Perseverance

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

I read a book once about the Battle of Monte Cassino. Monte Cassino is a monastery just south of Rome, where St. Benedict is buried together with his sister, St. Scholastica.

The German army occupied that abbey on a hill outside of Rome, a prominent hill overlooking the approach road to Rome from the south.

The Allies landed. It was the winter of 1944, much further south in Italy, Anzio, and they made their way up the center of Italy little by little.

There was a journalist in the front lines of that group who wrote the story. He said it was cold in the front lines, the shells were landing everywhere, and the soldiers were tired. Anyone in their right mind would have wanted to be somewhere else.

The mules who would bring the food each night after dark sometimes were shot, and the food wouldn't get through, so the soldiers were hungry. Each evening also, the wounded were taken back on mules back to the home lines.

The temptation to desert was very great. One day, two soldiers decided to desert.

They feigned that they were wounded, but there was a sergeant with a gun examining all the wounded to check that they were really wounded.

He discovered these two and he ordered them back to the front lines. These tired, battle-weary soldiers went back to their positions, and they fought on.

Eventually, the Germans were pushed back off that promontory. They withdrew to the north of Italy. Rome was spared. It was one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War.

It was won with tired soldiers. St. Josemaría often liked to say that battles are won with tired soldiers.

We find a lot of emphasis in Scripture on the virtue of perseverance.

“Well done, good and faithful servant! Because you have been faithful in little things, I have great things to commit to your charge” (cf. Matt. 25:23).

“I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I look forward to the prize” (2 Tim. 4:7).

“Where else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (cf. John 6:68).

Many words of Our Lord are words of encouragement to keep going forward in the battle, not to give up—or even if we do feel like giving up, to go back and begin again.

“Let us never slacken in doing good,” says St. Paul, “for if we do not give up, we shall have our harvest in due time” (Gal. 6:9).

“I have loved you just as the Father has loved me. Remain in my love” (John 15:9).

Again and again, Our Lord emphasizes the importance of these virtues. We can ask Him for that grace to grow in the virtue of perseverance, to hang in there.

Last week, Helen Nairobi, an Irish Loreto nun, celebrated her 100th birthday. She arrived in Kenya in 1946. She had been here for 74 years.

Every so often we hear one of these stories. Fidelity and perseverance are very beautiful, very inspiring.

All over the world, there are similar stories of people who have gone before us, who have led very heroic lives. Perhaps they have set up the educational system of a country or the healthcare system.

We leave a legacy of fidelity and perseverance to those who come after us.

Our Christian vocation in the middle of the world demands that same spirit in our marriage, in our family, in our work, in our apostolate —the task that God has given us to do in our quest for holiness.

We keep on looking forward towards the goal, not slackening in doing good.

“And then speaking to all, he said, ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me’” (Luke 9:23).

Our Lord doesn't tell us to take up our cross once or twice in our life, but every day, all the time, not holding back, keeping going, no matter what the situation may be.

We can ask Our Lord for that grace to hang in there, to begin again in living this virtue.

“Once the hand is laid on the plow,” Our Lord said, “no one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (cf. Luke 9:62).

“But you belong to Christ,” says St. Paul to the Corinthians, “and Christ belongs to God” (1 Cor. 3:23).

St. Josemaría liked to say, “To begin is easy, to persevere is sanctity” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, Point 983).

It's a grace, a gift from God. We pray for it. Perseverance is the fruit of faith, of hope, and of charity. That perseverance in the tasks that God's given us to do makes many things possible.

God wants to convert society—to produce a civilization of love, a culture of life, in and through our daily perseverance in the places where God has placed us.

St. Josemaría liked to refer to our vocation as a “commitment of love” (J. Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 74).

He loved that word: commitment. ‘Show me a person who is committed, and I will tell you what sort of person they are. Show me what they are committed and how they are committed, and even more, I will tell you what sort of person they are.’

We're called to lead lives of commitment, to show other people by our example what commitment means.

Today is the feast of St. Mary Magdalene. We're told, “It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark when she came to the tomb” (John 20:1).

She was very committed in her love. “She had been forgiven much, for she loved much” (Luke 7:47).

While everyone else was asleep, she couldn't sleep. She suffered from insomnia. If we're concerned about something, it bothers us.

She was concerned, and so she got up early. Her love moved her to action, moved her to fidelity. She needed to be with Jesus.

She moved through the village early in the morning, not worried about what people were going to think or what people were going to say if perhaps they were glaring out from behind their curtains. Her mind was on Christ.

She needed to be with Him. Then she came.

“She saw that the stone was moved away from the tomb, and she came running to Simon Peter, the other disciple. They went to the tomb, and they ran together. But running faster than Peter, the other disciple reached the tomb first. He bent down and saw the linen cloths lying on the ground, but did not go in.

“Simon Peter, following him, also came up, went into the tomb, and saw the linen cloths lying on the ground. And then they went in and believed” (John 20:1-8).

“The disciples went back home. But Mary was standing outside near the tomb, weeping” (John 20:11).

Mary didn't go home. She was also there at the foot of the Cross (John 19:25) when all the apostles had run away.

This faithful, persevering woman gives us a great example of what it means to love. Because of her example, she earns the role of the protagonist in the scene of the Resurrection.

The whole story of the Resurrection comes out or begins with Mary Magdalene, not with St. Peter, or St. John, or with Our Lady, but she wins the Oscar. She wins pride of place because of her love.

Perseverance is a beautiful virtue: not giving up, hanging in there, having total fidelity. Love seeks to be definitive. We need to give ourselves completely, and for that, we need a daily conversion, to do things God's way.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

Always, God will give us the grace to carry on or to begin again.

“My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Cor. 12:9). These are very wonderful words that St. Paul has given to us in all difficult situations.

No matter how much we might feel that we don't have the grace, or we can't continue, if God has brought us to it, He will bring us through it. If we trust in Him, we will not be disappointed.

We can leave the past to God's mercy, the future to God's providence (attr. St. Augustine), and live “the sacrament of this moment” (Jean Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence).

It's a gift. It has a visible and an invisible part. That's what a sacrament is. God lives in an eternal now.

We can also have great faith that all the moments of our lives are moments that God is using to bring us forward in holiness.

There may be parts of the journey that we don't understand, or we feel a little lost. When the Three Kings set out to follow the star, they came to Jerusalem and the star disappeared. What did they do then?

They used their common sense. They began to ask questions. “‘Where is he that has become the King of the Jews?’ … And the whole of Jerusalem was disturbed by the questions of these people” (cf. Matt. 2:2-3).

Later on, we're told, “They went on their way. And as they went, the star reappeared before them…and they rejoiced exceedingly” (Matt. 2:9-10).

We find great joy in our vocation. Sometimes the star may disappear for a while, but it reappears when we use the means—when we're faithful to the norms, when we live our customs, when we live our spirit.

We trust in God. We won't be disappointed. We know that He has a gold medal prepared for us that does not corrode—a gold medal that will last forever.

There is merit in the struggle that we make to win that medal. If God allows struggle, cross, contradictions, and doubts, it's because He wants us to get that merit.

He always remains faithful to us. We might not remain faithful, but He remains faithful to us.

We have to try and make sure that our vocation is founded on rock, that “the winds may blow and the rains may come,” but because our vocation is founded on rock, it does not sink. The rock is not just of doctrine, but of family life, of apostolate, of our Lady.

Our Lord also wants our free response. St. Josemaría loved freedom (Pilar Urbano, The Man of Villa Tevere, Chapter 5; J. Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Chapter 2, Freedom: a gift from God, etc.).

While God wants us and calls us, He also leaves a certain initiative up to us. We have to want it.

St. Thomas Aquinas was asked what was one of the most important aspects of achieving sanctity, and he said: To want it, to really want it.

As our Father says in The Way, we have to ask Our Lord that we might “want it like a miser wants his gold…like a sensualist wants his pleasure,” that we might want that holiness more than anything else in the world (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 316).

We know that the achievement of that goal may cost us some sacrifice, effort. Often perseverance needs sacrifice.

In the 1980s, I was going out to say Mass one Sunday morning in Manila, and I didn't know that there was a marathon taking place. Marathons were just starting at that time. I had to cross the main street, and that's where the marathon was passing.

I got blocked. I had to wait there for ten minutes. I was late for the Mass, but I got a bird's eye view of all these runners in the marathon.

I found you could roughly divide them into three different groups: those that were running very well, those that were not running so well, and those that had looks of agony on their faces, and looked like they should have stopped running in marathons about twenty years previous!

Those that were not looking so well—they had a pain in their side. Maybe they had entered the race as a bit of a joke, done no training. They didn't last very long. They had to drop out.

Those that had done some training—they were able to keep going, but they had looks of agony on their faces. But somehow, they managed to struggle on.

Then there were the champions, those who had really prepared for the race. They had gone over the course before. They knew where to turn left, and where to turn right. They knew where the hills were.

They knew for what they had to reserve their wind and their energy. They were running in the middle of the road very smoothly. These were the ones that were going to coast home and win the race.

Those three groups, you could say, roughly correspond to those who will go to hell, those who will go to purgatory, and those who will go to heaven. God has called each one of us to be like that third runner, to run like a champion, to run the race well.

St. Paul gives us very athletic, sporting descriptions of the race. “I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I look forward to the prize” (2 Tim. 4:7).

But of course, running in that way takes some sacrifice. It takes some commitment. It takes a lot of effort.

You've got to keep at it all the time, give importance to the race and take it seriously, and take care of details, and listen to our trainer—all those sorts of things.

At the bottom of all lack of perseverance, or lack of fidelity, there's a pocket of corruption. Humans are fickle-minded. All the apostles said “Yes”, but one changed his mind.

The passing things of this world can never be the source of our happiness. We find our happiness in the risen Lord, happiness in the spiritual things.

Money, pleasure, movies, football—all these things are passing. Perseverance and fidelity mean perseverance and fidelity to the means that God has given to us, the norms of our spiritual life, our customs, living our spirit, giving importance to small things.

A spiritual life may not be a romance all the time. There can be periods of dryness, maybe a lack of ideas, or a lack of affections, but we carry on.

Many of the great saints in the history of the Church talk about the dark night of the soul (St. John of the Cross, Dark Night; St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Autobiography, St. Teresa of Calcutta, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light).

There might be very few compensations, but yet we try to persevere and be faithful to the calling.

Mother Teresa was asked once if she really thought she would be successful in combating poverty in India. She responded, “Oh, I'm not called to be successful. I'm just called to be faithful.”

There's a lot of wisdom in that. We're not necessarily called to be successful in all our endeavors, in all our apostolic efforts, in all the seeds that we sow—but we are called to be faithful, to sow the seeds, to launch out into the deep, to do the things that God has asked us to do, in season and out of season, to carry the cross.

We know that God will make all our efforts fruitful. We may not see the fruit, but we know it will come.

“My chosen ones do not labor in vain” (cf. Isa. 65:23). Nothing is ever lost. We can be full of hope and optimism.

God is with us. “If God is with us, who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31).

The Holy Spirit is there, enlightening us, giving us little hints here and there—what He wants us to do, pointing us in the right direction.

We have to listen with humility and docility to what is said to us in this particular moment, reminding ourselves that God is with us in every moment of our journey.

A man came to me once in another country many years ago. He was very low. He had just missed his promotion. His career path had taken a left turn. He was very disappointed.

I recommended to him to go and read a chapter on pessimism in The Forge, which is the chapter in the works of St. Josemaría that I think I've recommended more to professional people in the last twenty or thirty years.

He went away and came back the following week. He said, “Father, there was one point in that chapter that I read where Our Lord is talking to the paralytic, quoted by St. Josemaría, “The Lord says, ‘Take heart, my son. Your faith has saved you.’” (cf. J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 231).

He said, “I've been repeating those words every moment, every hour, every day for the past week, and those words have kept me going.”

The Holy Spirit speaks to us, encourages us to put our hand on the plow once again, never to give up on the ideals of the beginning: the great ideal of marriage and married love; starting over.

Fidelity is dynamic, it's not static. It means falling in love with God and growing in this day by day and fostering that around us. We're in His hands.

There was a priest in Singapore many years ago, a Dutch missionary priest who used to say that a lot of young people would come to him complaining of low self-esteem.

He said, “I like to tell them that: Look, you're carried in the palm of a God who loves you. We're in the hands of God.”

Therefore, it's not difficult to persevere. The vast majority of people persevere. The normal thing is to persevere, to keep going, no matter what the challenges may be.

With that perseverance over time, God changes the world.

I met a couple in Singapore many years ago who had three sons in a very famous school in England called Stonyhurst. They went to the 500th anniversary of that school in the late 90s. The school started in the late 1400s in the time of Elizabeth I in England, who succeeded Henry VIII.

The Catholic history of England is very impressive and inspiring: tremendous persecution over the years, and there was a great persecution of Catholics at that time.

The Jesuits couldn't start the school they wanted to in England. Catholic education was forbidden. They had to start this school in France, and it moved from France to Belgium and various places for 150 years.

Then the laws in England lessened a little bit and they were able to get back to England. They inherited some big estate, and they moved back near Liverpool. This school had been there for 500 years. This couple brought back a little booklet about the history of the school.

It was twenty pages, a very small little booklet really, summarizing the 500 years of one of the oldest schools in Europe.

On the back page, there was a list of their most illustrious alumni. The first fifteen were saints and the first twelve were martyrs.

Over that 500-year period, that school had provided many Cardinal Archbishops of Westminster and had educated the children of the major Catholic families of the United Kingdom.

They had given a tremendous service over 500 years, but hidden in that story, in the bricks of that school—hidden in those 20 pages were the lives of many faithful and persevering individuals who helped that school to be what it was and what it lived to be through 500 years of difficult times, and persecutions, and uphill struggles—and produced a great fruitfulness.

We never know what God wants to do with our correspondence.

Perseverance and fidelity don't necessarily come with age. Sometimes, older people don't persevere.

If that's ever the case, it's because there was a focal point of corruption earlier. They perhaps did not want to keep struggling or were not in love enough with their vocation.

Virtues are manifestations of love. When love disappears, all virtues disappear.

“God is love” (1 John 4:8,16). All the saints in their writings talk magnificently about love. St. Josemaría, in his get-togethers and writings, talks all the time about love.

He said, “You possibly may not meet too many people of my age who talk about love the way I do.”

Love is at the center of everything: to love Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, to learn how to love the cross, to live for love, to put love into everything we do, to begin again in love.

Love is a mystery. We never fully understand the mystery because God is love, but from time to time we get different optical angles on this reality. We go deeper in love.

The Holy Spirit, the spirit of love, reveals new graces to us. We come up to a new level.

Intelligence, PhDs, well-paying jobs, apostolic successes—these necessarily don't make us faithful and persevering. What's important is not academic success but fidelity: commitment to the ideals of the beginning.

We would be crazy to worry about whether or not we're going to persevere. We just try to live each day and each hour in trust and hope and identify ourselves with Christ. We know that He will do the rest.

The saints suggest to us that those who learn how to serve others in the family, in marriage, in the office, in our neighborhood, in society, will be happy and persevering in their vocation.

God rewards that generosity. We can ask Our Lord for the grace of a deeper generosity to give ourselves again—and to give ourselves again like we did in the beginning.

Lord, give me the heart with which you want me to love you so that I can “sing a new song unto the Lord” (Ps. 96:1).

The sureness that divine love is with us is shown in our cheerfulness. We go forward in joy, to live out every day.

We could ask Our Lord, ‘May others see God in me, sometimes in my defects, but in the defects in which I struggle to be better.’

If we want to transmit our spirit, we have to try and live it.

St. Josemaría used to talk about making it our own: “Incarnate it in ourselves to its last consequences, not just fulfilling things in a peremptory sort of way but doing things with love.”

He asked that our fidelity would be a proselytistic fidelity: a faithfulness and perseverance that's focused on souls.

‘I do this for others, for the fruitfulness that will come, and that means a struggle each day—today and tomorrow and the next day; in this hour and that hour—a struggle with humility, a struggle to fulfill what we have promised.

Some promises are hard to keep, but we have the grace to be able to do all of this—a vocation and a grace for perseverance and fidelity—to have the right ordering of our loves and loyalties.

On the 50th anniversary of the founding of Opus Dei, on the 2nd of October 1978, in the get-together with Blessed Álvaro del Portillo, I heard him say that what happens in a game that little children play, where they sit around in a circle and they whisper a word into the ear, and that person has to pass it on, then whisper it into the ear of another person, and it goes around the circle, and often what comes out at the end is something completely different than what went in at the beginning. He said that can't happen with the spirit of Opus Dei.

The spirit that St. Josemaría saw from God in 1928 has to be the spirit that people live throughout each era of its history.

He said that for an organization that has to last until the end of time—fifty years in the life of that organization is like fifty days in the life of a person: it’s nothing.

We've been given a great responsibility to help all these things last. Christ was very faithful to His calling: “I've come not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38).

He came on earth to manifest divine loyalty, giving fulfillment to the promises that God had made to humanity.

He doesn't hold back, or get held back, by the infidelities of men, by Judas, or other things. He doesn't get held back in the face of difficulties, even at the cost of the greatest sacrifice.

St. Josemaría liked to use the aspiration, “Our refuge and our strength, refugium nostrum et virtus!” (J. Escrivá, The Way of the Cross, Thirteenth Station).

He doesn't leave us in the moment of battle. We can fight to place ourselves at the service of the Church, at the service of the Work, to burn our bridges, to give ourselves—asking for that inner toughness, that fortitude to dominate our ego, not to be ruled by our likes and dislikes—to be like a soldier in the battle who's thinking of the war, of the big picture.

There was a piece of news on a television network many years ago during the Gulf War, where they interviewed an American colonel who was in the war in the Middle East. He was a dentist, and he was asked, from his point of view, “What was the biggest challenge of the war?”

And he said, “The biggest challenge of the war, from my perspective, is the failure of the men in the field to brush their teeth three times a day.”

Maybe he was right, but at the same time, you could say there was something a little bit missing in his perspective. He didn't seem to have the big picture of the war fully in hand.

We also have to try and have the big picture so that we know what's going on. Cardinal Nguyễn Văn Thuận, when he was in solitary confinement in Vietnam for so many years, I think it was thirteen years, heard the Holy Spirit saying to him, “Choose God, and not the works of God.”

God may ask us to purify our intention in all sorts of ways. What things foster our perseverance?

It is fostering loyalty even on a human level, trusting in God in the face of difficulties, having the readiness to rectify and to keep going, recognizing our own weakness and not being scandalized by it.

We're “vessels of clay” (2 Cor. 4:7), having a sense of responsibility, taking care of little things, being realistic, knowing how to overcome the difficulties of our weaknesses, of our human limitations, of our tiredness, of our lukewarmness.

It is being aware of difficult external changes that might come at a bad moment. There are times when God might just sweep the feet from under us and leave us hanging there.

If that ever happens, it's because He wants us to look up and discover what real faith is and real hope is. Sometimes He might permit periods of temporary blindness due to our pride.

St. Josemaría says in Furrow, “Ever since you said Yes, time has broadened your horizons, giving them new and brighter colors and making them more beautiful every day, but you have to continue saying Yes” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 32).

To persevere is to persist in love through Him, with Him, in Him. Indeed, we can also interpret this as “He Himself with me, for me, and in me.”

“As the flames of your first enthusiasm die down,” he says in Furrow, Point 789, “it becomes difficult to advance in the dark. But that progress is all the more reliable for being hard. And then, when you least expect it, the darkness vanishes, and the enthusiasm and light return. Persevere!”

Our Lady at the foot of the Cross gives us a great example of perseverance, though a sword was piercing her heart (cf. Luke 2:35).

She said then, as she said at the moment of the Annunciation, “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to your word” (cf. Luke 1:38).

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

SMF