Courtney McGrailDear Editor, Fr Rolheiser (IC 19/11/2015) praises certain saints for their “stunning self-confidence” and “very robust self-image” in comparison to the rest of us, “simply lack[ing] sufficient self-image and self-confidence to do what they did”. In doing so he, to my mind, creates too sharp a contrast between the “spiritual giants” and us non-giants. He wrote, of course, his usual thought-provoking piece, but one that sent this reader anyway in search of a less polarised typology.
Let us take the cases of our own St Patrick and the man whose words provide the first reading on St Patrick’s Day, the prophet Jeremiah. St Patrick declared himself the most uneducated of disciples and thought of himself as merely a stone on the path that God picked up and placed high on the wall, while Jeremiah says, in words that surely strike home to every one of us non-giants, that he’s a child and cannot speak, until God gives him the confidence to.
In the development of a saint then, I would suggest that there is, at first, uncertainty and lack of confidence but that, at a certain turning point and in some kind of providential way, this self-doubt changes into self-confidence; that this pattern is also true for non-giants, and finally that, for giants and non-giants alike, far from such confidence being an assured thing, it continues alongside the same old lack thereof without, nonetheless, being undone by it. St Paul, he who declared himself to be “no polished speechmaker”, a “nobody” even, serves as a good example in this regard: “It is when I am weak that I am strong” (2 Cor. 12.10).
Yours etc.,
Donal McMahon,
Saggart,
Dublin 24.