Of Prayer Partners, Palanca and Padre Pio

Padre Pio OFM Cap

This afternoon I was in the office, by myself, busily cutting paper. The others had scattered to do everything from seeing people graduate to power tool shopping. I had no such excuses, so I was doing my duty for the Capuchin Outreach Program (COP) and cutting slips of paper for the prayer partner lottery.

For those of you not familiar with prayer partners, at the beginning of all of our outreach programs, each participant draws a name from a hat. Whoever’s name they draw, it is their job to pray for that person over the course of the week. At the end of the week, the prayer partners are revealed and each prayer partner prays over their person and gives them a letter they wrote to them. It’s a nice practice, but I’ve no idea why I was put in charge of this. It involves cutting up slips of paper and my housemates can tell you, I’m less than graceful when it comes to things like this.

Fortunately, cutting paper and keeping track of whose prayer partner is whose isn’t my only duty: I also have to give an explanation of what prayer partners are at the beginning of COP. Truth be told, I wasn't quite sure how to explain it. Prayer partners do more than just pray for each other; they offer little sacrifices for their person over the week as well. How to explain that? As I sliced tiny slips of paper one after the other, I mulled it over. Eventually my mind wandered to Padre Pio.

He went way down and his prayer
partner shot way up...

To be clear, me thinking of Padre Pio had nothing to do with an unfortunate slip of the paper guillotine. Instead it occurred to me that the great modern stigmatic and Capuchin extraordinaire was the master of what we at CYFM call "palanca." Palanca is the Spanish word for “lever.” If you’re looking at this post right now and wondering what in the world Spanish levers have to do with prayer partners and mystic saints, no worries, most people have that reaction the first time they hear the term. If you picture a lever for a moment (better a yet, a seesaw), think of how it works. Whatever is on one side of the lever only gets pushed up if the opposite end goes down. So too as Christians, by humbling ourselves, and making sacrifices for them, we are able to raise others up. This is what we ask of prayer partners, that they lower themselves in order to raise their prayer partner up. Hence palanca. 

Me pretending to be Padre Pio on Saints for Youth

Padre Pio gave his life to this. When you look at statues of Padre Pio, he’s always depicted with brown, fingerless gloves on. When I was a kid, I thought he was just cold. Alas, it doesn’t get that cold in San Giovanni Rotunda where he lived...No, Padre Pio wore gloves to cover the wounds he received from Christ: the same wounds Christ received during His crucifixion.

When people hear that, the typical reaction is, “COOL! A little creepy, but still cool.” Then they think a moment: “But why?...” The answer is palanca. For fifty years straight, Padre Pio suffered the pains of crucifixion as ransom for all the suffering that was going on in WWI. Through Christ, he chose to suffer so that others didn’t have to. His sacrifices bore a lot of fruit because amazing graces and miracles were wrought through his prayers. http://www.padrepio.catholicwebservices.com/ENGLISH/Miracles.htm

If this seems a little strange, it only take a moment of reflection to realize that this is an ordinary consequence of love, just brought to another level. If you truly love another person, you’re going to be thinking about their good without necessarily being concerned for your own. It’s about them, it’s not about you.

Imagine your mother calling across the house, "Joseph!!! The grass is getting long! Could you go out and mow the lawn?!" First you look at the thermometer. "Ugh, 90 degrees and getting hotter..." Then you think about all the things you'd rather be doing. "I could be sitting in a nice, air conditioned room, reading a book, maybe even taking a nap, all the while smelling dinner cook." Based on the evidence at hand, you conclude that the lawn can wait til tomorrow, or even next week. Heck, it can wait til the winter! But you love your mama, so you set aside your plans, ignore the heat, and go mow the lawn because it helps her and makes her happy. Love's not about you: it's about the other person.

Mother Teresa caring for the dying

Now let’s bring it to the next level: loving until it hurts. Imagine someone is in dire need and they ask you for money. You open your wallet and see you have a $20 bill and a couple of singles. $20 is half your weekly stipend; if you give them that, you won't be able to afford anything outside food for an entire week. It's not that you're a terrible person if you throw them the singles, but it speaks to a much deeper level of love if you give them the $20. Giving the $20 means giving until it hurts, making an even more intentional choice to forget yourself to care for another person.

When you choose to love another person, you're presented with all sorts of occasions when your love is tested and you have to choose to love until it hurts. The example that most inspired me was Mother Teresa. She gave to the poor until she was literally as poor as they were, yet she kept giving. She nursed people back to health and loved them even though their smell and their diseases would turn her stomach. She got down in the gutter and embraced the grossness, the heat, and even the heartbreak because all those hurts were necessary consequences of loving the poorest of the poor. Real love will drive a person to do even that.

Last we come to the highest level: when you so love a person that you even wish you could take their burden away from them and carry it yourself. Love drives us to that point all the time. We see someone who’s suffering terribly, we feel compassion for them and we wish we could take some of that burden away. I know I've felt this way at funerals before, when my friend's grief was so great that I would even suffer it instead of them just to alleviate their sadness a little bit. If you want a more concrete example, think of the Hunger Games. Katniss loves her sister so much that she would volunteer for the cruel slaughter that was the Hunger Games, so her sister didn't have to endure that. Love drives us to so forget ourselves that we would take the place of the people we love in their suffering.

The thing is, these are more than nice sentiments: we can take on some of the suffering of those we love. That’s what Christ did for us on the cross: He took the suffering and punishment due to our sins on His own body in the form of scourges and beatings and crucifixion itself so that we would not suffer them ourselves. That’s what Padre Pio did by accepting the stigmata: in those wounds he suffered for our sicknesses, our temptations, our brokenness and miracles came out of it for those who asked for his prayers. That’s what we can do by voluntarily offering up little penances and making sacrifices for people we love. We can offer those things spiritually for them and if Padre Pio is any lesson, those offerings will be received.

Padre Pio the morning
after he received the
stigmata

As COP and CAM both approach, it’s worth reflecting on this. These weeks of service are lessons in love. We are called to love those we serve, even when it hurts. Even when our patience has been tried by too many one sided conversations in a nursing home or when the sun is blazing hot and we don’t want to do manual labor anymore, that’s when love is tested and we prove that it’s real. We’re called to also love those in our own community, especially our prayer partners. All of you are going to need graces as you work to grow in the love of Christ and of your neighbor. All of you will need some help in the course of the week. Make a conscious effort to offer those little pains and sacrifices for your prayer partner: by lowering ourselves, we really can lift others up.

Padre Pio, pray for us!