To Want To Be a Saint

As she does so often, Julie Davis at Happy Catholic gets to the heart of the matter with this quote from Thomas Merton:

“What you should say”– he told me — ”what you should say is that you want to be a saint.” A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said: “How do you expect me to become a saint?” “By wanting to,” said Lax, simply. “I can’t be a saint,” I said, “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that they must reach: the cowardice that says: “I am satisfied to save my soul, to keep out of mortal sin,” but which means, by those words: “I do not want to give up my sins and my attachments.” Lax said: “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let him do it? [emphasis mine] All you have to do is desire it.” Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

Read the whole thing here.

Imprisoned in Our Selfishness

This quote from Pope Francis hit home:

He tells the prison chaplains to deliver this message as well: “You can tell them this: The Lord is inside with them; He too is one imprisoned, even today, imprisoned by our selfishness, by our systems, by so many injustices. Because it is easy to punish the weakest ones, but the big fish swim freely in the water.”

This was from Gregorian Institute email newsletter. You can read the whole thing here.