New podcast, Don't be a Lenten masochist, and Sex as sacrifice
Or a whole lot of thoughts on embracing the suffering we already have rather than heaping more on needlessly
Happy Lent!
I am 3 days into my Instagram fast, and my word, did I need this! The truth is I keep saying I’m going to be on Insta less and spend more time doing podcasts and this Substack, and my nonprofit FAbM (pronounced “fam”) Base, but the dopamine rush of the Q box just keeps calling me back! Investing in a new platform has been scary because it’s new, and it’s been hard to do what I want and need to do.
I opened up my first Substack chat thread on Friday with a question about Lenten resolutions, if they were different from years past, and what prompted the change. I absolutely adored reading everyone’s answers, and really loved the conversational style of the space. I will definitely be doing that again!
New Podcast Episode
I had time and inspiration to finally record part 2 for “Episode 3: Where do mothers belong?” Listen to Episode 7: Where Mothers Don’t Belong on Apple or Spotify.
Don’t be a masochist this Lent
My 5 month old has been rocking a month and a half long sleep regression that has been nothing short of a kick in the pants. We’ve had a few reprieves, but the night before Ash Wednesday, he decided to up the ante. Instead of waking up briefly to be quickly put back to sleep with a little nursing, that night he decided playtime was going to start at 2am and continue till about 4:30am. I guess he had so much fun that the next night he decided to do the same.
Sleep deprivation is nothing short of torture for me. I usually limp through the day with nausea and headaches, and an inability to find a constructive channel for anger or frustration. I’ve tried all the remedies. I can rock my baby, and let him cry it out, and nurse him, and put him to sleep drowsy but awake, and every other baby sleep tip you can imagine. There is no one more desperate than Sleep Deprived Emily. But the hard lesson I’ve learned from the sleep regressions of 3 children is this: sleep regressions will end when they end, and it is largely beyond my control, which gives the situation an added layer of difficulty.
I had to chuckle a bit because what a way to start Lent! When I don’t sleep, I am in survival mode, and Lenten sacrifices and contemplative prayer are about as elusive as, well, a good analogy for this. At 4am, all I could muster was, Sleep, Jesus, repeated over and over until both me and my babe conked out.
Admittedly, I think it forced me to have the right attitude about Lent, a poignant, albeit unwelcome reminder that I am weak and without Christ I can do nothing. It’s forcing me to re-evaluate some of Lenten resolutions not even a week into the season, which is not how I wanted to start. But it is the reality of life right now. Luckily, I remembered some words that Fr. Jacques Phillipe shared about suffering in his book Interior Freedom. I feel like they apply well to Lenten sacrifices as well, so I wanted to share what he writes.
The worst pain of suffering lies in rejecting it. To the pain itself we then add rebellion, resentment, and the upset this suffering arouses in us. The tension within us increases our pain. But when we have the grace to accept suffering and consent to it, it becomes at once much less painful. "Peaceful suffering is no longer suffering," said the Curé of Ars, St. Jean-Marie Vianney.
The natural thing to do in the face of suffering is to remedy it as much as we can. If we have a headache, we should take aspirin. But there will always be sufferings that have no remedies, and these we must make an effort to accept peacefully. This is not masochism or love of suffering for its own sake, but just the opposite, since consenting to suffering makes it much more bearable than tensing ourselves against it.
In accepting suffering we find new strength. Scripture speaks of "the bread of tears." God is faithful and always gives us the strength necessary to bear, day after day, what is burdensome and difficult in our lives. Etty Hillesum said: "I now realize, God, how much You have given me. So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful."
By contrast, grace will elude us when we try to bear additional sufferings that we heap on ourselves by refusing to consent to the ordinary trials of life.
One further point: What really hurts is not so much suffering itself as the fear of suffering. If welcomed trustingly and peacefully, suffering makes us grow. It matures and trains us, purifies us, teaches us to love unselfishly, makes us poor in heart, humble, gentle, and compassionate toward our neighbor. Fear of suffering, on the other hand, hardens us in self-protective, defensive attitudes, and often leads us to make irrational choices with disastrous consequences.
The idea that Fr. Phillipe proposes here, of first accepting the sufferings I already have as sufficient, gave me what I felt to be a healthier way to navigate Lent. The reality is there is no shortage of opportunities on a day to day basis as the mother of three for me to make sacrifices, to avoid something in order to make space for love.
The problem is I am usually making these sacrifices begrudgingly. Knowing how lack of sleep affects me makes it very hard to bear with my baby son when he wants to party at 2am. And that I think is my challenge this Lent. Not to put on a bright face and pretend all of these difficulties are in fact joyful, for that would be lying. Rather, I am going to strive for something far more difficult for me - admitting that I am limited and weak, that something as simple as losing 2 hours of valuable sleep leaves me wrecked, and that I need Jesus to come to me in these moments.
What has been amazing is that while I am operating with half a brain cell (seriously, talking to me is similar to talking to a drunk person right now. Same effect, none of the fun), I have felt a peace and a patience allowing me to manage day to day that I know is coming from One Person alone.
*It is worth noting that breastfeeding and pregnant women are absolved from fasting and abstaining from meat during Lent.
Sex as a sacrifice?
I had a good conversation with someone in my DMs last week after opening up a Q box about sex. The question was posed as follows: if a husband sacrifices for his wife by not having sex when she’s tired or touched out, how does the wife sacrifice in the bedroom?
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