Day 8: A different path

On the eighth day of the Surrender Novena, Don Dolindo confronts the most painful possibility in the spiritual life: that the path the Lord chooses for the soul may not be the one the soul originally requested. Today's meditation prepares the soul to surrender even the form of its surrender, to entrust to Jesus not only the outcome but the way.

Today's meditation

"When I must lead a soul along a different path from the one it sees, I prepare it; I carry it in My arms. I take it to the other shore. The soul rests in Me, abandoned, weightless. It allows itself to be led. The trial is the womb of the new way. Do not refuse the trial. Surrender to Me through it, with the heart of a child who lets himself be lifted by his father across the river."

The image is tender. I carry it in My arms. The soul that has surrendered does not arrive at its destination by its own running; it arrives because the Father has carried it. The same image governs the prophet Isaiah's word to ancient Israel: "Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save" (Isaiah 46:4).

The act of surrender

Today, before the ten repetitions, name to Jesus the form of surrender you have not yet made: the possibility that He may answer differently than you have asked. Even if it is not this outcome, Jesus, I surrender myself to You. Then pray, ten times:

O Jesus, I surrender myself to You, take care of everything.

The eighth day's surrender is the most spiritually mature of the novena. It is the surrender to the path itself, not just to the destination.

Reflection

The Catholic spiritual tradition has a name for this disposition: holy indifference, the freedom of the soul from any preference except the will of God. The phrase comes from the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), in the famous Principle and Foundation: "We must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, in so far as it is permitted to the freedom of our will and is not forbidden... so that on our part we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short life, and so on in all other matters."

This is not Stoic detachment. It is Christian freedom. The Catholic does not become indifferent because nothing matters; the Catholic becomes indifferent because the love of Christ matters more than any of the goods or evils that have been the field of struggle. "For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39).

Day 8 of the Surrender Novena is, for many souls, the day of the deepest interior peace. The soul that has spent eight days handing the matter to Jesus discovers, today, that even the what if it is not as I asked has been handed over. What remains is only the love of Christ Himself, in whom every outcome will be received as His gift, and in whose arms the soul is now actually being carried.

Closing prayers

Conclude with the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be, then the Marian closing:

Mother, I am Yours now and forever. Through You and with You I always want to belong completely to Jesus.

Tomorrow we close the novena with Day 9: pray always in readiness to surrender, and you will receive from this novena the great peace. One day remains.