Prayer, Penance & Pain

The Anchoress has an excellent, personal piece about offering up one's own pain for others. Here's a bit, then go read it all, including her links to others' pieces.

But I realized that just laying about in pain was silly and wasteful; it went against everything the good nuns and my own mother and granny had ever taught me about pain and suffering. In my head I heard Sr. Mary Gemma telling us children, “when you are in pain, when you are disappointed, when your feelings have been hurt, offer these things up to the Lord and ask him to use your pain - that He join it to His own pain on the cross, for the good of others. Offer it as penance for your own sins, or the sins of those who cannot or will not do penance for themselves.” ...

I asked Him to take the pain in my feet and use it to bless those essential, undernoticed people who spent so much time on their feet serving others - cops, nurses, food workers, teachers. I asked Him to take the pain in my ankles and use it to bless the men and women who stand a watch at home and abroad, the people they protect and the people they guard.

My knees - sometimes the knees wake me up in the middle of the night from pain - I offered the pain in my knees for those who suffer through long nights, either from insomnia, loneliness, social or family affliction; for “the night people” on the streets who live their lives in the bleakest hours, because they perhaps feel like they have no better choices, or because they do not feel like they “belong” to the day.