Winner or Sinner
One
I returned to my Catholic faith in 1989 after hearing a powerful testimony from a woman who shared her experience at Medjugorje. It was an exciting time for me: I had renewed enthusiasm for the Catholic faith, returned to the sacraments, made new friends, even met my eventual wife, all because my heart changed, and I committed to a different path in life. Within about a year or two, however, the Catholic honeymoon ended. The rosary—which I had committed to praying daily—became dry; Mass attendance became a chore; I started seeing warts on my friends, spiritually speaking, and worse, they began seeing and complaining about mine! I was ready to quit and return to my old way of life. What happened? Was my experience just an emotional charade? Unbeknownst to me at the time, my experience of spiritual dryness was actually typical and proper. These experiences did not mean that my conversion was a fake but rather the training wheels were taken off. God was testing me: would I stay the course? Will you?
Two
I had a mistaken notion about the spiritual life. I likened it to a plane taking off from a runway, leaving all former earthly cares behind as it set off into the wild, blue yonder. So, too, I expected complete freedom from my old sins. Hence, when those sins reemerged, I began to feel like I was stuck inside a revolving door. The stuff from which I thought I rid myself yesterday came back around again the next day. Something was wrong, so I thought, and I falsely assumed that I was spinning my wheels in a rut. I strongly entertained the temptation that my conversion experience was an imaginary farse. This was the tares or darnel seed the devil was trying to sew in me, and why Our Lord warned us of such a thing in some of His parables. (cf. Mt 13: 24-26). In actuality, the spiritual life is not like a plane taking off, but rather like a spiral on a slinky: as I live and follow it round and round, what seems to be a recurring rut is actually taking me deeper and further in with my intimacy with God. In order to grow, I discovered my need for perseverance. Jesus in fact teaches, “he who perseveres to the end will be saved” (Mt 24:13). He attaches this virtue to salvation, and the only way to get it is to struggle, to slug it out, even to fail. This is why it seemed to me that I was stuck in a revolving door with the same stuff, different day, occurrences. But this was how the Lord was honing and purifying me and helping me grow in this necessary virtue perseverance.
Three
In his wonderful spiritual classic Divine Intimacy, Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen reveals, “Neither good resolutions nor good desires suffice to make a saint. These must be translated into action; but precisely in the accomplishment of this work, great difficulties are encountered, causing many to stop in discouragement or actually to turn back from the way they have begun” (p. 831). Weak souls grow easily discouraged in the face of trial, fatigue, or even monotony. We think that this trial will never end, and our imagination intimidates us and we are coaxed into quitting. And quitters are never winners; they just stay sinners. Jesus both teaches and demonstrates the difficulty of the road of discipleship by carrying of His own cross. “Wide is the gate and broad is the way the leads to destruction,” He teaches, “narrow is the gate and straight is the way that leads to life” (Mt 7:13-14). How heavy is the cross on the shoulder that refuses to embrace it! “The greater the perfection to which a soul aspires, the stronger and more courageous it must be, because the difficulties it has to face will be greater” (Divine Intimacy, p. 831).
Four
We grow in this most necessary virtue of perseverance by practicing it. It is the virtue of struggle and failure. We don’t grow in it with ease. We may even feel like our persevering actions are merely empty efforts. We must keep in mind this slogan, however, so that we don’t have the wrong expectation: Fake it till you make it. This doesn’t mean to act like a hypocrite, or that we’re comfortable with mere appearances. Rather, it means we must do our part by acting accordingly, even though we don’t yet feel the desire to continue on our spiritual journey. I liken it to hewing a cistern out of rock—which takes a lot of hard work—because you trust that some day rain will come and fill it. Your efforts of perseverance display a confident hope that indeed, waters that well up to eternal life are yours. We feel like we’re faking it because our emotions sometimes fail to conform to the truth. We can feel like a failure when in fact we are succeeding; we can feel like God is distant, when in fact He is quite close. We can even feel like this or that sin is o.k. when actually it’s effect is harmful or even disastrous. Feelings are not trustworthy guides. Efforts fueled by faith, hope, and love are! And this is why Jesus attaches perseverance to salvation. He rewards love that endures difficult struggle and shuns instant gratification.
Five
Venerable Bruno Lanteri taught his followers a simple motto—Begin again! Chiara Lubich, foundress of the Focolare Movement, said that sanctity does not consist in having never fallen, rather in how rapidly we rise again. We can’t avoid sin. What we need to work on is focusing our efforts on prayer and acts of penance to detach us from the world, in receiving the sacraments in order to receive the powers of new life, and in accepting set-backs without exaggerating our plight. When we falter from these things, we simply begin again! I close with these words of wisdom from St. Francis De Sales: “We must not be disturbed at our imperfections, since for us perfection consists in fighting against them…fortunately for us, in this war we are always victorious provided we are willing to fight!” (Introduction to the Devout Life, pp. 48-49).