A Spiritual Tightrope: Reliance on God and His Holy Mother, Exerting Our Own Constant Effort

The reading from the handbook today is heavily reminiscent of the wondrous tales in the lives of the Desert Fathers, the earliest monks of the Church, particularly in Egypt, as they strove to become perfect in the virtue of obedience. In these tales, we can see very clearly the example of people, who recognized that virtue was God's work in them, but, at the same time, spared no effort in carrying out their tasks. With pride of place among these tales is the story of St. John the Dwarf, whose spiritual father took his own walking staff and planted it firmly into the earth. Then, he commanded John to water it liberally every day. This may sound at first so minor, such a nothing, but John's teacher lived very far from the edge of the cultivation, and the Nile, the only source of water was even further than that. John had to walk many miles every day to draw water from the river, return to water the staff, return to the river again, water the staff, and then finally be finished from his task. After two years, the zealous disciple's efforts were rewarded. The formerly dry (and old) walking stick budded, put forth leaves, branched and finally produced almonds. John's teacher gathered the almonds from the branches of the new tree and went around to all the hermits in that entire desert region, sharing with them and saying, "taste the fruit of obedience."

Closer to our own time, we also recall the example of that great light of evangelization from the 18th century, St. Alphonsus Liguori. Alphonsus was constantly concerned that any time be wasted. In the early years of founding the Redemptorists, after praying Matins with the small community in the evenings, the saint would retire to his cell, not to sleep, but to work long into the night on the various written works for which he is known. We all know that Alphonsus was prolific. The moral theology alone was encyclopedic. All of that production was due to Alphonsus' commitment to never waste any time, to keep moving, to keep pressing himself, to be at the Lord's service both night and day. 

Similarly too, a century later, St. Joseph Cafasso was renowned for enduring great pain and fatigue as a result of constant physical and intellectual work. One afternoon, in the course of carrying food like a pack animal up and down the long staircases of Turin's poorest high rise dwellings, feeding the elderly poor of the city, someone asked the priest, "don't you ever tire from so much work?" His response has come to be considered his motto, "Our rest will be in Heaven."

Knowing that salvation is a work of God through the intercession of His Holy Mother and still sparing no effort in cooperation with that work is a tightrope every Christian must walk. Above all, we manage to stay on that tightrope because of a fundamental, basic desire to be with God in prayer. As St. Sharbel Maklouf famously said, "the human being that does not pray scarcely exists." In a similar way, St. John Chrysostom says, "Whoever does not pray or has no desire to enjoy communion with God, is already lifeless and dead. For what the soul is to the body, this is what prayer is to the soul, and just as the body without a soul is dead, corrupt, and foul-smelling, so too a soul without prayer is dead, wretched and foul." We walk the tightrope through prayer. Founded in prayer, we will never lose our balance.