St. Michael's Lent 2026 - Reading #12 - Asceticism
Reading
Purity is not a bodily vault that violence can empty. Augustine settles the terrified conscience.
"We must further notice that some of those sufferers may have conceived that continence is a bodily good, and abides so long as the body is inviolate, and did not understand that the purity both of the body and the soul rests on the stedfastness of the will strengthened by God's grace, and cannot be forcibly taken from an unwilling person. From this error they are probably now delivered."
Grace holds what force cannot steal.
He consoles by the character of God: "For when they reflect how conscientiously they served God, and when they settle again to the firm persuasion that He can in nowise desert those who so serve Him, and so invoke His aid; and when they consider, what they cannot doubt, how pleasing to Him is chastity, they are shut up to the conclusion that He could never have permitted these disasters to befall His saints, if by them that saintliness could be destroyed which He Himself had bestowed upon them, and delights to see in them."
What God bestows, disaster does not erase.
Reflection
Underneath the pastoral gravity is the principle this week has been circling from the start: there is an inner citadel that no external force can breach. Goods can be stripped — you released those on Wednesday. Life can be shortened — you faced that yesterday. Even the body can be seized. But consent cannot be taken, only given. The one territory for which you bear total responsibility is the will, and the one defeat that is actually defeat is surrender there.
For you, the application is twofold. Guard the citadel: the compromises that actually undo a man are never taken from him at swordpoint; they are handed over in private, one small consent at a time.
And guard the wounded: if someone under your roof or in your reach carries the memory of what was done to them, be the man who says what Augustine said — what happened to you was not you, and the God who saw it has never once looked at you with anything but love.