March 18 – “By the Inch, It’s a Cinch!”

In Cor Unum, as in Regina Laudis Abbey, we are saints when we come through the door, if we have first come into new life through the blood of our Savior.

Why, then, is “sainthood” such a venerated condition for the monastics of some houses? Why should one strive to obtain what one owns?

(Saint) Paul did it. He said that, though he did not consider himself to have “attained,” that he was pressing on to take hold of all that for which Jesus Christ had taken hold of him. This is the crux of monastic conversion. We are becoming that for which Jesus Christ took hold of us.

Had He not hold of us, we could not attain the prize of life lived in His hands.

What was Paul seeking to attain? It was that which Caspar ten Boom sought with all his heart, even unto his death in Nazi captivity, and it is that for which Patrick left his family to return to the barbarians who had abducted him in childhood.

It is CHRISTLIKENESS. Christ’s likeness. One does not become a saint, in practice, overnight. First we tremble, we hate, we fear, we hold back . . . and then we overcome. In Cor Unum as in any monastic house, we overcome by the blood of the lamb that was poured out for all those who have wronged us, as it was poured out for us in all our wrong. Jesus is the Redeemer for all who believe.

We overcome by the word of our confidence in the love and mercy and justice of God, our testimony of the absolute effectiveness of the death of One for all.

We overcome as we begin to love the life of God as Jesus lives it in us, more than we love our own schemes and control, better than we love laying hold of lesser things, even life itself.

Patrick did it. He loved the vile and wicked, slave trading, human sacrificing Picts better than he loved his own life. Today their descendents love Patrick.


"The Holly and the Ivy"
photo by Kerry