St. Michael's Lent 2026 - Reading #8 - Asceticism
Reading
Same fire — gold glows, chaff smokes. Augustine’s master image for this week’s discipline.
"Yet often, even in the present distribution of temporal things, does God plainly evince His own interference. For if every sin were now visited with manifest punishment, nothing would seem to be reserved for the final judgment; on the other hand, if no sin received now a plainly divine punishment, it would be concluded that there is no divine providence at all. And so of the good things of this life: if God did not by a very visible liberality confer these on some of those persons who ask for them, we should say that these good things were not at His disposal; and if He gave them to all who sought them, we should suppose that such were the only rewards of His service; and such a service would make us not godly, but greedy rather, and covetous."
Goods and ills are common; what differs is the sufferer.
He drives the image home: "Wherefore, though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them. For, stirred up with the same movement, mud exhales a horrible stench, and ointment emits a fragrant odour."
Decide now what the fire will find.
Reflection
This dismantles the accounting most men secretly keep. When calamity hits — the job lost, the diagnosis, the child in crisis — the first question that rises is why me, as if suffering were a verdict and you could locate the charge. Augustine says the distribution proves nothing; God deliberately made the goods and ills of this life common to both cities, so we would neither covet what the wicked enjoy nor flinch from what the good endure. The furnace is not a verdict. It is a revelation of material.
So the only question in your control is what the fire finds when it reaches your address. Gold or chaff is not decided in the flames; it is decided now, in the ordinary formation of a man — prayer kept or skipped, appetites governed or fed, promises held or bent.
That is what this week's asceticism is for. In the same affliction the wicked blaspheme while the good pray. Your children will watch you burn someday. Decide today what they will see.