Man is a creature of habits – he is able to act thanks to the habits he has acquired. This is the reason why we must be concerned with the acquisition of good habits in order to live virtuously, because we know, by daily experience, how difficult it is to acquire virtue and how easy it is, under empty pretexts, to fall into vice.
Dear friends and benefactors,
Man is a creature of habits – he is able to act thanks to the habits he has acquired. This is the reason why we must be concerned with the acquisition of good habits in order to live virtuously, because we know, by daily experience, how difficult it is to acquire virtue and how easy it is, under empty pretexts, to fall into vice.
Nonetheless, habits are double-edged weapons. Once acquired, the actions done by habit risk becoming routine. Routine is not itself a vice, but it is perhaps more dangerous. Routine anaesthetizes the soul, soothing it with pleasant thoughts: “Don’t worry! You do not sin. You are not a Desert Father, you don’t need to look for great penances. Be at peace! Life is a long calm river!”
But the current of this apparently calm river thrusts us into the troubled waters of vulgarity. Life is combat, a fight to the death, and when we stop fighting we fall in routine, into half-heartedness. But half-heartedness is like the stagnant waters of a marsh, the gathering-place of harmful vermin that pass into our blood their often incurable evil.
To act by routine is a dangerous poison because it makes the highest realities become the commonest. For instance, if we reflect on how we behave habitually when we enter a chapel, we will have to acknowledge that our minds are usually occupied with minor things rather than with the only important one, or that we are so focused on ourselves that we look at others only to judge them. Let us not deceive ourselves! This internal attitude has deep effects on our external attitude. Often, unfortunately, our genuflection looks more like slipping on ice than an act of adoration. The genuflexion must be for us the occasion to think even more of He in Whose Presence we have the honor to appear.
The main evil of our time is the destruction of the sacred. And this destruction of the sacred is nothing else than the institutionalization of routine, the empire of half-heartedness. Everything is common. Everything is vulgar. Everything is reduced to the dimension of man. Hope, as true virtue, is missing. Also, man seeks pleasures of the heart to quench his thirst. We must understand that this destruction of the sacred ends in universal degeneration. It is absolutely useless to try to stop the present degeneration or the present flood of evil if we don’t understand its ultimate source.
The source of this degeneration is not the flood of indecency that surrounds us, terrible as it may be. Its true source is the absence of the sacred.
Men are starving spiritually. We must feed them, give them nourishment. It is our duty. But to accomplish it, we must ourselves be men living by the sacred! We know that nobody can give what he himself does not have. We must acquire the habit of seeing everything with a spiritual eye.
What is a Christian? A disciple of Christ? Of course! But it is not sufficient to say so. He is a temple consecrated to the glory of God, as the church consecrated by a bishop is.
This is the reason for our work here at the Seminary! We are beginning a new school year, hoping to work for the glory of God. It means to make the seminarians able to discover the beauty of God and worship Him, in order to devote themselves entirely to God. Our Lord Jesus Christ came to find worshipers “in spirit and in truth” to spread the spirit of faith, which is the spirit of consecration, throughout the whole world. And we are starting a new school year to answer this burning desire of Our Lord.
What honor! But also what responsibility! So, dear friends and benefactors, please pray for us that our souls will be sufficiently persuaded of this, that our hearts burn with the will to answer Our Lord, to be able to rise to the nobility of our vocation, allowing us to respond daily, by grace and faithfully, to our duty of state. The Seminary is also a place where, learning to live separately as consecrated men, we must learn to consecrate everything else to God.
Our interior consecration is a seal engraved upon our souls. Nothing in our lives can evade this stamp. And let us not deceive ourselves: this impression is not something artificial or external.
The House of God is a house of prayer, not a shopping mall! It is the same thing for our soul, particularly for us who have been chosen by God Himself to serve Him entirely; but also for you dear friends and benefactors who have received the grace and the character, the stamp of baptism. We are not merchants who should be expelled from the Temple! We are the worshipers of the Almighty God!
Let us go to the Virgin Mary, the most beautiful sanctuary of God. She will help us to remember always that we are temples consecrated, devoted to the glory of God.
Fr. Yves le Roux