My will is like a little mouse that eats me up bit by bit!
Perseverance is a virtue beyond explanation because it stems from a heart so filled with flame and fire and desire for the Desired One that it cannot be encompassed. It cries out. It looks at its life, long or short, as so little to give to God who gives so much.
Perseverance cannot be measured. It has thrown all yardsticks away, for it comes from a heart in love with God, a heart attuned to every intonation of the Beloved.
Perseverance follows through everything, right unto Golgotha, right up to the Cross, because it wants to be with the Beloved in a total commitment of love.
God gave us a total commitment of himself. If we want to respond, even in our small way, then we begin to know, even on this earth, what resurrection means, because perseverance practiced day by day unto the end brings forth a strange understanding of the resurrection.
When I do the will of God, I am renewed, whereas when I do my own will, I am not. My will is like a little mouse that eats me up bit by bit, and there is nothing left of me unless I put my will in God’s will, my hand in God’s hand, my heart in God’s heart, and follow him.
There is, my friends, absolutely no way to approach perseverance intellectually. Lots of books have been written about it, but catch the wind, catch the bird’s song … catch the moonlight and weigh it and cut it up with a knife, and there is no moonlight. If you try to catch it and bring it into the house, it will disappear, and so with perseverance.
How can one understand the fruits of love, the stupendous fruits of love that make a man or woman stand where God tells them to stand, walk where God tells them to walk, lie down where God tells them to lie down? How can it be done? There needs to be an outpouring of love in each act of obedience. He who practices, doing over and over what God asks him to do, has a glimpse of the resurrection.
Don’t be afraid. Please don’t be afraid to surrender yourself to God. A saint said, “He who possesses God possesses everything.” If Christ were standing right here in this room asking me, “Catherine, have you wanted for anything” would I say, “Yes?”
“No!” I would say. “No, we have everything.”
We are beggars. We follow humbly what Christ told us to do, and so we are satisfied, or should be, because we have eaten and slept and been looked after when we were sick and so forth.
And if Christ were to address you, the only thing you could say to him is, “I have everything, but something in me is not yet ready to surrender to your will completely. I need more grace.” And that is done on your knees. That is where perseverance really flowers.
It is a strange virtue. Don’t be afraid to meditate on it deeply and to say “yes” to God as Our Lady did.
For your “yes” is the salvation of many, like hers was. Always repeat “yes,” and there will come a day when you will be dead, but your “yes” will echo on through the lives of many people you have never known.
Excerpted from an unpublished talk, 1975.
Image: detail from Molchanie painting by ©Patrick Stewart, Madonna House.
