Our Station in Life
The idea shocked Merton: “And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things 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 attachments.’”1
Like Merton in 1939, not many of us think of becoming a saint. It never even crosses our mind. Our “mental landscape” (as F.J. Sheed would phrase it) excludes it. Merton, an erudite man on fire for the faith at this time in his life,2 had never even considered that he should try to become a saint. He wanted to be a writer or professor, but he never thought about becoming a saint, as though saintliness was one profession to choose among many, to the exclusion of many.
The vague feeling that sainthood and the “real world” are not compatible is shared by many who must work a job and raise a family. We have duties in this world, duties that take time and require energy, so we intuitively presume that we cannot be a saint because we cannot pursue the contemplative life of St. Benedict, or the carefree life of St. Francis or St. Benedict Joseph Labre. We view worldly obligations and saintly aspirations as mutually exclusive, like a man cannot practice as a lawyer and a doctor at the same time and be competent at both.
But this mindset is wrong. Anyone in any profession can obtain saintliness. God, said Clare Booth Luce, “recruits his elect from men and women of every temperament and talent, every color, profession, class, and condition on earth … No man need be the sport or slave of circumstances, if God go with him.”3 In the words of St. Francis de Sales: “All of us can attain to Christian virtue and holiness, no matter in what condition of life we live and no matter what our life-work may be.”4
Sainthood is not excluded by our station in life because sainthood deals with the act of existence, with our substance, whereas our station is merely an accident of existence. An accident is an essence, a characteristic, that helps define a thing. Accidents, wrote Jacques Maritain, “come and go, and change within us, whereas our substance never ceases or changes, being as such immutable as long as we exist.”5 Existence is distinct from accidents. A thing continues to exist, regardless of whether it’s white or black, smart or ignorant, a teacher or an accountant. Our station in life is a mere accident, an increment or accretion to our substance, and therefore distinct from our existence.
A Question of Existence
Being a saint is a question of existence, not of accidents, because being a saint simply means to be good. The saint does nothing extraordinary, in the ontological sense. God created each of us wholly good, but, due to original sin and free will, we tend to deny our being as created by God in favor of base passions and worldly ambitions. The saint sheds these passions and ambitions. The saint’s is a simplifying process, a process of shedding forms that are appended to being and returning to God: A simple being that approximates God as much as possible by just existing, without the clamor of sin.
This does not mean that passion and ambition disappear. Each person is created with a will. Passion and ambition are children of the will, created to be subject to the will. In fallen man the roles get reversed, and the will becomes the servant of passion and ambition. Through cultivation of the virtues, we are able to “put things right,” returning will to its primacy, but we eliminate neither will nor passion and ambition. Rather, passion and ambition are transformed, becoming, in the words of St. Maximus the Confessor, “good by reason of their use for the one whose thought and will are in captive obedience to Christ.”6 Passion for charity overthrows the passion of lust, but passion is still there. Ambition to be a saint replaces the ambition to make money or to be famous, but ambition still thrives.
Ambition transformed into saintly ambition is the first step to sainthood. After Merton’s friend told him that he should want to be a saint, Merton objected, saying that he couldn’t be a saint. His friend disagreed, saying, “No. All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”7
The idea of desiring to be a saint intuitively strikes many people as odd. We tend to view sainthood as the life of detachment, in which a person does not have specific goals and ambitions. The idea of cultivating a particular ambition, especially a large one like aspiring to sainthood, strikes us as inconsistent with the surrender to God’s will that is the hallmark of the saint. We tend to think that we should, like Merton in 1939, simply desire to be good, to be a good Catholic, and leave it at that — a properly humble aspiration.
But, as Merton realized, that humble aspiration is cowardice, a lack of resolve to be truly good, to return our existence to its state as created by God. The desire merely to be good is too amorphous; it doesn’t give teeth to everyday life. The desire to be a saint is more specific, more tangible, especially as illustrated in the biographies of the saints, and therefore more daunting to the lighthearted.
Moreover, the ambition to be a saint is not too ambitious. It is not a sign of arrogance. The desire to be a saint is the desire to develop our highest calling as wholly-good creatures. Such an aspiration cannot be sinfully proud. St. Bernard, when discussing the saintly ambition, said: “Do not imagine that there is anything harmful in such an ambition as this; there is no danger in setting our hearts on such glory.”8 The twentieth-century theologian Josef Pieper explored the same thing when discussing whether a person who desires God’s love for himself is selfish. Pieper said: “To be so ‘unselfish’ as to renounce the ultimate fulfillment, eternal bliss, is entirely impossible for us. Our will, as Thomas Aquinas has formulated many times, is unable not to desire such bliss.”9
The Proper Motivation
Of course, the ambition can be sinful if motivated by vainglory or other base motive. In fact, this is one of the immediate pits that a person who decides to strive for sainthood can fall into. Another Catholic convert, Malcolm Muggeridge (later affectionately known as “St. Mug”), waged many spiritual battles in his life. As a young man, he contemplated the possibility of becoming completely selfless in service to God, and immediately ran into trouble:
Yes, that is exactly what he wants — not just to contemplate the possibility of handing his life over to Christ, but doing it then and there, unconditionally, and for ever … turning aside for ever from fleshly and egotistic pursuits; concentrating his attention on the needs of others rather than on his own appetites, on love and his soul rather than on power and his will … as he turns over in his mind all its different aspects and possibilities his ever-active ego moves in, and he sees himself as a monk in his habit, a Franciscan preferably, sought after by lost souls everywhere, a saint-to-be.10
Notwithstanding such potential pitfalls, we must desire to become saints because it is the first step to full goodness. We can then direct our efforts accordingly. We will sin, and we will fall, but we ought not cease to desire and to try.
And once the decision to be a saint is made, your worldly station will fall into place. If you seek a profession that leads to saintliness, you are getting the cart ahead of the horse. Cultivate the saintly ambition first, then see what opens up before you.
Your profession might change a little, like St. Thomas More, a lawyer who never ceased to work with the law, though he was called to work with the law in different ways until his execution. You may stay in your profession forever, with no change and no recognition, like the multitude of un-canonized saints that sprinkle the Church, making individual parishes sparkle. Your profession might change frequently, as it did in the life of St. John of God, who journeyed to Africa to ransom his body for the life of a Christian slave, then peddled holy wares, then tried to become a fool for Christ, then cared for the refuse of Grenada with an effort that unintentionally started an order of hospitallers, the Brothers of St. John of God.
The patterns manifest God’s goodness, so, like God’s creation, the patterns vary. The pattern might even be distressing, as it was in the case of St. Maria Goretti, who, at age eleven, yearned Christ as she received her First Communion, then felt no special calling as her spirit dulled under the drudgery of burdensome household chores. A few months later, she was called to martyrdom, stabbed fourteen times after refusing to submit to a lustful young man’s demands. But the reward of every pattern is great, as illustrated in the case of St. Maria, who was canonized so swiftly that, for the first time in history, a saint’s mother watched her child’s canonization.
This article originally appeared on www.Catholic.net.
End Notes
1. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Image Books,
1970), 289-290.
2 . Despite his later egregious errors (both personal and pub lic), Merton’s young
adult life and meditations as described in The Seven Storey Mountain are orthodox
and inspiring, so much so that Dinesh D’Souza included it as one of ten classics
discussed in his book, The Catholic Classics (Our Sunday Visitor, 1986), a book
which discusses only the biggest Catholic classics, such as St. Augus tine’s Confessions,
St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica, a’Kempis’s Imitation of Christ,
and Chesterton’s Or tho doxy.
3. Saints for Now, ed. Clare Booth Luce (Ignatius Press, 1993), 18, 20.
4. See The Voice of the Saints, ed. Frances Johnston (TAN Books, 1986), 3.
5. Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy (Christian Classics, 1991),
156.
6. Tomas Splidik, The Spirituality of the Christian East (Cis tercian
Publications, 1986), 270.
7. Merton, supra, 290.
8. Sermo 2: Opera Omnia, Edit. Cisterc. 5 (1968), 364-368. See Catholic Book
Publishing Co., IV The Liturgy of the Hours (1975), 1527.
9. Josef Pieper, Divine Madness: Plato’s Case Against Secular Humanism
(Ignatius Press, 1995), 55.
10. Malcolm Muggeridge, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (Harper &
Row, 1988), 96.
