Giving up Lent

More than ever I find myself in the hands of God.
This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth.
But now there is a difference;
the initiative is entirely with God.
It is indeed a profound spiritual experience
to know and feel myself so totally in God’s hands.

— Pedro Arrupe, SJ

It's very nearly Holy Thursday, where Lent gives way to the Triduum and Lenten disciplines are put aside for another year. What did I give up this year? Not chocolate, not the internet.  I gave up oxygen, having come down with pneumonia at the end of March. I am still wheezy, still stripped of my singing voice — and to some extent my lecturing voice — still thinking more about breathing than I might otherwise. 

It wasn't my choice to surrender this. For the last couple of days I've been thinking about this prayer by Pedro Arrupe, SJ, written after his stroke in 1981, and the end of the Suscipe: "I give it all back to you, I surrender it wholly to be governed by Your will." There is a difference between choosing to give up a little luxury, and having something so essential stripped from me.  It pushes me into the depths, forces me to look at what it means to commend myself entirely into God's hands. This is what I profess to desire, to want God like air.  Theory is one thing, the practice, it turns out, is something else again.