Meditation for May 14, Natural Eagerness

To be active by nature is a blessing.

He, however, who expends his activity with a view solely to self improvement, manifesting little or no concern for the glory of God, understands activity in a wrong sense. He makes rapid prog­ress in his work but it is all done to satisfy vanity, to win a smile and a desired office. His motives are purely human. "What can­not a well-fed thriving self love do?" asks Father Faber. And he completes his thought: "How few among us have any other merit than that which we attain through our merely natural activity."

We do not exactly neglect the Good Intention, it is understood, or at least implied, that we work for God, but we allow ourselves to be carried away by the excess of our zeal, or an inordinate crav­ing for activity which is no longer zeal but an insatiable thirst for external interests and occupations. A certain essayist thought the most malicious trick that could be played on his contemporaries would be to make a daily hour of meditation obligatory for them. This would certainly be a mortification for people of the world, and many a religious would suffer martyrdom if she were driven to a more contemplative life.

"The saints," Father Faber said, "do not do a great many things." The lives of the saints as they are written give us a false impression. We would say that they are all activity. We get no idea of their silence, so that we receive the impression that each chapter is a pyramid of accumulated deeds. We must remember that thirty years of life makes thirty times twelve months, and each day of these months some of these saints meditated for five or seven hours. Perfection is not in the quantity but in the quality of the deeds. We must not exaggerate but rather bear in mind that "The saints were men who did less than others, but who ac­complished what they had to do a thousand times better than others. "
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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)