Pursuing Our Unique Path to God

God delights in our uniqueness. The saints know this and don’t waste time trying to follow someone else’s path. For example, St. Ignatius Loyola was a soldier before he became a priest, and as Robert Ellsberg notes in Give Us This Day, after an all-night vigil at the Catalonian shrine of Our Lady at Montserrat, “he laid his sword on the altar and became a soldier of Christ.” On the other hand, St. Therese of Lisieux said in her book The Story of a Soul, “despite my littleness I can aspire to sainthood. To make myself bigger is impossible; I have to put up with myself such as I am with all my imperfections…. So I sought in the holy books … and I read these words that come from the mouth of Eternal Wisdom: ‘Let all who are simple come to my house’ (Prov. 9:4). So I came, suspecting that I had found what I was looking for.”

Finding our unique path to God entails offering hospitality to ourselves, just as we offer it to others. What does it mean to offer hospitality to ourselves? As Maria del Mar Albajar-Vinas, OSB, observes in Benedictines magazine, “In the same way that hospitality toward my sister means to recognize and value who she is, with her particular way of understanding and response to life — to look after her and allow her the time and space she needs to walk the path of being who she is — just so, hospitality toward myself means to recognize and value who I am, with my particular way of understanding and responding to life — to look after myself and give myself the time and space that I need to walk the path of being who I am.”

God’s world is large enough to encompass many ways of understanding and responding to life. Because we have lived in different cultures and had different experiences, it is not possible for us all to think alike and follow the same path, and it would not be healthy to try to do so. The kingdom of God needs nurses and artists, warriors and administrators, and farmers and sanitation workers, with their different skills and outlooks on life. If we are true to walking the path of who we are, as St. Ignatius and St. Therese and so many other blessed ones have done, we will find our own unique way to know and serve God. The sure sign we have found it is a sense of abiding joy, vitality, and inner peace.