteen minutes to say properly, without rushing. So I settled into my chair and focussed on the words looking at me from the page.

They dwell on the suffering Christ endured before and during his Passion. I read of His being nailed to the Cross with big, blunt nails, being stretched out and pulled from all sides, and having His limbs dislocated. Yet He was able to forget His sufferings and pray instead for His enemies, saying: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

After fifteen minutes of immersion in the acute suffering of Our Savior, I felt really embarrassed about wanting to sleep in the spare room because of one hurtful comment. If Christ could go through all that agony for my sake, maybe I could swallow my pride and abandon my foolishness?

At least I hadn’t yet told my husband that I was slinking off in anger and was saved from having to take back those words!

The St. Bridget prayers proved so useful that day. They were long enough to give me time to simmer down, and described Christ’s sufferings in sufficiently graphic detail to put my own in perspective.

I highly recommend these prayers for those times when you feel a festering resentment towards someone and want to get even. They really work! Pray them with real fervor and you'll get a sense of peace and reconciliation.

 











Epilogue: Value of Suffering


As Bill Richer writes, below the prayers on that linked page:  "With your sufferings, others who would ordinarily not be saved will be saved!"’

None of us enjoys our sufferings, but by offering them up for the salvation of souls, we can use them for good and rejoice in being able to do so.


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The Pursuit of Joy Versus Happiness

8/16/2012

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This is my resentful face :(

My mother has had a stroke. Her left side has stopped working, and she is now in assisted living. However, she could regain complete use of her left arm and leg – if she would only put effort into her therapy.

I’m Doing My Bit – Why Doesn’t She Do Hers?

She is driving me mad. I made sure that she was no longer in real pain and found her a kind, strong (and handsome) male therapist who has the patience of a saint. And still she won’t try to get better.

It takes forever to visit her from my house in Maryland. I have to fly to Chicago, then take a three hour bus trip from O’Hare to reach her house, before climbing into her car and driving to the assisted living home.

All this for someone who isn’t trying to get better!

Resenting the Cross I’ve Been Given

For a long time I ranted at God for putting me in the position of having to take care of my mother’s finances, spend a week cleaning out her incredibly cluttered house, and trying - long-distance – to organize the redecorating and sale of her property. (Clearly she won’t live there again, and has agreed to my selling it.)

Mother is causing me incredible inconvenience. Doesn’t she care that I have a life of my own? Why won’t she put in the effort to literally get back on her feet?

Time to Reflect

The bus rides back and forth give me plenty of time to reflect, but also to read. The book on this latest trip was “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway” by Susan Jeffers.

Was I reading that book because of Mother? No, actually. I’m trying to overcome certain fears I have when competing on my horse. But at the end of the book, Dr. Jeffers writes that life is about feeling joy, which is not derived from pursuing our own happiness.

“And what is joy? It is something that expresses the ebullience of the spiritual part of ourselves. Joy is characterized by lightness, humor, laughter and gaiety.”

She goes on to explain how we “become bigger (when) we move away from that ‘feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making me happy’ (George Bernard Shaw). We move into adult status, where we have much to give this world.”

How to Experience Joy

God creates so many opportunities for us to give to people, but we tend to carefully sidestep them, because they get in the way of our 'true goal' i.e. the pursuit of our individual happiness.

Our true goal should, however, be helping others. As Christians we’re supposed to serve.

We can’t all be Mother Theresa and do mighty deeds. And God doesn’t ask that of us. He simply wants us to be good and faithful servants, doing His work humbly, regardless of how insignificant it appears to us or others.

Once I grasped this, I realized how selfish I am to get mad because my mother is disrupting my life. She didn’t choose to have a stroke!

Instead I should be glad of the opportunity to take care of her needs, because God wants me to. He has given me a job, He has let me know that I matter to Him and to her.  My joy is in fulfilling God’s purpose for me.

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Sleeping peacefully after a job well done!

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Good Friday: A Chance to Help Christ Carry His Cross?

4/6/2012

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Good Friday

Christ was crucified today. For our sake, He endured being beaten and whipped. He was then made to carry His own cross all the way to Calvary, where He was nailed to the heavy wooden structure and left to die the slow, agonizing and suffocating death of crucifixion.

It was such a horrific way to die that the Romans didn’t even inflict on their own people when they were sentenced to death.

An Unexpected Cross

This past week I was dealt a heavy spiritual blow and my immediate reaction was to feel sorry for myself. I cried whenever I was alone, and every time I was in church. The situation should eventually resolve itself, but instead of focusing on that, I kept asking myself “supposing it doesn’t?”
 
Surely it is no accident that this happened to me shortly before Good Friday? Here was Christ, giving me a cross to bear, one which isn’t even remotely comparable to what He endured, just before our commemoration of His horrible death.

And was I bearing my cross cheerfully? Was I accepting my opportunity to grow in faith?  No!

My God, why Have You Abandoned Me?

I felt very alone in my situation. 

In my own mind I was doomed: I couldn’t look forward to going to Heaven because of unresolved issues in my spiritual life and I looked at others in Church with bitterness because they were going to Heaven. 
 
Everything earthly lost its appeal, and now that I felt threatened with losing God, He became the most important thing to me - as He should always have been!

In short, I was perilously close to committing the ultimate sin of despair.
 
The Road Back Home

With tremendous help from my parish priest, who is giving me great spiritual guidance, my mindset became positive again.
 
His first point was that God loves me, and that I should look to the good things that had just happened in my life. The return of my Mother back to the church, in answer to my prayers, and my son’s amazing Church attendance because of my example, were both huge proofs that God has not abandoned me. Far from it!

But he emphasized that God listens to the prayers of the humble, and that I needed to maintain humility when asking for God’s help with my current situation.

Moving Forward with Faith

I understood how easily I could have been feeling proud because of ‘my successes’ with my mother and my son, and how I’d probably been giving myself credit for God’s work in them. Instead, I should have been grateful that He allowed me to be His instrument. That was the first lesson in humility.

The second was that I should joyfully accept God’s cross for me. I should be humbly happy that He was testing my faith, and giving me an opportunity to grow in love for Him.
 
In his book I Believe in Love, Father D’Elbée said that when Christ gives us a cross to bear, He is allowing us to relieve Him - just a little bit - of
the weight of His own cross. How can I be upset at being given the chance to do that? How can I feel He doesn’t care about me, when He’s inviting me to help Him?
 
When we look at Christ hanging on the cross this Good Friday, we should ask ourselves, how can we – in our own small ways - relieve Him of His  suffering?

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    Hilary Walker

    A fanatic horse rider and writer of Christian Inspirational Fiction, who's beginning to understand that making it to Heaven is a tad more important than winning at horse shows.

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