Is my path to holiness real or only in my imagination?

As I live longer upon this earth, these are the thoughts that continuously creep into my consciousness: “What will I do to attain the Kingdom of Heaven? How much effort is my soul worth?” I used to once believe that I would indeed do anything for God, however experience has taught me differently; I still sin. Reality and my actions in it are altogether different from the childlike certainty that “I will die a martyr.”

There is a romantic thought that used to prevail upon me about consoling Christ on the Cross: “If I was at Calvary, not only would I be with John and not Peter, but I would desire to climb upon the Cross and have my hands nailed on top of Christ’s hands, and there I would suffer with Christ. Christ would therefore not be suffering alone and I would be giving to Christ what he was giving for me, life itself.” Yet, experience has taught me differently, for if I cannot give my life to Christ by living, I would not be able to give my life to Christ by dying.

The first time I experienced the harsh reality of life was at the age of 24 during the Crucible to become a United States Marine. The Crucible is a 54 hour event comprised of war games, mind games and a very small amount of food. As a kid, and as an adult, at every moment prior to bootcamp and in the comfort of an arm chair, I was excited for this moment of testing. It honestly looked fun and tough, and I knew that I was tough. It would be easy.

The cold hard truth is that the fun is purposely torn from it, because it is designed to assimilate the rigors of combat. I am dead certain that no Marine has ever gone into combat with the false pretense that he would automatically become a hero and live under combat conditions for extended periods of time in comfort minus of course the epic hail of shot and shell.

In reality, one is constantly dehydrated and peeing dark brown, has severe heat cramps, and soiled pants because there is no time to get to the latrine. Furthermore, camouflage does not help because the enemy can smell you a kilometer and a half away, and the good shape you thought you were in is of no use. For, no person’s body can take the continuous strain of running, jumping and crawling that these three days entail. There are forty-eight miles of “hiking” during the west coast crucible and I ran all but nine of them, wearing a flak jacket, kevlar with an M16 and assault pack. I could run a six minute mile in sneakers on a track, but in boots and in this  environment, my heart was skipping beats and palpitating in ways that it had never acted before. If I had gone to the corpsman, I would have been stuck at MCRD San Diego for a year, and so I struggled on in fear. War is hell and so is reality. 

This was exactly how it happened that I began to think about the difference between reality and my imagination, and therefore my perceived relationship between myself and my God versus how it actually is. There is not one experience during the Crucible that was different than my knowledge of it beforehand and how it actually went. Yet, that real experience made all the difference. I do not actually love that level of training, in fact I hate it. Accordingly, I might someday fight in war, but I know that I will be a normal marine who does his job and that it would only be by the grace of God that I come forth out of it with a brain not maimed and a body not scarred or dead.

Taking the conclusion of this experience back to that earlier romantic thought of consoling Christ on the cross, I remember many years ago a friend struggling with his faith and accusing Christ of not having the capacity of self emptying love. I reminded him that Christ gave his life on the cross out of love and my friend responded that “yeah, Jesus was still getting something out of it, because whenever you do something good for someone you always get that happy feeling just knowing the satisfaction that your “self-sacrifice” is giving them.” I knew at the time that this was wrong but I did not have the vocabulary to turn the argument, now I do.

I take guidance from St. Thomas Aquinas on this matter who writes:

“Thirdly, the magnitude of Christ's suffering can be estimated from the singleness of His pain and sadness. In other sufferers the interior sadness is mitigated, and even the exterior suffering, from some consideration of reason, by some derivation or redundance from the higher powers into the lower; but it was not so with the suffering Christ, because "He permitted each one of His powers to exercise its proper function," as Damascene says.”(Summa Theologiae Tertia Pars Q.46 Art. 6 Respondeo)

The “derivation or redundancy from the higher powers into the lower” which St. Thomas refers to, is our ability to temporarily forget pain by thinking about other objects while experiencing the pain. It is our ability to tell ourselves “I will take a drink of water when we get to the next obstacle course” or, “24 hours of the crucible behind me only a day and a wake up left.” 

God has seen fit to be merciful to fallen man by making us able to temporarily step outside of our pain. Christ could not do this, or rather, would not. Christ was the God Man, the Man who was never corrupted by original sin. In order for Christ to suffer, he had to will each and every whip lash, thorn, nail, or smack on the cement. His suffering culminated in relinquishing his sight of the Father, having cried: “my God, my God why have you forsaken me.” Christ therefore got no fuzzy do-good feeling, because he was focused only on the pain, faced with ultimate desolation and abject loneliness. It is thus, that I should have answered my friend, and thus my “holy notion” of comforting Christ on the cross is crushed. 

There is nothing “romantic” about Christ’s passion. His passion was pure fear and pain. The fear that causes one to bleed sweat, and the kind of pain that can never dissipate and only intensify. In order to truly climb upon Christ’s cross, we must accept the kind of crucifixion wherein we are writhing and alone. We must accept that we are in the “valley of tears,” and should not expect satisfaction, spiritual or otherwise, though God in his mercy does, sometimes, provide it. Each of us desires holiness, but usually before it becomes real. The real is uncomfortable, and we must come to terms with the fact that the real call to holiness is hard, being a death to self.

What self righteousness to think that I could console Christ on the cross! What holiness I must have assumed that it would be that easy to suffer and die with him! I know now, how different reality is from imagination. I know now, that my soul would crumble just by feeling the desolation that Christ felt, much less the physical pain that he endured. It is this knowledge that turns my mind to the thoughts: “What will I do to attain the Kingdom of Heaven? How much effort is my soul worth?” 

The path to God is much more narrow than one would think. It is not simply being holy enough to have a liturgical preference. It is not simply being holy enough to try and pray a daily Rosary (and so sorry I missed it today!) No! The life of Christ is to live in Christ, it is to “pray without ceasing,” it is a life of fasting and meditating on the law night and day, and it is a terrifying path to begin on, if one is truly beginning upon it. It is an act of radical and self killing love.

I accuse myself of failing in this regard right here, after a day’s work and driving home, my immediate concern is to play music and unwind. Should it not be the case that the righteous man find his reset in God and not the volume dial? St. Augustine was worried about sinning by looking at a spider spinning his web in a state of curiosity and not out of love for God’s creation. Was this scrupulosity or was this such an elite level of sanctity that every separation from God in deed and thought caused heart break?

I end this here by saying, not only in sin are we holding something more dear in our heart than God, but also when we reach for mortal things, neither good nor bad, but without referencing it back to him. The path to God is real. I can guarantee that your (and mine) perception of our closeness with God is false, and that we do not love God as deeply as we think we do. The battle is waging over our souls and in our hearts. Where our heart is, there is our treasure. We must ask ourselves: “Where do I find my joy?” And if it is anything south of a hungry pursuit after God’s love, we need to reevaluate and start living for Christ, so that someday we might have the strength to give our life in martyrdom, lonely and on a cross.

War is upon us, and none of us will survive unscathed. There is no frontline  and all of us are the grunt. The war is over our souls and unless we, at this present hour, sever that which is dearest to us, tear it out of our hearts and place it far from us to make room for Our Lord, we will feel this selfsame pain later in eternal hellfire, for hell is what we truly want.