How many good people have some particular fault that they wan to get rid of? It might be bad temper or irritability or laziness or something else. And they pray very hard to God to set them free from this fault, which they detest and which they regularly confess in their frequent confessions, and they still have the fault after many years, despite all these prayers and all these acts of contrition. The thing to do is to accept that one has that particular weakness, to keep on praying to be freed from it, and to keep on trying to conquer it. Accept the truth that you are that kind of person; be truthful with yourself; accept yourself, and keep on praying and trying to improve. The devil tries to get you to see this fault as a complete barrier to peace with God and to holiness. This is a lie of the devil. You see, if you have a particular weakness and you want the opposite virtue, then what you need is not just to lose the weakness or fault but to gain the positive, opposite virtue. It is virtue that makes us holy, not the absence of vice.
In order to be true we must accept ourselves as we are, and beginning at that low level, start to improve little by little according to the grace God gives us. When we pray to be freed from our irritability or whatever fault we have, God most certainly hears and answers our prayer, but He does not answer it by taking away the fault at a stroke. If He did that, if you suddenly became free from irritability or whatever fault you have by an act of God, you would not have grown one millimeter in virtue. You would have lost a faulty tendency but not by your own effort or virtue at all, and you would not have become one speck more holy, even though you now though yourself almost perfect. What do you think keeps you always hating your weakness or fault? What keeps you confessing it with sorrow over and over again? It is the grace of God, and that is the answer for the time being to your prayer to be freed from your fault. You keep up the fight; you practice virtue against it, and although you are not always successful, it makes you much more holy than a miraculous removal of the faulty tendency would do. Be truthful and thank God that although you have been irritable all your life, you have fought against it all your life. You are an irritable person trying to love God, and don’t pretend that you are a perfect person occasionally falling into irritability. Be true to what you are and do your best from that base. . .
In olden days in Rom, before photography was invented, some well-to-do Romans liked to have statues of themselves made so that they could admire themselves and get their friends to admire them. So they would go to a skilled sculptor, and he would begin to chisel a large block of stone into the likeness of the client. Now it sometimes happened that when the stature was nearly finished, the sculptor, by a careless blow of the chisel might accidentally chip, say, the ear or the nose of the statue, but instead of beginning over again with a new block of stone, a dishonest artist would remodel the damaged feature with wax. The client, delighted by his true likeness would take it home and put it in a prominent place for his friends to admire, but when the hot Roman sun rose and warmed the house, the wax would melt. This must have been a fairly common deception, because the Romans coined a phrase to describe a statue that was genuine. They called it one “without wax.” Now the Latin word for without is “Sine,” and the Latin word for wax is “Cera.” So “without wax” becomes “Sincera” or sincere, and that is where our word sincere comes from, so I am told. Let us be without wax; let us be genuine. Let us not pretend to ourselves or put on an act for others either. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth. . .
There are many things we would like to do for God and cannot, and the reason why we cannot do them is because God does not want us to do them. What God says to each of us is “Give me your heart.” If you give God your heart, you love Him; you want what He wants for you and everyone else. Rather like the roman statue with bits of wax on it, we adorn the will of God for us with our own ideas as to what that will should be. God’s will for us is revealed by our circumstances as well as by the general teachings of the Church about the path to holiness, and by the advice of spiritual masters. We tend to notice the practical details about the teachings of the Church and the spiritual writers and overlook what they say about the way each different person has to understand them and put them into practice. Each of us has to try to follow the inspiration of God. We have to live under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit of Truth, and He does not inspire a sick man or woman to act as if they were perfectly healthy. He does not inspire a genuinely weak person to act as if he were strong. He does not inspire a confused person to act as if her were completely clear minded and certain. It is true that God can and sometimes does cure the sick, strengthen the weak, clarify the minds of the confused, but if He does not do so, it does not mean that the person in question cannot be holy. “Give me your heart” God says. And if you give God your heart, it means that you say “Yes” to all God sends or permits. There are things we ought to fight in life, of course, but there are also things that we ought just to accept. . .
It is easy for us to be at peace with God at any time, and we should refuse to entertain thoughts that separate us from God and from His peace. There is a time for remembering our sins and failings, of course, but we can overdo it very easily. If you ask a great friend to your home, and while he is there do nothing but think about your own defects in his regard, and tell him that your cooking is poor, and that the flower arrangement in the lounge is not up to much, and that you are sorry your conversation is not better, and that your regret not having a better hair style, and that the garden is not well weeded, and so on, you would hardly please him. Now we have a wonderful, beautiful Guest in our souls, One Who does not overlook all our faults but it the antidote for them; His presence removes them. So we ought to revel in His presence and His light and His peace and forget all about our own failures most of the time. He is our life, our joy, our peace, so why look at ourselves and try to polish ourselves up so that we can be our own life and joy and peace?
Let us rejoice in the presence of the Holy Spirit within us, the Spirit Who by His presence makes us holy in spite of everything. Let us live in confidence and contentment. Let us be sincere and genuine, and let the Divine Artist produce that perfect statue that we are to become in heaven, without any wax about it. We often think that we are being chipped in the wrong places, but God never makes a false stroke. Let God act. Trust Him in everything. Be at peace. You can be quite sure that it is never God’s will that you should worry or be anxious, not even about your weaknesses and failings.
