The affliction of your mother presses heavily upon your heart, and it is meet that you have brought it before the Church. Yet I would lift your eyes from the sharpness of the pain to the profit which God may be bringing forth through these pangs. For as the anguish of childbirth is soon forgotten for the joy that a new man is born into the world, so the present suffering of her body, if borne with faith, can become the travail that births her soul into greater life. Marvel not that I speak of profit in such sorrow, for the Lord Himself said that sorrow for a season brings a joy that no one takes away.
You say she is bound by fear and by an unwillingness to listen to reason, even to the point of trusting remedies found in the hidden corners of the world rather than the physician ordained by God. Here is a work for your patience. Recall how the Apostle travailed for his children until Christ be formed in them, groaning as a mother for her wayward offspring. So you, too, are called to bear her infirmities with long-suffering, not with sharp words that aggravate the wound, but with the tenderness that covers a multitude of faults. The evangelist, speaking of a woman stained with great sins, did not cry out “the bloody and accursed woman,” but spoke in a manner that veiled her shame. In the same way, approach your mother not with reproach but with gentle entreaty, lest she harden her heart further.
Above all, you name a deeper malady than the body’s ache, a demonic oppression that clouds her mind and stiffens her will. Here, my beloved, is the true battleground. The medicine of doctors and the counsel of men will avail little unless the strong man be bound by One stronger. Fast and pray without ceasing, not only in your own chamber but in the assembly of the faithful, that the Lord who cast out the legions may rebuke the adversary. Yet know this: no one, not father nor mother nor brother, can redeem a soul that will not repent. The commandment to honor your mother remains, but her deliverance rests upon her own turning to the Physician of souls. Therefore make it your chief labor to lead her, by your meekness and your tears, to cast herself upon the mercy of Christ. Let her see in your eyes not anger but the grief that is the mother of joy, a grief that weeps for her sins and her sorrows alike, trusting that godly sorrow works repentance unto salvation.
Do not let the sight of her worsening pain overthrow your hope. Rather, give thanks as Job did, who when stripped of all things cried, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” For what the thief steals or the body loses, if we receive with thanksgiving, becomes gain eternal. This pain, which seems so cruel, may be the very furnace in which her stubbornness is melted. Offer this suffering to God as a sacrifice, and believe that He who permits the pang will bring forth a new creation, turning the sorrow of the night into a dawn of gladness.
I will join my prayers to yours, beseeching the Lord that He who made the lame to walk and set free those tormented by evil spirits will visit her with His healing. May He grant her relief from bodily anguish and, more than all, break every chain of delusion and fear. But you must continue to honor her, to cover her with the mantle of your love, and to wait upon the time of His visitation with unwavering faith.