Patience in Penance. Fourteen Years the Abbot spent on Overcoming One Fault.

“Love demands a complete inner transformation – for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with our brother… And this involves a death of selfishness

In the Verba Seniorum [Words of the Elders] we read of Abbot Ammonas, who spent fourteen years praying to overcome anger, or rather, more significantly, to be delivered from it.”

… We read of Abbot Serapion, who sold his last book, a copy of the Gospels, and gave the money to the poor, thus selling “the very words which told him to sell all and give to the poor.”

Time and again we read of Abbots who refuse to join in a communal reproof of this or that delinquent. Abbot Moses, that great gentle Negro, walked into a severe assembly with a basket of sand, letting the sand run out through many holes. “My own sins are running out like this sand,” he said, “and yet I come to judge the sins of another?”

A BROTHER asked one of the elders: What good thing shall I do, and have life thereby? The old man replied: “God alone knows what is good. However, I have heard it said that someone inquired of Father Abbot Nisteros the great, the friend of Abbot Anthony, asking: What good work shall I do? and that he replied:

Not all works are alike. For Scripture says that Abraham was hospitable and God was with him. Elias loved solitary prayer, and God was with him. And David was humble, and God was with him. Therefore, whatever you see your soul to desire according to God, do that thing, and you shall keep your heart safe.

TWO brethren went to an elder who lived alone in Scete. And the first one said: Father, I have learned all of the Old and New Testaments by heart.

The elder said to him: You have filled the air with words.

The other one said: I have copied out the Old and New Testaments and have them in my cell.

And to this one the elder replied: You have filled your window with parchment. But do you not know Him who said: The kingdom of God is not in words, but in power? And again, Not those who hear the Law will be justified before God but those who carry it out.

They asked him, therefore, what was the way of salvation, and he said to them: The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and humility with patience. (1)

— from “The Wisdom of the Desert (New Directions Book 295)” by Thomas Merton

— Thomas a Kempis: The Imitation of Christ

— Carlo Caretto on the pain in failure

— Carlo Caretto’s Love Letter to the Church

— The Parable of the Onion by Fyodor Dostoevsky

— The Scholar, the Skull, and the Abbot

— Benedict and His Option, Catholic Insight By John Paul Meenan, Editor -July 11, 2022

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Fr. Gabriel of St Mary Magdalene reminds us:

“Patience is the virtue which makes us accept for love of God, generously and peacefully, everything that is displeasing to our nature, without allowing ourselves to be depressed by the sadness which easily comes over us when we meet with disagreeable things.

(1)  Patience

Holy Patience is a special aspect of the virtue of fortitude which prevents our deviating from the right road when we encounter obstacles.

It is an illusion to believe in a life without obstacles. These are usually all the greater and the more frequent as our undertakings are more generous. Great works, magnanimous and heroic virtues, always grow in the midst of difficulties.

In the presence of these, fortitude has a
double function: to face them and to bear them.

Many difficulties are surmounted and overcome by an act of courage others, on the contrary, cannot be mastered. We must learn to bear with them, and this is the role of.patience  —-an arduous task, because it is easier to face obstacles directly, than to support the inevitable oppositions and sufferings of life, which, in time, tend to discourage and sadden us (our sinful nature).

Only by fixing our glance on Jesus, the divinely patient  One, can we learn to practise patience.

When we see Him who came into the world to save us, living from the first moment of His earthly existence in want, privation, and poverty, and later in the midst of misunderstanding and persecution; when we see Him become the object of hatred of His own fellow citizens, calumniated, doomed to death, betrayed by a friend, and tried and condemned as a.malefactor, our souls are stirred: We realize that we cannot be His disciples unless we follow the same road. (2)

If Jesus the Innocent One par excellence, bore so much for love of us, can we sinners who are deserving to suffer, not endure something for love of Him?

Whatever the total of suffering in our lives, it will always be very small, and even nothing, compared with the infinite sufferings of Jesus; for in His Passion Christ not only endured the suffering of one life or of several human lives, but that of all mankind.”

— Divine Intimacy
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(2) “He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” —1 Jn. 2:6

The Dark Night
by St. John of the Cross

One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
— ah, the sheer grace! —
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
— ah, the sheer grace! —
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.

On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.

This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
— him I knew so well —
there in a place where no one appeared.

O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.

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— See On Confession by Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen