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Recovery from an addiction or compulsion, especially one deeply ingrained early in life, is a work of patience. Faith is patience cultivating trust, a grace of God.
Instant cure from sin is an extreme hope. Progressive victory over lust is a realistic recognition of transformation’s mercy. A recovery of patience leads to the even greater blessing of empyrean humility.
We may feel our life has been a grotesque specimen, struggling only against a chafing, unseemly passion or disorder. We may wish that we’d been born differently, or into a different context, to avoid the grueling journey out of darkness that became ours.
We have probably painfully begged: why couldn’t we have been born the happy John, who never received an unchosen wound, who never went astray, who never gave his youth to the devil.
We have grieved in agony indeed, being less than conquerors.
But Christ, the Son of God, came to earth to rehearse every worst case human scenario. Jesus says: Have you not understood my cross?
God lowered himself, stooped to the depths of almost unknowable, unthinkable, even impossible humiliation: a God Who says yes freely to vagary, injustice, mockery, victimization, (what looks like) stupidity, tragedy, defeat, oblivion, death.
No one learns more about a problem than a person at the bottom. Was Paul a wounded healer, someone who knew more than others, because he overcame invisible leprosy, the child drama that asks more than becoming a whistling custodian?
God came for the sick, attracted to the frail. How convincing His Act seeking for human credulity!
A conqueror is a guy who has a sure win in his pocket every day, a soldier who never lost a fort, because he saw to the door always being locked. Blessed is he!
More than a conqueror, is one who finds far greater merit in Heaven, because that one has to become human first before he can become a saint.
So let us be consoled by God, let us no longer say anymore in fear or panic “I’m under attack!”, because the day is far spent and we are leaning ever closer to the finally Unloseable Grace of Eternal Purity.
Let us watch the door swing the other way, outward, finally recognizing that the devil is actually weak, terrified of faith-based confidence, who trembles before the fruits of true perseverance, who runs fast from the sword that keeps praying and never quits.
Almighty and ever living God, perfect our life, the proper functioning of free will, a virtuous memory that does not remember what it should not and recalls what it must, and a healthy imagination that envisions the right future and moves toward it. Let us do this with Your grace alone, living free to love. We ask with faith in Jesus’ name. Amen.