A few years ago a friend of mine told me that he had recently started reading the Fathers of the Church, which, he said, made him feel like "the great slacker of the world."
I had a similar feeling as I read The Soul of the Apostolate a few years back.
This is the effect that good spiritual reading ought to have on us. From it, we learn from holy people (that is, people who are fiercely serious about loving God and one another, along with the Church, Scripture, and Tradition, who are indefatigably committed to prayer and the Sacraments, and who know a thing or two about self-mastery thanks to regular and rigorous penance and mortification) what, with God's grace, we are capable of, and what He put us on this earth to do.
Good spiritual reading also reminds of our own pathetic brokenness, and how far we presently are from reaching a point anywhere close to that reached by the spiritual masters whose works we read.
Sure, no one likes to be reminded of his faults and imperfections, but we periodically need to remind ourselves (or have someone else remind us) of how not-so-good we are, lest we get a little too comfortable with ourselves and become -- God forbid -- proud.
With this in mind, consider these words of Servant of God Dorothy Day, whose death 31 years ago was commemorated yesterday:
“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
These words are as good a reality check as any we're likely to come across today. We would all do well to look deep within ourselves and honestly ask:
How much do I really love God?
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I had a very similar realization a few years ago. When someone asked why I wore a Green Scapular, I told him that I was praying for conversions, and he asked if I would pray for him. Now, I though then, and still think today, that the fellow was just being facetious, and so I talked it over with my friends, all of whom were agreed that I HAD to pray for the fellow. That there could be reasons for refusing just about any other act of charity, but since a prayer cost you nothing, you were obliged as a Christian to pray.
So, I began including the fellow in my morning prayers. And I did this, probably for years, before it occurred to me that it was really insincere of me to pray for this guy’s conversion if I didn’t really want to see him in Heaven one day. And, frankly, I didn’t. At the time, I would rather have met Stalin in Heaven before this guy.
After a few days of real anguish, I resolved to really want to see this guy in Heaven one day, and it changed my whole attitude towards him. I began to cut him some slack, stayed away from our differences and tried to maximize our agreements, and it worked. We aren’t the best of friends now, I wouldn’t have him over to my house, but I can say we are friends of a sort now, something I never would have anticipated.
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