Usually exhaustion consumes me by Friday night.
But one Friday night, I took my son roller skating for an hour. Because he knew I was tired, we agreed ahead of time to leave by 8 p.m.
Energized by conversation with other parents on the sidelines, however, I lost track of the time until I saw my son skating toward me.
“Mom, it’s eight o’clock,” he said. “Don’t we need to go?”
“It’s okay,” I said, noticing that in order to remind me of the time, he’d skated away from friends who were asking him to participate in a race that was about to start. “You can do the race!”
He turned eagerly to rejoin his friends, but discovered that another friend had taken his place since he’d said he had to leave at eight o’clock. In order to protect the newcomer’s feelings, my son swallowed his disappointment and just cheered on his friends in the race instead.
In this way I saw my son die to his own wants — twice — in a matter of seconds.
He was growing up.
My heart broke for him in this moment of suffering, but I praised him for his responsibility and maturity and explained that he could offer up his sacrificial actions in prayer for someone else who could use God’s grace.
In this way, God pulls good out of our own sufferings.
Dying to oneself
As children of God who struggle toward holiness, we often find ourselves in similar situations in which we are called to stretch beyond ourselves and put others’ needs before our own.
Dying to oneself is not easy. But it is precisely what God calls us to do regularly in our surface lives and spiritual lives. He required it of His only Son, who in fulfilling God’s will died to Himself and in doing so opened the doors to Heaven for us all.
One must go through the dying in order to experience the Resurrection. It does not mean dying to oneself just a little bit. It involves giving complete control of your whole life to God in big and small ways, repeatedly, each day.
“What it means to live a Christian life is that you put to death the right to live life as you choose,” said Fr. John Riccardo in Heaven Starts Now: Becoming a Saint Day by Day (p. 89). “Could there be a quicker way to die than to let God form our lives from moment to moment and continually consent to his action in us?”
Detachment required
Dying to oneself requires detachment: From things of this world that will pass away, from things that impede our relationship with God, from bad habits or uncharitable attitudes toward others.
“That joke, that witty remark held on the tip of your tongue; the cheerful smile for those who annoy you; that silence when you’re unjustly accused; your friendly conversation with people whom you find boring and tactless; the daily effort to overlook one irritating detail or another in the persons who live with you . . . this, with perseverance, is indeed solid interior mortification,” said St. Josemaria Escriva (The Way, #173).
In our humanness we cling to the people and things that surround us in this world. But when we pry these things away from our hearts and lay our hearts bare before God so He can take possession of them and occupy them instead, such joy can invade our souls.
This relationship — found by dying to oneself and thus opening ourselves up to God’s presence — is what we were made for.
And as we realize this — and truly reach for it in sincerity — all else falls away.
“See, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5).
Look with hope
As we enter the Triduum, the holiest days of the liturgical year that celebrate the Passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, let us consider individually and together the big and small ways God is calling us to die to ourselves as we look with hope toward the Easter that lies before us.
The inner conversion of heart needed for this dying to oneself is not much different from the outward actions of a young child giving up what he wants out of obedience and consideration of others.
Practice in this area is indeed required.
Thankfully, roller skates are not.
Julianne Nornberg, mother of four children, is a teacher’s aide at St. John the Baptist Catholic School in Waunakee.