Day 7: Standing fast

On the seventh day of the Saint Jude Novena, the Apostle's own theme of perseverance becomes the meditation. The Letter of Jude was written to Christians under spiritual pressure, and its exhortations to contend for the faith and to keep yourselves in the love of God are the Apostle's counsel to anyone whose impossible cause has lasted long enough that endurance itself has become part of the test.

Today's meditation

The Greek verb in Jude verse 3 ( epagōnizesthai, to contend, to struggle) is the source of the English word agony. The Apostle does not pretend that perseverance is easy. He names it as a contest, a struggle, a kind of agony. The Christian who is praying through a long trial is participating in this apostolic struggle, the same struggle the Apostle Jude himself underwent in his missionary life and his martyrdom.

The Catholic spiritual tradition has long recognized that perseverance is itself a grace. "He who endures to the end will be saved" (Matthew 24:13). The capacity to keep praying when the answer has not come, to keep loving the spouse when the marriage is not yet healed, to keep visiting the prison or the hospital when the visit has not yet borne fruit, is a gift of God, not a natural achievement. We pray today not only for the answer to our intention but for the grace of perseverance itself.

Today's intention

Today, before bringing your intention to Saint Jude, ask specifically for the grace of perseverance. Saint Jude, please ask the Lord that whatever He has decreed for the resolution of this matter, He would also give me the grace to persevere until I see it. Then pray:

Most holy Apostle, Saint Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, the Church honors and invokes you universally, as the patron of difficult cases, of things almost despaired of. Pray for me, who am so miserable. Make use, I implore you, of that particular privilege accorded to you, to bring visible and speedy help where help was almost despaired of. Come to my assistance in this great need, that I may receive the consolations and succor of heaven in all my necessities, tribulations, and sufferings, particularly (name your request), and that I may praise God with you and all the elect forever. I promise you, O blessed Saint Jude, to be ever mindful of this great favor, to always honor you as my special and powerful patron, and to gratefully encourage devotion to you. Amen.

Reflection

The Letter of Jude exhorts the Christian to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). The faith is described as a deposit, a treasure that has been entrusted to us and that we are charged to preserve and to hand on. Perseverance in prayer is one form of this contending. We do not surrender our prayer because the answer is delayed. We do not switch our trust to other gods (the gods of resignation, despair, cynicism). We hold fast to the One in whose name we pray.

Saint Augustine, in his Sermons, observes that the long delay before the answer to prayer is itself a means by which God enlarges the soul. "God wishes our desire to be exercised in prayer, that we may be capable of receiving what He is prepared to give. For what He is prepared to give is very great, but we are small and limited in our capacity to receive." The trial that seems to be the absence of God is, in Augustine's understanding, the means by which God is preparing the soul to receive a fuller answer than it could have received earlier.

By Day 7 of the novena, we have likely passed through some of this enlarging. The intention we are praying for has changed in our own heart, even where it has not yet changed externally. We have learned, perhaps, that what we asked for in Day 1 is connected to deeper goods we did not know we needed. The Apostle is teaching us today that this enlargement is not a delay; it is the answer beginning.

Closing prayers

Pray three times each: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be.

Saint Jude, who contended earnestly for the faith and who persevered to the day of your martyrdom, obtain for us the grace of perseverance.