Saints For Today: Reflections on Lesser Saints by Ivan Innerst

Author:Ivan Innerst [Innerst, Ivan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681494197
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2000-03-01T06:00:00+00:00

THE CALL

Nicholas of Flüe

He might best be described as the saint of paradox, for what he once was and what he later became, for the pure breadth of his life and experience. Let us then see the man, the whole of him: the family man, father of ten, who would become a hermit; the statesman called father of his country who was to end his life as a virtual recluse; the onetime respected magistrate and judge who in his later years, from the accounts of eyewitnesses, lived solely on the Eucharist, his only food.

This was, all in its turn, the life of the Swiss saint Nicholas of Flüe. It is in full measure, in its passage, an unfolding, a slow emerging of the true holy man over the period of a lifetime. There is little or none of the sudden conversion, a light from the sky, about it—nothing of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. It is rather a matter of stages, of acts, of grace in its own good time perfecting nature.

To observe this life of Nicholas allows us not only to ponder paradox but also to weigh the role in one man’s experience of those hard sayings that are to be found in the Gospels. In him we confront those words that Jesus uttered with all the force of a commandment and that we mere mortals believe to be beyond our poor powers to live by or follow, to put into practice, when we at the same time must survive in the world around us.

They are those same words, spoken as injunction, that often caused the disciples to question Him further as to their true meaning, so far did they seem beyond a mans reach, and that made others of His followers drift off into the crowd for good.

We for our part declare they were uttered with all good intention. But, beyond that, they are met with a smile. They then fall more lightly on the ear, as words surely memorable but in effect harmless: “Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect. . . . Give all you have to the poor. . . . Leave the dead to bury their dead.”

When we look to the life of Nicholas of Flüe, we are forced to consider this further exacting utterance of Our Lord: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

The Scripture-wise say of this that Christ here had simply to do with a person’s priorities. He hardly wished to destroy the sanctity of the family, in which He would have been the first to declare that love and faithfulness must abound.

But the words as recorded nonetheless sound harsh and much too stringent; one turns away, to look for the kinder, gentler Master: the Master found elsewhere throughout the Gospels, He of the Golden Rule, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Shepherd caring for His sheep.

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