Self-Mastery: Grace and Will

This morning, as my daughter tried to wake me - she is an early riser and it was an hour and fifteen minutes before my alarm - I experienced the role of grace and will in my life.

Lying on the couch where I had spent a fitful night, I noticed that I was meditating on my sense of deprivation and misery. That moment of noticing, for me, is the cross roads where wisdom stands and calls me to go in a different direction. This grace filled noticing led to a moment of prayer asking Jesus to help me face my day. The choice before me was to wallow or push past my emotional reaction to losing sleep, and instead be intentional about how I would respond to my daughter. I asked her to reheat my green tea (grace again as the cold tea was waiting in my mason jar right near the kettle) then I engaged my will and chose to be friendly rather than grumpy.

That small choice reminded me of St. Térèse of Lisieux’s pivotal moment when she overcame her emotionality and began to live in her will. She writes in her autobiography The Story of a Soul:

I had a constant and ardent desire to advance in virtue, but often my actions were spoilt by imperfections. My extreme sensitiveness made me almost unbearable. All arguments were useless. I simply could not correct myself of this miserable fault. How, then, could I hope soon to be admitted to the Carmel (the religious order/convent she was desiring to enter)? A miracle on a small scale was needed to give me strength of character all at once, and God worked this long-desired miracle on Christmas Day, 1886.

Her miracle arrived in her new found ability to overcome her hurt feelings in order to please her father. For the sake of his feelings, she pushed past her own emotional reactions and engaged her will instead. After this choice, she reaped the ongoing joys of self-mastery:

I knew that when we reached home after Midnight Mass I should find my shoes in the chimney-corner, filled with presents, just as when I was a little child, which proves that my sisters still treated me as a baby. Papa, too, liked to watch my enjoyment and hear my cries of delight at each fresh surprise that came from the magic shoes, and his pleasure added to mine. But the time had come when Our Lord wished to free me from childhood's failings, and even withdraw me from its innocent pleasures. On this occasion, instead of indulging me as he generally did, Papa seemed vexed, and on my way upstairs I heard him say: "Really all this is too babyish for a big girl like Thérèse, and I hope it is the last year it will happen." His words cut me to the quick. Céline, knowing how sensitive I was, whispered: "Don't go downstairs just yet—wait a little, you would cry too much if you looked at your presents before Papa." But Thérèse was no longer the same—Jesus had changed her heart.

Choking back my tears, I ran down to the dining-room, and, though my heart beat fast, I picked up my shoes, and gaily pulled out all the things, looking as happy as a queen. Papa laughed, and did not show any trace of displeasure, and Céline thought she must be dreaming. But happily it was a reality; little Thérèse had regained, once for all, the strength of mind which she had lost at the age of four and a half.

On this night of grace, the third period of my life began—the most beautiful of all, the one most filled with heavenly favours. In an instant Our Lord, satisfied with my good will, accomplished the work I had not been able to do during all these years.

Such a combination of grace and will! There was grace to desire to do better, grace to try again and again, grace to notice there was a choice, grace to make a new decision, followed by the will and the work of walking in a new way, and the will to enter into a new season, making full use of new abilities. There is a joy in self-mastery, not a riotous and frolicsome joy, but a calm and pleasant, steadying strength. St. Térèse declares that this moment was her entrance into a new period of her life. My own moment of self-mastery gave me a sense of inner strength and confidence that lasted all day and made the next challenges more easy to bear. It is not too much to hope that a new chapter of joy and fulfillment could arise from such a humble moment of grace and will.

#saintstories #selfmastery #grace #contemplativelife #will