Keep going until the end

Let us notice what our Lord reproaches all those who consider themselves His faithful friends: “Your love is like a morning cloud and like the dew that passes away early” (Hos 6:4). This verse could also be paraphrased like this: you begin, but you do not persevere; you come, but immediately you leave. Your perseverance does not last longer than one morning, at most one day! It is not difficult to say: I love you! The difficulty appears at the moment when we add to this the little word: forever, but even more so when it comes to turning our confession into concrete deeds. For “forever” lasts a long time, a very long time. As long as the enchantment with the beloved person is still alive, keeping fidelity is neither laborious nor painful. However, for this enchantment not to fade with the passage of time, which “reveals the reality of life,” he who loves should be able to reawaken this enchantment within himself, to keep it in its original freshness. Is it a plot of love against itself? Not at all. The truth is simply like that. For what was attractive to you just yesterday surely deserves to attract you even today, as long as you have enough strength to rise from mere emotional yearning to fidelity, from complaints and whining to melodies. No one wishes to say: I am unable to love. Yet everyone is in danger that one day he will catch himself, forced by circumstances, saying: I am at the end of my rope, I can no longer love. For if a man is to love always the same object, a spring must gush forth in the depth of his soul. On one hand, he must not forget the past; on the other hand, he must be capable of creating. Every day we need to discover something that is to form the content of precisely this day. Love can sometimes be a weakness, but to remain in love or in friendship is always a sign of magnanimity and a victory.

You shall love the Lord your God: this commandment does not place upon us a burden that we could not bear. But what strength does it require of us if we are to fulfill it every day, without change and for a whole lifetime! And yet perhaps very little is enough to achieve this goal. Just as little is enough if we are to keep a fire going in the middle of a forest, where there is no shortage of wood. And yet even this minimum is often beyond our strength. Hardly does God’s friendship cease to be attractive to us, hardly does the oppressive grayness of everyday monotony begin to crush us, and we are left with only one possibility of how to detach ourselves from the world of lowlands and start climbing up again: it is prayer. Whoever wants to remain in friendship with God must persevere in prayer.

For it is no small thing to persevere in love for an object that is beyond our sensory perception, and to rely only on a single means that likewise cannot satiate our senses with the food to which they are accustomed. Only theological love, the gift of God’s grace, binds us to God. And it is by no means easy for us to remain vigilant, to ask for this grace daily and to be able to receive it.

Truly tremendous effort is prayer in which a person continues even when the spring of his feelings and desires is drying up. Tremendous is also human patience in the face of God’s silence. Tremendous is the persistent effort with which a person is able to seek love that remains hidden and that seems as if it does not even want to reveal itself. Tremendous is the limping poor man who does not abandon the Almighty and tries to keep pace with Him.” (Father Hieronym, Glowing Embers, Lúč, 2017, pp.

Father Hieronym further emphasizes in his reflections that faith must result in an effort to persevere on the path we have embarked upon. He says that we must consider perseverance as a fundamental value. For whenever the world goes in a certain direction, we can bet that the Spirit of God is blowing in the opposite direction. Today more than ever, the world craves change and adventure. From this we can conclude that God does not want either change or adventure for His friends. He thus invites us to build on certainty and on perseverance. He invites us to exclude any doubt about the meaning of what we are doing. He compares all perseverance to the work of a forester who today plants, and his great-grandson will cut the first trees in a hundred years.

What can this perseverance mean for us? A constant return to the basics. The first step on the path of evangelization is our oikos. The group of people with whom we have a relationship. That is probably where the spring of love and feelings can dry up the slowest. That is, when we can no longer manage to pray for anything and anyone, for them we can still manage it. We are to pray for our oikos. What does that mean? We are to desire their salvation. We therefore ask for God’s blessing for them. To tell God about them, to talk to God about them, we can always do, even when we are completely parched. So let us not abandon this same point, here is where we can always return.What helps me to reawaken enchantment?
What is the content of this very day of mine?
Do I pray for my oikos?
Do I entrust the members of my oikos to God?
What do I share in the cell group when asked what I have done for the Lord? Do I hunt for random events, or that which I tried to do for someone from my oikos in order to make Christ present to him?
Which member of my oikos would I like to serve this week and how?
Is there already someone to whom I could witness about God, explain, or invite him?