As a child, I would occasionally see homeless people in my hometown. Many had mental problems. As children, they can frighten us. I vividly remember watching from my elementary school playground as a homeless man tried to get into a house. The door was narrow, and he could not get in because he was carrying a large bag on his back that he would not put down. As children, we found the scene amusing. This scene came to mind this week as I reflected on today's Gospel reading.
The Lord speaks of a narrow door that gives access to salvation. He says that many people try to enter through that door but are not strong enough to do so. We ask ourselves, what is this door and what does it mean? Why is the door narrow?
The door of salvation is the Lord Himself. He said, “I am the gate for the sheep” (John 10:7). The Lord is the door that leads to the forgiveness and love of the Heavenly Father. Pope Francis explained why the door is narrow: “It is a narrow door not because it is oppressive, but because it demands that we restrain and limit our pride and our fear, in order to open ourselves to Him with humble and trusting hearts, acknowledging that we are sinners and in need of his forgiveness.”
Today we are again reminded of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton as we approach the 50th Anniversary of her Canonization on September 14. She knew the Lord as the gateway to salvation from her upbringing in the Episcopal Church.
She learned from her difficult life to restrain her pride and fear, which allowed her to accept God's will with a humble heart. The financial misfortunes and eventual bankruptcy of her family and the familial and social rejection of her conversion to Catholicism, were circumstances that restrained her pride. These, along with the constant threat of illness in close family members leading to the deaths of her parents, her husband, and two daughters during her lifetime, produced great fears that she had to restrain and limit at the entrance to the door, essentially at the feet of the Lord.
The restraint of her pride is a significant detail. When St. Elizabeth Ann Seton's father was a Manhattan health official, she saw immigrants in quarantine sites. A few years later, upon her arrival in Italy with her ailing husband and her eight-year-old daughter, Anna Maria, she had to endure this same affliction. Humbled by her painful circumstances, St. Elizabeth Ann let go of her pride and opened her heart to the Lord in trust.
The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us of this lesson: “Endure your trials as ‘discipline’; God treats you as sons. For what ‘son’ is there whom his father does not discipline? At the time,
all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it” (Hebrews 12:7, 11). The example of the Saints teaches us to welcome the great difficulties of this life as sources of salvation.
I now return to the image of the homeless man trying to enter the door with his large bag on his back. We are all like this: trying to enter the door of salvation, eager to receive the Heavenly Father's forgiveness and love, but unwilling to limit or restrain our pride and fear. Prayer and penance help us restrain our pride. The prayer I am speaking of is the kind of prayer in which we ask for forgiveness and let God speak more than we speak. And confessing our sins, many of which cause us shame, requires humility and the restraint of our pride.
Let us humbly ask the Lord to grant us his grace to restrain and limit our pride and fear so we may have access to the Heavenly Father’s infinite mercy.