THE WAR INSIDE US BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL.

I was listening to a priest lately and he was talking about that passage in Romans    "I do not understand my own actions for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate................................." Romans 7.15. onwards.    Paul was talking about the slavery to sin that is within us and which even he had not yet overcome.   The priest gave the example of a friend who had been on a retreat, he came back full of fervour and love for the Lord.  The next day his friend started to pray, but found his mind wandering to worlds things; but he kept on persevering and trying .   At the end of a half hour he stopped and realised that for only about five minutes of that half hour had he been meditating with the Lord.  He was so disappointed.     Does that happen to you well it certainly happens to me.   I can never quite feel I belong to the Lord because of my distractions and when I do good works I do not have the humility to keep it to myself but want to boast about it to the world.   That old phrase "It is so hard to be good"  has real meaning.    I want to feel loved by God, I want to feel Mother Mary so close to me that i could touch her, I want to be among the saints yet I feel I am not good enough, but at least one saint understand me and that is St Paul.

St Paul goes on in Romans  "So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil is close at at hand.  I delight in the law in my inmost self but I see in my members another law at war with the law in my mind"    Have you found this that you battle to be good an pure in thought,  That you do not want earthly things that lead you astray, yet somehow you persuade yourself they are not really harmful even when you know deep inside the they really are.  "Well, God does not really mind" you tell yourself.  "God is merciful, he understands my weakness and does not mind"   And all your good intentions are lost.    Paul puts it rightly when he says it is 'a war'.   There is a battle inside of everyone of us between good and evil.   Our enemies as St Paul tells us elsewhere are 'Principalities and Powers'   When you are going towards God that is when Satan tries to pull you in the opposite direction   It is not easy to be a saint which is why we hold them in such honour.   We have to struggle to be good, but with a firm resolve and with the many graces that God give us through his Son Jesus Christ if we persevere and never give up we can achieve sainthood.    I am eighty now and still 'in the race' as St Paul puts it somewhere else    I am still not a saint but I am still trying.   Why not join me.

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