Twisted Straight

I was able to get to Mass this morning, and the visiting priest gave a homily on St. Aloysius Gonzaga, since it was his feast day today. 

Now, I used to recruit next to tiny St. Aloysius College located in Central PA at fairs, and the prospective students avoided their table, probably because they did not know how to pronounce the name (I didn't either). And I only heard of Gonzaga because of their recent fame in making in to the Final Four in NCAA basketball. Apart from that, I was entirely unfamiliar with the 16th century saint.

But his life spoke to me. Born into a rich influential Renaissance Italian family, he wanted to be a saint from an early age, but he didn't know how. In devotions he is portrayed as insufferably pious, the perfect chaste docile teenager, while in reality he was bull-headed and teen-extreme. While devout, Aloysius was attempting to make his way into Heaven through sheer effort. He cobbled together a DIY routine of severe asceticism and mortification and committed himself to it.

When he entered the Jesuits at the age of 17, he was an appointed a spiritual director, St. Robert Bellarmine. Level headed and patient, Bellarmine listened to Aloysius describe his extreme schedule of individual religious practice, then ordered him to cease it. He was assigned instead to work at a local hospital tending to the sick and infirmed. Squeamish, he was repulsed by the work, and he disliked people, which is probably why he was initially inclined to his private devotions and mortifications. When the plague hit Rome in January 1591, the sick and dying were everywhere, overwhelming the hospitals, and Alyosius had to dig deep and draw on that Italian stubbornness and bulldog like willpower to stomach the work.

But in time, a transformation happened by God's grace. Though this was never work he would have chosen for himself, Alyosius began to see Christ in them, similar to St. Francis' encounter with the leper. He experienced compassion for the sick and dying, and often carried them from the streets to the hospital on his back. He contracted the plague as a result, and died June 21st, at the age of 23.

Why did his story speak to me? I can see Alyosius' youthful pride and ascetic extremism in myself, his desire to follow God and now knowing how, as well as the temptation to try white-knuckle our way to Heaven through sheer grit and effort and religious practice. The grace of guidance under a holy and level-headed director tempered this self-made salvation plan and forced Alyosius into situations he would not have chosen for himself. It moved him out of himself and his own private retreat into the real world of need and suffering, a world which is not sterilized and sometimes chaotic. He learned submission through obedience, temperance through outward charity, and the overwhelming saving power of God's grace, unmerited and undeserved.

The temptation to stay in our safe prescribed religious spaces and construct for ourselves DIY salvation plans is a recipe for stunted growth. "The first step of humility," writes St. Benedict, "is unhesitating obedience...for the obedience shown to superiors is given to God (Rule, Ch 7). God's call for our lives is dynamic, sometimes forcing us into uncomfortable situations we would rather not get into in the first place were it not by humble obedience to faithful and holy directors entrusted with the heavy responsibility for the care of souls. "I would rather be the vilest worm by God's will, then a seraph by my own." -Bl. Henry Susso. 

I think it sometimes takes a kind of admirable stubbornness, that Italian bull-headedness and tenacity in St. Aloysius, to keep on the path that leads to life, since there is so much working to knock us off it. It finds its fruition and full power when combined with the docility of humility, the cornerstone for all virtues to lay upon, the humility to allow ourselves to be molded by the Potter's hands. When we give God our unique imperfections to use them for His glory, He works a great and mighty thing in us. "I am a twisted piece of iron," the saint wrote, "I came here to get twisted straight."