(Statue of St. Mary Magdalene in the crypt of her basilica in St. Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, France)

Do you ever feel that if you were to become more Christlike, you'd have to lose something? That you'd have to give up "who you really are" and become like the Stoics of ancient times? This myth has been around a long time...probably since Adam and Eve thought that they wouldn't reach their full potential if they obeyed God and resisted the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit. Some people think they'd have to turn to stone like the statue shown above, in order to resist their human passions.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini dispels this myth with this lovely metaphor:

"One day [a man on shipboard] asserted that, in order to become converted to better things, he would have to suffocate and extinguish the whole ardor of his soul and the vehemence of his human passions, and so would have to reduce himself to the condition of a mountain of ice, indifferent to all things, even the most beautiful and great. I pointed out to him that the flames of human passions, which always leave a void  and a sense of dissolution, become changed into celestial flames through grace, and that the supernatural light of Heaven, once let into the soul, grows so wonderfully that the human passions become a volcano of Divine Love, a real fire that nobody can extinguish as long as goodwill remains in the soul. Have we not had the brightest examples in this direction? An Augustine, a Magdalen. Did they become mountains of ice after their conversion? Quite the contrary. We should never have had these prodigies of conversion and marvelous holiness, if they had not changed the flames of human passion into volcanoes of immense love of God."

 
(Events in the life of St. Mary Magdalen depicted in the stained-glass windows of St. Mary Magdalen Church in Drogheda, Ireland)

Oh, let us become volcanoes of Divine Love, bit by bit, more and more, until the Love spills over, lighting and warming everyone around us!