“The great thing,” according to St. Philip Neri, “is to become saints.”
Not an original thought—it’s one that’s been echoed by saint after saint, and it has a good Biblical pedigree as well. (“What doth it profit a man . . . ?”) But today’s the feast of St. Philip Neri, and it seemed worth repeating!
I’ve always had a kind of fascination for him. Anecdotes give him a peculiar character. There is, for example, the story of the lady who used to attend St. Philip’s Masses and leave right after receiving communion. The saint, rather than attempting to stop her or argue with her, once sent two altar boys with lighted candles to accompany her through the streets for the requisite part of an hour during which the Blessed Sacrament remained inside her. Needless to say, after that experience the lady began making somewhat longer thanksgivings . . .
According to Frederick William Faber, “Practical commonplaceness was the special mark which distinguishes [Neri’s] form of ascetic piety from the types accredited before his day. He looked like other men . . . [H]e was emphatically a modern gentleman, of scrupulous courtesy, sportive gaiety, acquainted with what was going on in the world, taking a real interest in it, giving and getting information, very neatly dressed, with a shrewd common sense always alive about him, in a modern room with modern furniture, plain, it is true, but with no marks of poverty about it—in a word, with all the ease, the gracefulness, the polish of a modern gentleman of good birth, considerable accomplishments, and a very various information.”
In fact, he sounds just like the sort of saint that you or I would have to be, if we only had the courage to stand up and be saints: the sort of saint who could and did live in the world. It was not that he never made other people uncomfortable—certainly the lady with her altar boys was made uncomfortable—nor that he was careful to keep up his dignity or position—he was both humble and, apparently, something of a clown. But despite his awkward Christianity and his penchant for occasional levitation, he seems to have been really human. He’s a relief from the prickly saints like Jerome or Catherine of Sienna, saints who make you feel you’ll have to take things very gravely indeed if you want to get to heaven. Being a saint is a great thing, but there’s no need to be so serious about it! After all (as St. Philip Neri says), “A joyful heart is more easily made perfect than one that is downcast.”
Thanks for a good post, Sophia. One admires the ascetic, both physical and spiritual, extremes of some saints, but (and one really pauses at the use of the word “but” here), sometimes some of their practices are not just extreme, but downright strange.
Self-flagellation is one of these practices. It may be that humility and what we might call “seriousness” (sobriety?) are not related in a way that I can understand; also, seriousness and mortification. I confess I have some difficulty relating these religious attitudes. It may be because modern psychology recognizes self-mutilation, -deprivation, etc., and masochism as dysfunctional, or as symptomatic of emotional illness, but it’s not just that.