St. Catherine’s teaching on love for death and love for life is just as applicable to-day as in her life-time—neither more nor less so. Her extraordinary personality, so full of mystical activity, is timeless in its significance. It is not easy for us to understand her, but it was not easy for her contemporaries either. It is true enough that we have learned a good deal since her day: we know much more about the physical mechanism which can cause abnormal (that is to say unusual) symptoms and conditions in the human body, about the psychic energy which can cause one mind to affect the minds of others, even at a distance, even in opposition to the other mind. But we seldom see such unusual symptoms except in neurotics. Seldom or never do we see them in conjunction not only with a high degree of intelligence, but also with robust common sense, with unlimited ability to take upon oneself all kinds of hard work and trouble, with interest for the well-being of other people, and no interest whatsoever in one’s own comfort or welfare. We have had terrible experience of the psychic power which can produce effects such as the possession by devils of a whole people. But we have less experience of the psychic powers which console and strengthen and fill our minds with peace, which encourage the despairing and drive out hatred and envy and the will to hurt others. Although, thank God, most of us have known someone with this psychic power, though perhaps it seemed to us to have only a small field of activity—a family, a circle of friends, at the best a people. But perhaps we are wrong; perhaps the power which proceeds from good men and women is too subtle for us with our limited abilities to understand. Perhaps its waves are like the light-waves and sound-waves of which our eyes and ears only perceive a small part.
The saints have always known that the power of good is something quite incalculable. When they renounced even pure and harmless happiness on earth, that they might have none of the hindrances interposed by care for their own or another’s material needs, in their struggle to achieve unity with the Origin of life, they knew that if He filled them with His grace and mercy, His superfluous gifts—gifts bringing health and life—would overflow into the lives of other men—even to people outside the range of their knowledge, beyond their sight and the field of their activity. St. Catherine must often have felt discouraged when she saw no concrete results of her efforts for certain individuals, both men and women, through prayer and attempts at persuasion. But she never wavered; she gave of herself until her physical life was used up, in a fight whose final results she was as sure of, as she was sure that she would not see many victories on the battlefield of this world. But in fact Our Lord has never made any promises regarding the triumph of Christianity on earth—on the contrary. If we expect to see His cause triumph here, His own words should warn us: “The Son of Man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?” He did not tell us the answer.
But these words should make those who talk of the bankruptcy of Christianity in our times a little more careful. We have never been given any promises of a world where all men and women willingly accept the teaching of Christ as their way of life. They have not even done so in a period when there were very few who doubted that He was the lord of heaven and earth; they still tried to escape Him or deliberately refused to listen to Him. For every man is born individually, and must be saved individually.
It is not given us to know what Christendom’s final fate on earth will be. The gates of hell shall not overpower His Church, but those who wish to break out of it have full freedom to do so. The real question is: when the conditional reality which we call the material world withers away, who will have won real life in all eternity in the land of the living? Even the people of of our times, who have magnified mankind’s ineradicable trust in the things which we can see, touch, and enjoy with our senses, and made their articles of faith out of materialism, self-aggrandising humanism, collectivism, or whatever one likes to call it—even they have caught a glimpse of how utterly worthless all material things are. In the light of the split atoms, solid objects become as it were transparent, evanescent. But who can say how mankind will react to the new discoveries it makes? We sorely need the wisdom of the saints.
Catherine of Siena Page 32