Holiness and the giving of ourselves thoughtfully and recklessly

“Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion?” –Luke 14:27-28

The idea of becoming a saint sounds great. And then you try it.

When we read the Beatitudes, when we are transported by sacred music or architecture, or filled with zeal as we read the lives of the saints, the call to holiness sounds like a trumpet in our hearts and minds, summoning us to the highest heights of spiritual excellence and to make any sacrifice for the Lord.

Then the morning alarm tears us from comfortable sleep. A difficult person grates on our nerves. A family member pushes us just a bit too far. We get fed up once again with what we see on social media. Or some little temptation is suddenly alluring.

We can imagine holiness easily enough, and we want to be holy very badly, but in the nitty-gritty of everyday life, we are often tempted to wimp out. The universal call to holiness is not as simple, or as obviously attractive, as it might at first seen. It is a universal call to heroism and to humility, to danger and to drudgery. It is a call to embrace the “faith of our fathers” to such an extent as to hazard “dungeon, fire, and sword,” and it is to be charitable and faithful in the ordinary circumstances of daily life.

The text from Luke’s Gospel, quoted above, reminds us that the call to holiness is also a call to recklessness and reckfulness.

Christ calls us to be reckless in loving God beyond what nature allows, setting aside everything that gets in the way of our union with him. He calls us to embrace the way of the Cross, the prospect of which caused the Son of God himself to sweat like great drops of blood as he confronted it. We cannot think our way into this kind of total abandonment of self. We must act, taking up our crosses and following him.

At one point during the correspondence between St. Thomas More and his daughter Meg, during the saint’s imprisonment, Meg asks whether her father has not done all that is reasonable to stand up to the king. Could anything further being expected of him? To which St. Thomas answered that while he had done all that was reasonable, he needed to do what was unreasonable to defend the Catholic faith they both loved so dearly.

In his last letter to Meg, St. Thomas writes:

His Majesty has done me such great good with respect to spiritual profit that I trust that among all the great benefits he has heaped so abundantly upon me I count my imprisonment the very greatest. I cannot, therefore, mistrust the grace of God.

By the merits of his bitter passion joined to mine and far surpassing in merit for me all that I can suffer myself, his bounteous goodness shall release me from the pains of purgatory and shall increase my reward in heaven besides.

I will not mistrust him, Meg, though I shall feel myself weakening and on the verge of being overcome with fear. I shall remember how Saint Peter at a blast of wind began to sink because of his lack of faith, and I shall do as he did: call upon Christ and pray to him for help. And then I trust he shall place his holy hand on me and in the stormy seas hold me up from drowning.

A more whimsical story about the holy “recklessness” of the saints comes from the life of St. John Cantius. The saint was on a break from teaching at the university and was heading to Rome for a pilgrimage. Because he was absent-minded and very generous with the poor, his colleagues on the faculty got into the habit of sewing some money into the robe he wore on his trips so that he would have enough funds to get home.

On his way to Rome, he encountered a pair of robbers. In his panic, St. John told them that all he had was a couple of coins of little value–his pocket money. After the robbers left him, he suddenly remembered the gold coins sewn into his clothes and became worried that told a lie! So he ran off after the robbers and offered them his gold coins, a reckless honesty that moved even those criminals to repent and return the money they had stolen.

Being a saint means we need to be bold, to be reckless, but Christ makes it clear, nevertheless, that we do need to consider the gravity of what we are doing when we choose to follow him. It does not do to start down the path of discipleship, only to turn away when the going gets tough. “Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion?”

Such reckful recklessness was expressed by another victim of the religious revolution in England, St. Edmund Campion. In St. Edmund’s famous “brag,” he tells Queen Elizabeth of the determination he and his fellow Jesuits have made to pray and work for the conversion of England, no matter what the cost. He writes:

Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posterity shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes. And touching our Society, be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practice of England—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: So it must be restored.

Every disciple of Jesus Christ is called to “calculate the cost”, to “reckon the expense” of following the Lord Jesus. Every disciple should ask himself, “Do I have what it takes, with God’s grace as my unfailing help, to give myself away in an act of spiritual heroism and to allow myself to be consumed slowly, day-by-day, like a candle? Am I the type of person who could lay down his life in a moment, were some persecution to threaten me, as it did St. Edmund Campion? Am I also the type of person who can lay down his life on this altar of sacrifice every day, in a thousand little ways, for decades to come?”

It is at the Eucharistic altar, more than anywhere else on earth, that we find the answer to these questions. The Sacrifice of the Mass is the locus of our most intense reckoning. At the altar, we find the One who calls us. In the Eucharist, we find the One who has himself offered his life in one moment of death and triumph. And we find the One who allows himself to be offered every day, who makes himself present to his people every day. In the agony of Calvary and the daily celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, Christ shows us what it means to be a saint, in all of its glory and its daily fidelity.