Shortly before his death St. Alphonse Rodriguez, aged eighty-seven years, answered his nurse, who had asked him if he was suffering much:
"Yes."
"From what do you suffer?"
"From self-love."
St. Francis de Sales put no limit to the misdeeds of corrupt nature. It even goes beyond the bed of the agonizing. "Self love," he used to say, "will die only a quarter of an hour after us."
That is sufficient to plane down certain pretensions and claims. There are persons who imagine that from a definite moment they will be completely transformed; there will be nothing more of the human in them; nature will have ceased to exist; they will awaken one fine day metamorphosed into seraphim.
The true story of our lives is quite different.
Assuredly God can work miracles; He can change stones into children of Abraham, and reserves to His own pleasure the transformation of an ordinary soul into a privileged creature, one who, except for still touching two feet on the ground, seems to be no longer of the earth.
But so long as our steps tread our poor planet of sin, earth remains earth; it is true that we are born of passion and we continue, to the end, to carry about in us the marks of passion; it is true that, bitten by concupiscence, we have to reckon with concupiscence to the end.
It has been said for all without exception: Watch and pray.
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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)
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