What you suffer in making Him a new servant…
“A delicate body that is weighed down by the burden of pregnancy, weakened by the labor of carrying a child, and troubled with many pains, does not allow the heart to be so lively, so active, so ready in its operations; but this in no way injures the acts of that higher part of the soul, which are as agreeable to God as they would be in the midst of all the gladnesses in the world…. yea, to God these acts are more agreeable in truth, for they are done with more labor and struggle.”
St. Francis de Sales offered these words of consolation in a letter to his dear friend St. Jane de Chantal. He urged her not to worry about being unable to offer “enough” to God during her pregnancy and the natural hardships that came with it. When you’re sick in the body, he said, simply tolerating your symptoms with joyful patience is enough spiritual exercise. Sometimes, all you can do is just exist through the fatigue and nausea and round ligament pain. Exist, smile, pray, and carry on.
And the last thing you want to do, St. Francis tells St. Jane, is to fast while you’re pregnant as a deluded way of trying to make even more of a penitential offering than your pregnancy symptoms are already doing. Instead, “nourish without scruple your body, in consideration of that which you bear,” he writes. “You will not lack mortification for the heart, which is the only haulocaust God desires from you.”
St. Francis isn’t trying to suggest that our bodily suffering is pleasing to God. He’s asserting that God allows bodily suffering - including that experienced during pregnancy - only because the soul that willingly submits to this kind of suffering is naturally going to be humbled, strengthened, purified, and meak.
So “have patience then with yourself,” he tells St. Jane gently. “Often offer to the eternal glory of our Creator the little creature in whose formation He has willed to make you His fellow worker.” In the month I knew I was pregnant, I loved feeling all of the pregnancy symptoms I got to experience. I loved being tired and needing a nap every afternoon. I loved having to carry around peppermint essential oil because the smell of it was the only thing that would quell the nausea. I loved the random bolts of round ligament pain, the food cravings and aversions, the bloating. I loved it all because of why I was having them. And I miss those symptoms now that my pregnancy is over prematurely. I miss them so, so much.
“Make profit of this pregnancy in two ways: offering your offspring a hundred times a day to God, as St. Augustine says his mother used to do. Then, in the troubles which will come to you, and which usually accompany pregnancy, bless our Lord for what you suffer in making Him a new servant, who by means of His grace will praise Him eternally with you.”
Oh, how I wish I could be in those troubles again. How I wish I could make for the Lord a new servant.
