Day 5: Trust in Healing

The fifth day of the Saint Peregrine Novena, the midpoint, turns to the Catholic disposition that has carried the saint through his suffering and that has carried Catholic patients across the centuries: trust. Saint Peregrine did not know, on the night of his vigil, that his cancer would be healed. He trusted the Lord. The Catholic patient praying this novena does not know, at the close of the nine days, what the Lord will give. We trust.

Today's invocation

O great Saint Peregrine, you have been called the Mighty, the Wonder-Worker... (the full opening prayer)

Today's meditation

The Catholic theology of trust in serious illness is articulated with particular precision in the writings of Don Dolindo Ruotolo, the Italian priest of the early twentieth century whose Surrender Novena is treated separately on this site. Don Dolindo's central insight is that the Catholic patient's trust must be complete (not partial), blind (not dependent on visible signs), and confident (not anxious). The Lord, having received complete trust, acts in the way that is best for the soul, whether by healing or by sustaining the patient through the illness.

The Catholic patient who has prayed the Saint Peregrine Novena for many years often testifies to the gradual deepening of this trust. The first novena prayed at the diagnosis of cancer is sometimes prayed with anxiety, with bargaining, with conditional trust (if You heal me, I will...). The novena prayed in the second year is often prayed with deeper trust, less conditional, more abandoned. The novena prayed in the fifth year, by patients still in active treatment, is often prayed with the fullness of trust that Saint Peregrine himself bore on the night of his vigil. The novena, in this Catholic understanding, is not principally a transaction (the petition exchanged for the healing) but a school of trust.

Today's intention

Today, before bringing your principal intention, name to Saint Peregrine the conditions you have been placing on your trust. Saint Peregrine, I have been trusting the Lord on the condition that He give me (or my loved one) the healing I have asked. Help me today to release the condition. I trust the Lord whether or not the healing is given.

This is hard. The Catholic faithful are realistic about how hard it is. The release of the condition is not made once and for all; it is made daily, sometimes hourly, in the presence of the Lord. But the release made in this novena, even tentatively, even partially, is the beginning of the deeper Catholic trust.

Reflection

The Catholic patient sometimes asks, what if the Lord does not heal? The Catholic answer is precise. If the Lord does not heal in this life, He has chosen for the patient a different gift: the patient's continued participation in the Cross, with all the spiritual fruit that this participation brings, until the moment of death, at which the Lord will give the final and complete healing of body and soul that no earthly medicine can give. "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4). The Catholic does not lose the healing; the Catholic receives it in the form and at the time the Lord chooses.

Saint Peregrine was healed in this life. Many Catholic patients are not. The Lord's freedom in this is the same freedom that the Mother of Mercy has always exercised: the gifts she obtains are calibrated to the soul's true good, not to the soul's immediate request. The novena's fifth day is the Catholic act of consenting to this freedom of the Lord and the Mother of Mercy.

Closing prayers

Conclude with the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be.

Lord Jesus, I trust You with the outcome of my illness. Saint Peregrine, intercede for the gift of full trust.