Transformation
Prune oneâs faults
Which of my faults bothers me most, and which virtue would I like to acquire?
God, thank you for allowing us to see our faults, as this is one of the primary virtues.
I will take a simple example. I don't know if you know the Amazonian forest. Even if we haven't walked in it, most of us have at least seen it in the cinema. Vegetation, vines, trees... everything grows in all directions, in every which way and at stunning speeds. When someone arrives in the Amazonian or equatorial forest, he will have to make a passage. With his machete he will cut down vines, left and right, to make a gap and arrive at a clearing where he will place his hammock, his house or his tent. So we understand that this person started with this idea: to go to some spot "X". But to get there, he had to create his path. In spiritual or human life, it's the same thing: we arrive in life, and one day we become aware. We become aware of the essential meaning of life. And if we are lucky enough to be on a spiritual path, we notice how extraordinarily rich life is when we are enlightened, and how extraordinarily poor life is when we remain in darkness.
From that moment on, we will want to make a path just as in the forest, and we will build our life. We will need a clearing. So we will prune, cut down, thrash, etc., to prepare the ground for more comfortable living. The clearing represents the hearth; it represents the heart of human society. The jungle represents society! Now, all of a sudden, we arrive there with all of our faults and our qualities, one human being among others. We start sorting, we make a selection. We make a path and we understand God. We then try to follow the example of Christ, and to place our feet in his footsteps, one step at a time. All of a sudden we start pruning, as we had pruned on our path, we cut down our faults, our impatience, our intolerance, our jealousy over here, our judgements over there, our lack of generosity, our egoism, our incompetence or our inability to listen to others, etc.
Yet we live in this society and forget that without continued pruning, our clearing will no longer be clear tomorrow, it will regenerate itself. Our faults return. They will try to attack you again; they will try to fill the void. We must quickly use the machete to again make the gap in this space. This is exactly what happens with our faults. We must be vigilant. That is why Christ says: "Stay awake and pray!" A vigil means "Do not fall asleep!" We are in the jungle system. Faults are very hardy; they are vines that entangle us."They attack again, and we must cut, thrash, to make that clearing around us. We must be able to see clearly. So we will cut down our faults. But I repeat: if we are not vigilant and if we do not pray, our faults will return, in some other manner, and they will try to occupy and assimilate us.
What is virtue compared to this? And what awareness allows us to see our faults? At a certain point of our existence, as we are clearly assessing our life, we correctly see our travelled path. We see the gaps that we made, we see the space made for the clarity and the light, and we can no longer accept the shadow which returns to our life. We can no longer bear it! So we will see the smallest fault, not only with our eyes as before, but much larger, because it will be the only visible one. That is, we will no longer see the others, as they will have been eliminated. But as long as a single fault remains, it will appear enormous to us. It will become enormous in our eyes until it is completely eliminated. It is the understanding of perfection.
Saint Theresa of the Infant Jesus spoke a lot about all this, as in fact did many other saints. When we allow a small fault to infiltrate into us, it becomes larger and larger until it chokes us. But if all of a sudden we see this fault return, it will seem huge, and we will no longer want to see it because we know the dimension and the imprint that it will have on us and our behaviour. We will no longer be able to accept it, and we will do everything possible to fight it. You can say: "Thank you, God, for being able to see our faults!" because it is one of the primary virtues. Christ tells us: "You are blind and deaf." To see it all of a sudden, is to know that it exists. We know that when we become aware of something, we have the arms to fight it.