Sanctifying the Things We Hate So We Can Learn to Love Through Them

By The Rev. Canon Aaron Zook, ’12

“For the Sanctification of Illness Sanctify, O Lord, the sickness of your servant N., that the sense of their weakness may add strength to their faith and seriousness to their repentance; and grant that he may live with you in everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” 

I can’t really tell you how many times I’ve said that prayer. I use it every time I visit someone in the hospital and continue to say it for them daily until I know they’ve gone home. In the case of surgeries, where the person usually has weeks or months of healing after being discharged, I’ll keep saying it for them until I know they’re (at least figuratively) back on their feet. When I know they’re about to go in for surgery I add a prayer that God would “guide the minds, hearts, hands, and eyes of every doctor, nurse, therapist, and orderly engaged in their care.” (I stole that part from Mary Baker Eddy, but don’t judge me! Even a blind squirrel finds a nut, and so on.) I cap those prayers with the expectation of their renewed health allowing them “to be a sharp, strong instrument” of God’s will in the world. After all, we are all instruments of His will; we either stand as gleaming examples or cautionary tales. My prayer is always that he hones us to be the former. Over the years, those three parts have become like old friends who come along every time I pray for someone who is ill. But as much as the three have congealed into a single prayer in my mind and heart, it is that first portion that found real traction as we all struggled this spring to turn our homes into offices. 

That prayer for “Sanctification of Illness” can be found in all sorts of Anglican prayer books going back centuries. It’s found in the prayers for Ministration to the Sick, a liturgy designed for visiting individuals in the hospital or for public services of healing. I’ve always liked this prayer because of its concentration on the (assumed) brevity of the illness. It looks forward to a person’s life after they regain their health and strength and puts their focus where it should be: on their relationship with God and His children. I also like the idea of finding strength through weakness. It's a gentle “hat-tip” to the Arma Christi, those items meant to weaken or injure Christ that ultimately became the weapons he used to destroy death. What I like most about the prayer, though, is the very concept of sanctifying an Illness. To sanctify something is to make something holy. We sanctify things all the time. We take the things that mark special or recurring moments of happiness and consecrate them; we set them apart and make them holy. As intuitive as it may seem to take a church building, or ornate candles, or wedding rings and ritually to set them apart for special use and significance, our ability to do the same with something that we very much don’t like is what makes or breaks us as individuals, as a species, and as a Church. 

When we suffer, whether through some catastrophic event or through some minuscule slight from an acquaintance: the person, place, or thing that brought on that pain doesn’t change, but our perception of them does. For some people, the source of our suffering becomes an all-consuming manifestation of evil that must be avoided at all costs. For others, they become another in a series of difficulties and obstacles that are preventing us from finding comfort and happiness. For still others, they become two-dimensional shadows that are incapable of doing anything good and exist solely to seek their own reward. (If you snorted about Mary Baker Eddy earlier, you probably fell into this group.) Sometimes, however, those sources of suffering become something else. They don’t morph into the worst of what our world can create. Instead, they become instruments instead of instigators, and their power for causing pain diminishes. After all, they didn’t set out to make us suffer. We did suffer, but that wasn’t their intent, it just sort of happened. It was circumstantial. But that’s the center of Grace, isn’t it? An absolutely undeserved kindness? God imputes righteousness to us that is reflective of His desire, not our suitability to carry it. In the same way, those people or things or events that cause us suffering may not deserve sanctification, but our desire to see and be goodness in the world requires a spark that time can kindle. And that is where we need to put our hearts and minds right now: in that space of stoking sparks of light, even in the darkest moments. 

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that most of us are suffering right now. The COVID-19 virus is scary, and we still seem not to know enough about it. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, and thousands more are gravely ill. Millions of people are out of work and many more are being laid off or furloughed each week. We all continue to wrestle with new software to connect and communicate, and we are starving to shake hands with our coworkers, hug our parents, and pat our friends on the back. We hate the virus. We hate the government for locking us down or even for letting us back out. We hate people who don’t wear masks, and we hate the people making us wear them. We want to shout from the rooftops and take people to task for the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that are bubbling under the surface all day, every day. It has been like this for months, and there’s no end in sight. Some of us don’t even know if our children will be in school this fall or at home with us. Many of us can’t even get to other issues (like racial equality and any local catastrophes) because the virus alone has us so distraught and distracted that we can’t find footing. Many of us feel as though we’re being buried under the weight of this illness. 

And this is where we need to pivot. I don’t want to minimize what is happening to us. This situation is incredibly difficult in ways too numerous to recount. Far more of us than I want to think about will die before we’re done with COVID-19. Many more will spend weeks near death, putting incredible strain on their bodies and their spirits. Far too many will come out the other side of this trying time with no job, or no home, or a significantly smaller support network. But that doesn’t mean that we have to give in to our instinct to get angry. And it doesn’t mean that we have to look at this time as a period of pure darkness from which we can only hope for an animalistic level of survival. This time can, in fact, be a renaissance. 

My wife and I have been married for nearly ten years and we’ve never spent this much time together. To be sure, the time is stilted, and my work and her work keep us each busy most of the day, so it isn't as if we are cuddled together on a love seat sharing cocoa all day. But it is still rather wonderful to be together so much. Even after all these years, we’ve never before had the opportunity to witness each other in our respective worlds with as much detail as we can now. We used to tell each other about our day, but now those stories are becoming rich with detail and experience as we watch each other sigh and scream and giggle through our workdays. It isn’t easy to balance what she needs in order to work every day with what I need in order to work every day. When you throw in that we both became part-time teachers in our daughter’s virtual schooling, it moves beyond difficult and becomes nigh impossible. But experiences aren’t good because they’re easy. Experiences are good because of what we become for having lived them. When the frustration of tripping over each other (while maintaining our work-at-home schedules) begins to seem like too much, we need to pivot and realize how much we’re experiencing of each other’s workaday lives that we never could have without the lockdown. We’re learning a great deal about the little moments that can make each other’s day or ruin each other’s week. 

The experience of handling this strange time with the parishes I serve follows the same pattern. When we were so quickly “thrown out of our churches,” we scrambled to figure out who had computers or smartphones. Who didn’t have internet access? What software platforms had the parishioners used before COVID to talk to grandchildren on the other side of the country? What bits and pieces could we cobble together to maintain some sort of community when we couldn’t be in the same room with each other? We’ve done what most churches have done. We’ve found or created simple services to livestream on multiple platforms. My family has quietly entered the church every Sunday and celebrated Mass Sine Populo--with no congregation in the building. We’ve held virtual coffee hours over Zoom. I’ve put videos on YouTube, called people, written cards, and sent so many emails. We recently started monthly outdoor, socially-distanced Eucharists on church properties. 

It would be easy to give in to the feelings that I’m doing more work now than I did when we could actually come together as we did before. I could scream at the leaders who are keeping the doors of the churches closed, and not allowing us to make hospital visits. But as we start to feel like John the Baptist, alone in the river, crying out and hoping for a few people to understand, we need to pivot and understand what we’ve gained. For example, if I had held a class in January on how to telecommute, I probably would have had three or four interested people. However, because it has become necessary to use that technology, most of my parishioners are engaging in livestreams, and videoconferencing, and even old-fashioned phone trees. Those abilities will bear fruit for years to come, even after we’ve returned to the pews. 

What’s more, there have always been a number of people for whom Sunday services were quite difficult. It may have been a mobility issue or a conflict with their work schedule, but they simply couldn’t join us as much as they wanted. Now they can “join us” while they work or from the comfort of their lift-chair. I’ve also noticed that a number of people who don’t belong to either parish have started to regularly peek in on our content. For some, they belong to a different parish and would never leave that church home but also wish to engage with our parish. For some, they are so resolute in their fear or distrust of the Church as an institution that they simply can’t get involved, but when they can access our worship from the safety of their own space, they feel more at ease and are beginning to hear the gospel for the first time in many years. That is a good and holy thing. 

All of these developments are, in fact, quite wonderful. I’m gaining a deeper appreciation of my wife’s life at work and my daughter’s schooling. We’re finding new avenues for preaching and teaching (and parishioners are becoming fluent in them). Combined with the fact that for so many people the church feels accessible (if not downright necessary) again, and for the first time in memory we’ve found the means to make a given service accessible to all people in all places at any time, we can come out of this trying time with more tools and more strength than we’ve had in centuries. Make no mistake, these are dark times and the looming clouds look to be darker still. But if we can continue to find ways to reach more people in more ways, we can sanctify this difficult period. If we can make it holy by taking this time that has already been set apart by sadness and grief and use it to develop the means for connection, then we can sanctify even this pandemic. We can make it something powerful and transformative. We can take this pandemic’s power to cause suffering and make of it Arma Christi. We can use that which should have destroyed us and make it a tool for Resurrection. To do so, we must continue to find new ideas and embrace our growth in any direction, trusting that God will put good fruit at the end of each vine. We must be willing to forego that which we dreamed and embrace that which we’re given. And of course, we’ll have to do a lot of praying. 

That said, allow me to paraphrase the prayer I shared before: 

Sanctify, O Lord, the sickness of your world; have mercy on your servants, that the sense of their weakness may add strength to their faith and seriousness to their repentance; give them the patience to see their shared struggles; guide their minds, hearts and hands to see you at work in the world that they may be ready to give and glad to distribute to the most imperiled among your children; and grant that they may live with you in everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Rev. Canon Aaron Zook, ’12, is a proud Son of the House. He serves as the Canon to the Ordinary and as a parish priest in the Diocese of Eau Claire, and also works as a freelance Canon Lawyer. He lives in Chippewa Falls with his wonderful wife and daughter and you can find more of his work at https://www.parsonofinterest.com/