Peter Kreeft Culture War Part 9

Last year, an American Catholic bishop asked one of the priests of his diocese for recommendations for ways to increase vocations to the priesthood. The priest replied in his report, “The best way to attract men in this diocese to the priesthood, Your Excellency, would be your canonization.”

Why not yours?

But how? We always want to know how. Give me a method, a technology, a means to this end. What does that question mean, “How can I become a saint?” Or “Give me a means to the end of sanctity.” It means, “Give me something that is easier than sanctity, which will cause sanctity. So that if I do this something or attain this something, then this something will be the middle term, the link between me and sanctity.”

No. There is none. No prayers, no meditations, no 12-steps programs, no yogas, no psychological techniques, no techniques at all. There can be no button to push for sanctity, any more than for love. For sanctity is simply love: loving God with all your soul and mind and strength.

How do you love? You just do it. A cause cannot produce an effect greater than itself. And nothing in the world is greater than sanctity, nothing greater than love. Therefore, no cause, no human cause, can produce sanctity. There can never be any technology for sanctity.
Of course, God is its cause. Grace is its cause. The Holy Spirit is its cause. “Oh well, why doesn’t God cause it then? If sanctity isn’t a do-it-yourself thing but an only-God-can-do-it thing, then why doesn’t God make me a saint? If only grace can do it, why doesn’t He give me that grace?”

Because you don’t want it. If you wanted it, He’d give it. He promised that: “All who seek find.” It’s back to “just say yes.” It’s infinitely simpler than we think, and that’s why it’s hard. The hard word in the formula “just say yes” is the word “just.”

We are comfortable with Christ and theology or Christ and psychology or Christ and America or Christ and the Republican Party or Christ and the Democratic Party or Christ and phonics or Christ and dieting. But just plain Christ, all Christ, Christ drunk straight, not mixed, we find far too dangerous for our tastes.

Aslan is not a tame lion. Just say yes to Him? You never know what he’d do with you!