His Mercy endures forever. From Fr Z: Oscar Wilde is often quoted as having said, “every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” St. Mary of Egypt is one of the more popular saints in the …More
His Mercy endures forever.
From Fr Z:
Oscar Wilde is often quoted as having said, “every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
St. Mary of Egypt is one of the more popular saints in the Orthodox Churches. She’s one of ours, too, though she’s not as popular in the West, unfortunately. St. Mary, at the age of twelve, ran away from her family to Alexandria, where she began to live a life of great dissolution. She became a prostitute, but it is said that she often refused money for her sexual acts because she enjoyed her sin so thoroughly. After nearly twenty years of this life, she accompanied a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but not out of any pious motive. No, she went in the hopes of drumming up some business for herself among the pilgrims, hoping in her heart to entice some of holiest and most devout pilgrims away from their piety and into her sinful way of life. When the pilgrimage got to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the pilgrims entered, she found herself blocked from entry by an unseen force. Her depravity and impurity made it impossible for her to enter. Her eyes fell upon an icon of the Blessed Virgin, and she began to weep profusely, recognizing how greatly she had sinned and how foolishly she had wasted most of her life. When she asked for forgiveness, the Blessed Virgin nodded, and she was then able to enter the church, where she venerated the True Cross which was then kept there. She returned to give thanks to the icon and the Blessed Virgin told her to cross the Jordan, and “there you will find glorious rest.” She went across the Jordan to a monastery, confessed her sins, received absolution and Holy Communion – her first non-sacrilegious Holy Communion since childhood. She spent the remainder of her life as a hermit in the desert. She received Holy Communion one additional time, many years later, from the hands of a priest, St. Zosima, travelling through the desert. When he returned to her a year later, he found her dead, with an inscription in the sand near her head saying, “bury the body of Mary, the sinner.”
Many other saints were once great sinners: St. Augustine, of course is probably the most well-known, but there are literally hundreds of other. St. Hubert was a wealthy man with a cavalier attitude towards religion until his conversion, as was St. Francis Borgia, St. Thomas a Becket, and others. Bl. Bartolo Longo was a Satanic priest!
Also, remember that there is no sin that we little mortals can commit that is so bad that God can’t and won’t forgive it, provided that we are truly penitent. Angels rejoice at our conversions, every single one of our conversions! We stand in awe of angels, who are so vastly above us in the order of created beings. But I think they must stand in awe of us, who have to contend with the world, the flesh and the devil, and whose humanity now sits at God’s right in the Person of the Incarnate Word.
Don’t give up hope. Don’t strive for mediocrity. Striving for mediocrity is a subtle way of telling God that you don’t believe in His gifts of grace or in his plan for you. Whatever your past may have been, you were created for holiness. You were made by God to become a saint. Don’t let the naysayers get you down. Strive for the holiness to which you were called at the moment of your baptism. It takes effort. It’s not easy.
Holiness is, sadly, the exception, but strive to be exceptional.
And GO TO CONFESSION!
From Fr Z:
Oscar Wilde is often quoted as having said, “every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
St. Mary of Egypt is one of the more popular saints in the Orthodox Churches. She’s one of ours, too, though she’s not as popular in the West, unfortunately. St. Mary, at the age of twelve, ran away from her family to Alexandria, where she began to live a life of great dissolution. She became a prostitute, but it is said that she often refused money for her sexual acts because she enjoyed her sin so thoroughly. After nearly twenty years of this life, she accompanied a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but not out of any pious motive. No, she went in the hopes of drumming up some business for herself among the pilgrims, hoping in her heart to entice some of holiest and most devout pilgrims away from their piety and into her sinful way of life. When the pilgrimage got to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the pilgrims entered, she found herself blocked from entry by an unseen force. Her depravity and impurity made it impossible for her to enter. Her eyes fell upon an icon of the Blessed Virgin, and she began to weep profusely, recognizing how greatly she had sinned and how foolishly she had wasted most of her life. When she asked for forgiveness, the Blessed Virgin nodded, and she was then able to enter the church, where she venerated the True Cross which was then kept there. She returned to give thanks to the icon and the Blessed Virgin told her to cross the Jordan, and “there you will find glorious rest.” She went across the Jordan to a monastery, confessed her sins, received absolution and Holy Communion – her first non-sacrilegious Holy Communion since childhood. She spent the remainder of her life as a hermit in the desert. She received Holy Communion one additional time, many years later, from the hands of a priest, St. Zosima, travelling through the desert. When he returned to her a year later, he found her dead, with an inscription in the sand near her head saying, “bury the body of Mary, the sinner.”
Many other saints were once great sinners: St. Augustine, of course is probably the most well-known, but there are literally hundreds of other. St. Hubert was a wealthy man with a cavalier attitude towards religion until his conversion, as was St. Francis Borgia, St. Thomas a Becket, and others. Bl. Bartolo Longo was a Satanic priest!
Also, remember that there is no sin that we little mortals can commit that is so bad that God can’t and won’t forgive it, provided that we are truly penitent. Angels rejoice at our conversions, every single one of our conversions! We stand in awe of angels, who are so vastly above us in the order of created beings. But I think they must stand in awe of us, who have to contend with the world, the flesh and the devil, and whose humanity now sits at God’s right in the Person of the Incarnate Word.
Don’t give up hope. Don’t strive for mediocrity. Striving for mediocrity is a subtle way of telling God that you don’t believe in His gifts of grace or in his plan for you. Whatever your past may have been, you were created for holiness. You were made by God to become a saint. Don’t let the naysayers get you down. Strive for the holiness to which you were called at the moment of your baptism. It takes effort. It’s not easy.
Holiness is, sadly, the exception, but strive to be exceptional.
And GO TO CONFESSION!