Reading The Lives Of The Saints

In the beginning, when I began seriously exploring the world of my faith, I kept coming across exhortations to read the lives of the saints.

At first, I was not very keen.  I did not relish the thought of reading someone's potted history or biography.  I had this idea that reading about a saint with high ideals and stratospheric levels of morality would dishearten my puny heart and pathetic efforts at getting myself out of the 'not hot, not cold' category.

Incidentally, I began having panic-stricken episodes of guilt when I found out that what hurt Jesus the most was the Christians who were lukewarm.  They had received His revelations and yet weren't doing much about it.  I knew very well that I was one of them.  But I couldn't understand why lukewarm Christians hurt Jesus so.  I wasn't hurting anybody and I wasn't on the side of the devil.  How could sitting on the fence hurt anybody?

Of course, the answer was simple.  I had received knowledge of Christ and yet sat tight on my little tuffet keeping my eyes off the spiritual mayhem going on around me.  Better if I had been born an ignorant uneducated savage living on twigs and leaves.

I reluctantly went online and began googling saints.  Incidentally many of the histories online are abbreviated (and sanitised!) ones.  I had to purchase books or download pdf's off Catholic sites like St Patrick's Basilica or forums such as Catholic.org to reall get to the meaty stuff.

Suddenly I found myself in a world of bilocation (being in two or more places at the same time), teleportation, mind-reading, telekinesis, angels, demons, mysteries and more stuff than even the world of fiction could contain!  I felt like hitting myself in the head... what took me so long??

And of course, once you get into Jesus' world, you're hooked for life.  Hang on to your ship for dear life because you're no longer at the wheel... Jesus is!  Praise GOD!