“But I don’t wanna do Quiet Time,” my 3 year old moaned. 1:30 PM had already passed and I’m quite possessive of our designated silence-all each afternoon. I need the calm.
“I know you don’t,” a feeble effort to validate him, “but everyone needs quiet time.”
“But I don’t WANT TO!” In our back-and-forth, his whiny protests raged fast; a key indicator that he needed rest. Doing my best to rein in frustration, I ushered him to bed, promising happy play time and delicious snacks if he would please just put his head down.
“But I don’t want to…” I closed the door and tiptoed to the living room, silently positioning myself on the couch, and finally exhaling. At last, I hoped, all four were asleep.
Then footsteps and a door opening. “Mom? Is it time to get up now?”
Sigh. After ten rounds of putting him back, he finally wore himself out protesting the injustice of naps and by the end of it, I was reeling from the injustice myself.
My kids didn’t come with discipline. They don’t have the inner promptings to analyze and prioritize, so we the parents must possess the ability for them. From birth, we’ve shown them how to eat and when to nap; as they mature, we teach them how to deny instant gratification and how to base decisions on pleasing God. It takes extreme work of the will from Andrew and me; and while our precious children learn, they look to our example and the boundaries we set. To be a parent is to be discipline itself until our kids develop the ability to do for themselves what we’ve demonstrated. Discipline has to be enforced in the beginning, then taught, and then finally, when a child matures, he desires it and takes it on himself.
Sainthood is strangely similar. Seemingly too lofty, it can seem as incomprehensible as discipline to a newborn. It’s a joy and closeness to Christ I desire to have, but with a whole map full of avenues I hardly know where to start sometimes. Read scripture or take on a daily Rosary or novena? Daily Mass, Confession? All roads at once? Without a clear approach, it’s easy to lose hope that holiness, let a lone sainthood, is possible. Sainthood is what happens to people who have huge, miraculous conversions and blasts of intense, soulful reflection. I’ll be lucky to slip clandestinely into Purgatory and even then I’ll be settled for a while.
Enter St. Therese.
It’s amazing to know that such a well-known, beloved saint thought Heaven was impossibly out of reach: “I desire, in a word, to be a saint, but I feel my helplessness and I beg You, Oh My God, to Be Yourself My Sanctity.” In writing the question so many souls have, she also wrote the answer: be my holiness for me.
And just like that, my eyes were opened. Just as parents are discipline itself for their children, so God is holiness itself for us. Like discipline, God moves us to holiness by teaching us his paths and then leading us in sanctity (Psalm 25); and it’s following his promptings that we desire it and pursue the relationship with him in return. There have been too many times when I’ve thrown fits to match my 3 year-old – there have been too many occasions of protesting The Plan, but the more I ask God to help, the more deeply I desire to follow him. I know God wants me in Heaven with him, and to be in Heaven is to be a saint. The path seems impossibly difficult, and the crown out of my reach, but the opportunity is real.
Be my Holiness, O Lord, because in You I can begin.
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Thank you for this.;)