The Road to God

The other night we were watching a lecture, on television, by a monk talking about modern saints. He told of women saints and men saints, of married saints and monastic saints, saints who were royal and saints who were paupers. In fact, the only thing these people had in common, besides being saints, is that they were modern-day saints, not saints from the Roman Empire or the Middle Ages.

I didn’t understand everything the monk said, by any means, but I was struck by one phrase I did understand: “This is the road to God, if you care to follow it.”

It occurred to me that people imagine the Road to God as something other-worldly, mysterious, glamorous, and exotic – and it isn’t! It just is not any of these. No, the road to God is as ordinary as water, or bread, or wine. The path to deification is as down-to-earth as learning to love, tenderly, as yourself, the total jerk you find yourself next to on the bus or at work or in your neighborhood. It’s identifying and correcting all the obstacles to such love that we find within ourselves. That means praying a lot and recognizing our own unworthiness, else we will have a very hard time forgiving. It means fasting and other ascetic endeavor, because love is sacrificial, and we will not be able to give sacrificially to another person when the time comes, if we have not schooled ourselves in self-denial beforehand.

And there’s the rub. People don’t want to love if love means sacrifice or anything ascetic. As someone once said to a roomful of us, “I am not interested in loving; I just want to BE loved.” It’s not that the road to God is anything incomprehensible, impenetrable, or abstruse; no, it’s just that people would rather not walk along it. They sense that the road to God is somehow the way of the Cross. And so it is; Jesus said, “If anyone would be my disciple, let him take up his cross, and deny himself, and follow Me.”

There’s an old Baptist hymn, “The Way of the Cross Leads Home”.