Beneficial temptations

All things are from God.  All things.  Both good gifts and beneficial temptations.  Neither of them guarantees spiritual doom.  Nor does either of them guarantee wholeness.  It all depends on what we do with each of them—both the gifts and the temptations—as they come.

Temptation is the gift of possibility.  It takes us to the crossroads of life and requires us to choose a direction rather than simply fall into one.  It makes virtue—spiritual strength—a reality rather than simply a word.  Most of all, for those for whom the choice is a long and painful one—years of addiction, a lifetime full of delusions of grandeur, the continuing plague of unsatisfied lust without the calming antidote of real love—there is, at the same time, another kind of gift.  It is the gift of going on.

The gift of perseverance in the journey to wholeness is the treasure trove of the human spirit.  Sanctity, like everything else in life, is not an event.  It is a process of coming to know the clay of the self and then shaping it into a thing of beauty.  This thing called union with God, sanctity, holiness, is not a matter of going through religious hoops.  It is a matter of winning the contest with the self that leads us to the best in us.  Becoming holy is not an attempt to become someone else.  It is about becoming the fullness of ourselves.

   --from In God’s Holy Light by Joan Chittister (Franciscan Media)