When I Am Weak, Then I Am Strong

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

One of the themes that Scripture proposes for our consideration is the paradox of strength in weakness. It is found especially in the writings of St. Paul. We draw strength from consenting to our weakness (Jacques Philippe, Fire & Light: Learning to Receive the Gift of God).

This is neither easily understood nor easily practiced. It requires much trust in God and much humility. But, today especially, it is extremely important.

There are several reasons why this image of humanity confronting its weakness is particularly timely now.

The modern world relegates us to our weakness. Contemporary Western society is creating people who are more and more fragile. The disintegration of the family and of social relationships, the hedonistic mentality centered on the quest for immediate satisfaction, the difficulty in transmitting solid human values from one generation to another, the loss of contact with nature—these are among the principal causes.

At the same time, this world of ours is becoming more and more powerful from a technological point of view, in which the will to control all is pervasive. Paradoxically, and perhaps providentially, in the face of this technological power, individual persons are increasingly compelled to confront their personal weaknesses.

Demanding efficiency, the technological mentality gives rise to an invasiveness that enters into every aspect of life, forcing many people, sometimes cruelly, to face up to their limits and their vulnerabilities. It is required of every person that he or she be competent in everything and succeed in all areas—work, social life, leisure activities…, and more.

Technological invasiveness dehumanizes relationships and demeans people. Machines appear to be more intelligent and competent than men and women. Many people worry that robots will one day replace them in their work.

Another product of technology is an overabundance of information. Media infiltrate the most remote recesses of private life. On the pretext of giving information, newspapers, television, and social media churn out the misery and failing of humankind more than in any other era, catering to unhealthy tastes as they do so.

There is a second reason, of a wholly different order, why facing up to our weaknesses is inevitable. God wants to reduce human pride to nothing, especially now. The more the Church progresses through history, the more poor and humble a Church she must become, in order to be filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit and respond to it.

The Holy Spirit wants to fashion the Church according to the model of the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1-12), which are not based on human strength but on the strength of God, not on human wisdom but on the wisdom of the Cross.

Here is a Church able to address every wound and every inadequacy with love. But for that to happen, pride and human ambition in all their forms must go.

Here are passages from Scripture that speak of God’s intervention in the end times, the Day of the Lord, when the vanity of human pride will be made plain for all to see:

“The haughty looks of man shall be brought low…the Lord alone will be exalted in that day” (Isa. 2:11).

“On that day,” we’re told in a Book of the Old Testament, “you shall not be put to shame because of the deeds by which you have rebelled against me; for then I will remove from your midst your proudly exultant ones, and you shall no longer be haughty in my holy mountain. For I will leave in the midst of you a people humble and lowly. They shall seek refuge in the name of the Lord” (Zeph. 3:11–12).

Similar language occurs in St. Paul when he speaks of those whom God chose to establish His Church at Corinth: “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor. 1:25-29).

God does not seek to humiliate or destroy mankind. On the contrary, He wishes to glorify humanity beyond anything we can imagine and to confer on us a sovereign grandeur. “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).

But to make this exaltation possible, to receive the fullness of God’s salvation, to allow the grace of the Holy Spirit to act, we must confront our radical poverty. We must grasp the fact that God’s gifts are absolutely free and beyond our power to acquire on our own. They are the fruit of God’s mercy, not human merit.

Only humility, poverty of spirit, makes us capable of receiving the rich gifts God wants to give us in order to exalt us in His glory. Without a poor and humble heart, we seek to snatch God’s gifts for our benefit—and the result is to nourish spiritual pride rather than placing them at the service of others.

God’s salvation is a work of pure mercy, as St. Paul points out in his Letter to the Romans: “For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So it depends not upon man’s will or exertion, but upon God’s mercy” (Rom. 9:15-16).

The more I want to be holy, the more aware I become of my powerlessness. The more we advance in holiness, St. Thérèse said, the more aware we become of our radical weakness.

Although asceticism is necessary for the spiritual life, we must realize that in a certain sense all asceticism is destined to fail. Human beings cannot change themselves by their own power.

We must desire holiness and do all we can to acquire it. She said, “I don’t want to be a saint by halves” (Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul).

But the more we drive ourselves to attain it, the more we realize that it exceeds our human capacity.

When a ray of sunlight cuts through a dark room, we see that the air is filled with many more dust particles than we could have imagined. Just so, the closer the soul is to God, the more it sees its own poverty—its hardness of heart, its faults and blemishes.

Testifying in her autobiography to her awareness that she stood in relation to the saints as a grain of sand to majestic mountains—and yet she also wanted to be a saint!—Thérèse concluded that she must not become discouraged, that holiness was possible for her because God had given her this desire, and that He is just and faithful.

“I wanted to find an elevator that would raise me to Jesus, for I am too small to climb the rough stairway of perfection” (ibid.). After searching the Scriptures, she decided that she must let God act, and for that, she must remain little and become ever more so.

We can’t transform ourselves or affect our own conversion: only God’s grace can reach the extremity of our weakness. In faithfulness to the Gospel—and also so that we don’t weigh down others with a burden we can’t carry ourselves—we must understand that Christianity is not a religion of human efforts but of grace.

That doesn’t mean we should do nothing, but we should see our efforts in context. We strive not to exercise human power but to open ourselves to grace.

And an essential condition for opening ourselves to the grace of the Holy Spirit is to be free [of] all forms of pride, so as to become little and humble before God. We’re told by the prophet Isaiah: “But this is the man to whom I will look, he that is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word” (Isa. 66:2).

There’s a text by a Carthusian monk that underlines the need to face up to human weakness, especially in a setting like a monastery completely animated by the quest for God, as the Carthusian monastery can be. The disconcerting experience of human poverty, our own and that of others, can lead little by little to true poverty of spirit.

The “habitual shortcomings of human nature,” he writes, are as present in the monastery as anywhere else. But that is a necessary part of the process of self-examination and growth in self-understanding. “We first discover mediocrity in others and afterwards, in ourselves” (The Carthusian Order in England, The Wound of Love: A Carthusian Miscellany).

And as we do, our self-absorption fades in the light of the risen Christ. This is the way the monk must follow [he says]: “He must learn never to focus on himself but to be taken up in the movement of a divine love” (ibid.).

Poverty of spirit, the first of the Beatitudes, is the gateway to the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 5:3). Spiritual poverty is the freedom to receive freely and give everything freely, a freedom possible only by the death of all self-love, all concentration on self. Then we are turned entirely toward God to receive without measure and toward others to give without keeping score.

The theme of humankind confronted with its weakness is in the foreground of St. Paul’s works, especially in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, when he speaks of his mysterious “thorn in the flesh.”

“If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. … A thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 11:30; 12:7–10).

What is this thorn in the flesh? We don’t know. It is some condition or suffering, ever present and humiliating, [from] which Paul would have preferred to be free, thinking of it as an obstacle to the fruitfulness of his mission. But the Lord made him understand that, on the contrary, it was best that he continue to have this weakness. God’s power is “made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).

Paul can say his strength is in weakness because, when he is realistic about the weakness, he’s obliged to place himself totally in Christ’s hands by an act of faith; and, that done, his human capacities no longer work in him, but the grace of God. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

The experience of radical weakness compels us to a kind of surrender by which we recognize our poverty, accept the fact that we are not absolute masters of our lives, count on God alone, and place ourselves at His mercy with boundless trust. Then God acts and does splendid things, things sometimes visible but often hidden.

Speaking in the Second Letter to the Corinthians of a painful trial he had undergone (we don’t know exactly what it was), Paul says: “We were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Why, we felt that we had received the sentence of death; but that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:8-9).

The outcome of this trial, with its radical experience of weakness, was positive since it led Paul to put away confidence in himself in favor of confidence in God and God’s power over life. Thanks to faith, human weakness becomes an opening for God’s strength.

Paul [has] a well-developed understanding of the beauty of apostolic ministry and its glory. Having spoken of this glory, greater than the ministry of Moses, he says: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.

“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.

“For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. …

“And so we speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence (2 Cor. 4:7–14).

I believe this passage is the most precise description we have of life as Christ’s apostle, always at the limit of our forces, yet animated by a “spirit of faith” leading us to proclaim the message of the Gospel.

And so fragility and weakness aren’t obstacles to holiness but the path to it. As one writer says, “If this poverty didn’t exist, it would be necessary to create it as a support for our ascent to God” (Marie-Eugène de l’Enfant-Jésus, quoted in Joël Guibert, Renaître d’en haut: Une vie renouveļée par l’Esprit Saint).

The experience of weakness is positive because it effects a purification of faith, so that little by little it is founded only on God, on His Word and His promises, not on the self or other human entities. We learn to throw ourselves into God’s arms in total confidence, in faith, counting on Him to support us in His mercy and fidelity.

We find [the same] thought in St. Thérèse of Lisieux. In a letter to her cousin, she spoke of her extreme weakness, adding that by it, Jesus was teaching her “the science of rejoicing in her infirmities. … When we see ourselves as so miserable, then we no longer wish to consider ourselves, and we look only to the unique Beloved!” (Thérèse of Lisieux, Letters, Volume II).

In another letter, she expressed a magnificent hope: that when we have become truly poor in spirit, “Jesus will come to look for us, and however far we may be, he will transform us in flames of love” (ibid.). Humility attracts the fire of the Holy Spirit.

The experience of weakness purifies faith and hope, so that they come to be founded only on God— faith on His Word, hope on His limitless mercy.

Our love of neighbor is purified, too. The experience of weakness leads us to stop judging others, treating them with gentleness, humility, and understanding instead.

Our relationship with God is intensified: seeing ourselves so poor, we are obliged to invoke Him constantly, putting away self-love and turning ourselves totally to Him. Our happiness is not in ourselves but in Him.

The great mystery lying behind the positive face of human weakness is the mystery of love. In love there is a great power, but it is veiled in a mystery of weakness.

Paul can say “the weakness of God is stronger than human wisdom” (1 Cor. 1:25) because God’s weakness expresses His limitless love for mankind, whose human condition He wanted to take upon Himself.

At the heart of all authentic love there is a mystery of weakness. Love means accepting and being accepted, as another Carthusian monk said, “without being judged or condemned, and without invidious comparisons. … Once we really begin to believe in the infinite tenderness of the Father, we are, as it were, obliged to descend ever more fully and joyfully into a realm in which we neither possess, nor understand, nor control anything” (The Carthusian order in England, loc. cit.).

This weakness is not laziness or cowardice, not a devaluing of human efforts. Human enterprise is beautiful and necessary, not as a condition for meriting grace—it is given freely—but as an expression of good will, of our desire to respond fully to God’s love. Human capacities and talents are not to be despised but developed—the Gospel makes this clear.

God will not save us without our collaboration. His love is freely given but can’t be fully accepted without our choosing to do so.

So there is a place for human effort. But it must be in its place. This isn’t fretful or prideful perfectionism, but doing what’s asked of us day by day with simplicity, gentleness, peace, humility, and trust, supported by God and not relying on ourselves, never worried or discouraged at reaching our limits but accepting them humbly and peacefully.

St. Thérèse said, “We experience such great peace when we’re totally poor, when we depend on no one except God” (Thérèse of Lisieux, Her Last Conversations).

The path of recognition and acceptance of weakness isn’t always easy. It collides with pride, fear of not being accepted by others, and lack of trust in God. It demands a radical revolution that doesn’t come easily to us: no longer thinking about ourselves but staying purely centered on God.

It helps a great deal to be close to the Virgin Mary. Thérèse expresses this in her last poem: “Near you, Mary, I like to stay little” (Thérèse of Lisieux, The Poetry of St. Thérèse of Lisieux).

Close to Mary, our weakness becomes lovable to us for we see God as our only true wealth. Mary’s maternal tenderness offers us marvelous encouragement on this path of humility and love that she herself followed.

In a homily at Lourdes on September 15, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI rejected the idea that this is a “pious infantilism,” declaring instead that “those who have attained the highest degree of spiritual maturity…know precisely how to acknowledge their weakness and their poverty before God” (Benedict XVI, Homily on the Occasion of the 150^th^ Anniversary of the Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes, September 15, 2008).

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW

From Fire & Light: Learning to Receive the Gift of God, Chapter 3 by Jacques Philippe (Scepter, 2016).