The Priest at Prayer, June 27

The Third Part - Vices and Virtues

HOPE

Second Meditation - Priestly Motives

I. Once ordained a priest, what is there for me to hope for, apart from eternal life? The good things of earth? At my ordination I deliberately placed them out of my reach. And even in my enjoyment of those which my priestly condition does not forbid me, it is my personal experience, or the experience of others I know, or both together, that no sooner have my itching fingers begun to clutch them, no sooner have my thirsting lips tried to suck their sweetness, than their hollowness and deceptiveness have stood revealed and they have been true only to the name written upon their inmost nature: delusion, satiety! Even if they were something solidly good, how shortlived, how ephemeral, how frail they are!

But, whatever their nature, I solemnly renounced them when at my ordination I claimed the Lord for my prize and inheritance:

Dominus pars hereditatis meae et calicis mei, tu es qui restitues hereditatem meam mihi. (Ps. xv, 5)

With St. Augustine I said: "Let others make their choice of the good things of earth and of time for their enjoyment; the Lord is my lot. Let others drink of deadly pleasures; it is the Lord who fills my cup."

Am I going to retract that renouncement? Was it all a farce?

II. We priests bear a heavier yoke than the laity, and in like measure our difficulties increase, our temptations gather fury, discouragements multiply; our souls are ships braving wilder storms, their frail sides are lashed more mercilessly. There is but one anchor to hold fast and firm: the anchor of which the Apostle speaks: the anchor of hope, which is sure and immovable, reaching that inner sanctuary beyond the veil, where Jesus Christ, our escort, has entered already. (Heb. vi, 18-20.)

How many times in my priestly life has my conscience made shipwreck through not casting this anchor of hope, but keeping it idle on deck like a piece of scrap iron?

III. It is a tragic thing for the faithful when their priests and instructors in the Faith fail to live by the hope of eternal reward. What will their practice of religion be like?

Either they will give up all practice of Christianity, because if there is nothing to hope for in another life the crucified Christ will appear an absurdity; or else, bypassing the pith and substance of every Christian act, hope of eternal life, they will debase practice to the level of empty, meaningless formula and vocal articulation, nothing more.

Or again, by a certain inconsis­tency, as illogical as it is frequent, they will give honour and have recourse to Christ and the Saints with Chris­tian prayer and belief, but in that same spirit with which the pagans of old invoked Mercury, the god of wealth and plunder, and Bacchus, the god of wine, and Venus, the goddess of lust; they will turn to Christ for pre­cisely those same boons and favours which were expected from the false gods of old.

Just think of it; asking a crucified God solely or in the first place for honours, pleasures, and riches! I only hope that my own example has not led them to it!

IV. Who is there who does not cherish the hope of some­thing this world can give? What is our life but a texture of a thousand colours being woven by the 100m of hope? A texture, however, which reality is all the time unravel­ling without mercy, breaking and scattering the strands in big handfuls along the roads and crossroads of our earthly existence.

Hopes of the past were my day­dreams: vigilantium somnia; money, prosperity, pleasures, appointments, dignities, honours: these are my dreams of the morrow. Tomorrow, that cruel god at whose shrine I have been slaughtering and sacrificing all my yesterdays; the god who, when he comes, brings instead of achievement a sneer and empty hands or hands full of bitter disappointment, and vanishes into thin air like the rest of my days.

It is God's command that we should keep on hoping. It is part and parcel of my inner nature that I should hope for something. Then why let this irrepressible energy run to waste? Why not divert my hope from possessions which shall never be mine, which are always ephemeral, and which even if they were permanently mine would still leave me hungering and empty as ever; and direct my longings, like a compass-needle, to the magnetic North of God and everlasting life? Hope is a force that was given me as a spur to goad me along the road which leads to eternal happiness.

Resolutions
1. I shall meditate more assiduously on the eternal life which awaits me, until I have pinned all my hopes upon it, like an anchor pinned to the bottom of the sea. My God, when wilt Thou grant me the grace to be able to say with all sincerity these words of the Psalmist: Ps. xxvi, 4:

"One request I have ever made of the Lord, let me claim it still, to dwell in the Lord's house my whole life long."

2. Not to be satisfied with a lifeless sort of hope, but ever to possess a hope vivified by charity; and therefore, to avoid grievous sin, which robs hope of its principle of life; even though it may not reject it altogether from my soul, it deprives it of supernatural energy.

3. If I am a prey to vice, especially sensual vice, to combat despair, vice's poisonous fruit. The greatest temptation for any sensual person is always either to believe oneself irrevocably lost on account of the appar­ent impossibility of returning to the path of Christian chastity, or stupidly to assume that God will somehow manage to save one's soul without any great effort on one's part. Oh, the danger of soft sensuality! Greater than we imagine!

4. To profess the tenderest love for Mary, the Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.

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Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!