Thought for the Day – 15 June – Meditations with Fr Richard Frederick Clarke SJ (1839-1900)
PATIENCE
Meditations for a Month
Patience under Temptations
- If we all have to endure temptations, we must try to endure them well. Temptations are not sins. We may be surrounded by temptations. They may be present to us for hours. We may have a sort of guilty feeling as if we had offended God. Yet, if we are not conscious of having in any way consented to them, if throughout, we have wished them away, then our conscience is free from any stain of sin, even though they may have caused satisfaction to our lower nature and to our baser inclinations. To remember this will help us, not a little, in bearing them patiently.
- But there is another consoling consideration with respect to temptation. We may do much for the honour of God and for our own progress in virtue, by our resistance to the tempter. We lay up a store of merit in Heaven. We are purified as in the fire and the dross of venial sins and imperfections is taken away. We must, therefore, be not only patient but cheerful under temptations and thank God for them.
- Some of the greatest Saints were subject to terrible temptations. St Paul, who had been rapt to the third Heaven, was tempted by the sting of the flesh; St Alphonsus, by doubts against every article of the Faith, by vanity, presumption and concupiscence; St Rose, by darkness and a seeming hopelessness of being saved – she felt no love of God and feared that she was already among the lost. Yet, these were great Saints and they proved their sanctity by their faithfulness under temptation, by crying out, “Jesus, forsake me not! In Thee, O Lord, I. have trusted, let me not be confounded forever!”
I will do the same: I will never lose hope, I will never lose my confidence in God.
AnaStpaul 