Tuesday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 372

Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many. How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few.”

Saint Luke encourages us to “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” Saint Matthew doesn’t include the word strive. “Just do it!” he might be saying.

I hear people say they will try to quit smoking, try to abstain from sweets during Lent, or try to be more patient with their children. That’s a sure-fire formula for failure.

There is no trying in the spiritual life. There is only simple obedience. “I do this for the Lord!" or, “I don’t do this for the Lord!”

There is, however, sin, as Saint Paul famously admitted in Romans 7:

“What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.” (verse 15)

and

“For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. (verses 19-20.)

The narrow gate is not not-sinning. The narrow gate is admitting, owning, and repenting of my consistent, deliberate sin. As my confessor said to me, “You do it because you want to.”

Grace both confronts and meets us in the same place; that is, where we sin. Perhaps we wish we could meet grace somewhere else, some place where I feel more presentable, more like the person I should be. But the Lord comes to us in our guilt, shame, and remorse; and then leads us as we are willing to go. 

Although, until now, we might not have been willing to go there. "Excuse me," I might have said. "I still have some important business here." As the reluctant citizens said in Jesus's parable, "I have married a wife and bought a cow! Please hold me excused." 

On this blog, tucked away in one of the corners is a sixteen century tract by a Franciscan mystic. In the last chapter of Pax Anima he encourages us: 

CHAPTER XV

How the soul must quiet herself at every turn without losing time or profit.

Take, then, this rule and method in all the falls you shall make, be they great or little; yea, though ten thousand times in the same day you shall have incurred the same crime, and that not occasionally, but voluntarily and deliberately; observe, I say, inviolably this prescription: That as soon as ever you find yourself in fault, you trouble not nor disquiet yourself, but instantly, as soon as you are aware what you have done, with humility and confidence, beholding your own frailty, cast an amorous glance on God, and fixing there your love, say with heart and mouth,"Lord, I have done that which is like what I am, nor can anything else be expected at my hands but these and the like transgressions; nor had I stopped here, but plunged myself further into all wickedness, if thy goodness had permitted it, and left me wholly to myself. I give thee infinite thanks that thou didst not thus leave me, and for what I have done I am sorry. Pardon me for thy own sake, and for what thou art, and give me grace to offend thee no more, but admit me again to the favour of thy friendship."Having done this, lose neither time nor quiet of mind, imagining that perhaps God hath not pardoned you, and the like, but with full repose proceed with your exercise as though you had committed no fault; and this, as I have said, not once, but a hundred times, and, if there were need, every moment, with as much confidence and tranquility the last time as the first. For, beside the particular service of God herein, a thousand other advantages are gained by it; time is not lost in futile excuses, further progress is not obstructed, but, on the contrary, sin is subdued and mastered with much profit and perfection. This I would gladly inculcate upon, and persuade scrupulous and disquieted souls of; then they would soon see how different a state of tranquility they would find themselves in, and pity the blindness of those who, so much to their cost, go on still losing so much precious time. Note this well, for it is the key to all true spiritual progress, and the shortest means to attain to it.