Hardships And Heresies

Living the ideals of Christianity will only grow more difficult as we continue our approach toward the day when our Lord Jesus returns. We should not be at all surprised by the insanity that is part of a world content with its own destruction. The Lord Jesus raises a serious question regarding the day when he will return. "Yet when the Son of man comes will he find faith on earth?" [Luke 18:8]

Saint Benedict reminds me that my way of living is to be different from the world’s way of living. He reminds me that my love of Christ must come before everything else. [Holy Rule 4:20-21]

The Rule is hard. The Gospel, for that matter, is hard. What makes them hard is that the Gospel, and the Rule, are totally radical and counter-cultural. They cut squarely against the grain of the world and its way of thinking.

They are especially hard as long as I am trying to live in some rationalized gray zone where I am constantly justifying and condoning my own sin and the sin of the world … unless I have bought into some miserable and convoluted modern understanding of sin and sinful behavior that heretically modifies the severity and consequences of its nature.

Saint Louis De Montfort’s description of External, Presumptuous, Interested, and Critical Devotees of Mary easily and naturally find application, as well, to the Lord Jesus himself. Mary does, after all, always lead us to Jesus.

External’s are persons whose devotion consists in outward practices; have an interest in external appearances but have no real interior fire in their spirit.

Presumptuous Devotees are persons abandoned to their passions … lovers of the world, who under the fair name of Christianity conceal their pride, avarice, impurity, drunkenness, anger, swearing, detraction, injustice or some other sin. They sleep in peace in the midst of their bad habits, without doing violence to themselves to correct their faults, under the pretext that they are devout.

Interested Devotees are those persons who take recourse only to gain some lawsuit, or to avoid some danger, or to be cured of some illness, or for some other similar necessity.

Critical Devotees are those persons who are, for the most part, proud scholars, rash and self-sufficient spirits, who have at heart some devotion, but who criticize nearly all the practices of devotion which simple people simply and holily render, because these practices do not fall in with their own humor and fancy. They call into doubt all the miracles and pious stories recorded by authors worthy of faith, or drawn from the chronicles of religious orders testifying to us of the mercies and powers of the most holy Virgin. [Saint Louis De Montfort lived between 1673 and 1716.]

The Apostle James writes, "Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if a man be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he shall be compared to a man beholding his own countenance in a glass. For he beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was. But he that hath looked into the perfect law of liberty, and hath continued therein, not becoming a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work; this man shall be blessed in his deed." [James 1:22-25]

Hardships and heresies are two thing that are growing increasingly more unavoidable.

The more earnestly I pursue integrating the values of the Gospel and of the Rule of Saint Benedict into life in the 21st Century, the more I realize the necessity to listen with the ear of the heart to those “authors worthy of faith” who lived, ministered, and wrote before the latter half of the 20th Century - before the gross heresies of modernism gained their popularity and momentum.