The Personification of the Path to Heaven

by Fr. Roger Landry - May 21, 2010

St. John Vianney's mission as pastor, as he mentioned the day of his arrival to eight year-old Antoine Givre, was to show the people of Ars the way to heaven. The beginning that pastoral plan was to try to help his parishioners — through his preaching and his contagious longing for heaven — to lift up their hearts from earthly desires, concerns and goods in order to develop a deep desire for the greatest good of all: eternal life with the God who loves them.

Getting them to desire heaven, however, was only the first step. The second was more challenging: actually getting them on the path that leads to heaven. This meant persuading his people to turn around from the popular dead end highways on which they were traveling to journey with him perseveringly on the narrow path that leads to life (Mt 7:14)

His principal means to do this was to foster among them a great devotion to, and imitation of, the saints.

Fr. Vianney sought to make the path to heaven simple by showing how the saints personified it. Each night he would spend a large portion of his minimal sleep time to read the lives of the saints so that he could pass on the fruits of his contemplation to his people.

He also adorned the inside of the Church with altars to the Blessed Mother, St. John the Baptist, and St. Philomena, as well as with shrines to Saints Joseph, Peter, Sixtus, Blaise, Lawrence, Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Benedict Labre. The Curé of Ars was pleased when parishioners began to comment that the Church was beginning to evoke the heavenly communion of saints. That was his point, to remind them that they were surrounded by a vast cloud of witnesses spurring them on the victory and showing them the way (Heb 12).

The other purpose for adorning his church with such images, he would joke, was a sacred quid pro quo: "I willingly make a beautiful place for the saints here on earth so that they may make me a small one in heaven!"

Merely having a devotion to the saints, however, was not sufficient to be numbered among them one day. They also needed to be imitated.

A century before the Second Vatican Council proclaimed the "universal call to holiness," Fr. Vianney was already preaching it, conscious of the fact that he was not preaching to the choir. Most people at his time, like many still today, believe that God doesn't really call us all to be saints but just to be "good." St. John Vianney confronted this moral minimalism head-on. He said he had often heard people say, "Provided that I am saved, that's all that's necessary. I do not want to be a saint." He replied by saying, "If you are not a saint, you will be a reprobate. There's no middle ground. It's necessary to be one or the other. Take note!"

If we genuinely desire the end of heaven, Fr. Vianney emphasized, we must likewise will the means of sanctity. The saints show us how to do so.

"The saints are human beings just like us," the Curé of Ars often said, "but they love the good God more than we do." They are not members of a rarified class of spiritual superheroes, but are ordinary people who love God and others according to Christ's standard.

To those among his flock who thought that because of past selfish choices, they could never become holy, he reminded them, "The saints did not all start out well, but they all finished well. We may have begun badly, but let us finish well!" He focused on the infinite diversity of saints to help his people recognize that saints do not come from a divine cookie-cutter. "All [saints] do not take the sake path," he said, "but they all arrive at the same place."

In order for us to arrive at that place, he said, we need to imitate the saints principally in availing ourselves of the means God provides to make us holy. Sometimes we can have an erroneous notion of holiness as something that mainly we do — through thousands of heroic acts of charity — rather than something God does. Fr. Vianney stressed that we need to let God, who is "holy, holy, holy," conform us to his holiness.

This conformation occurs fundamentally through prayer and sacraments. "The two things we need to do to unite with our Lord and be saved," he said, "are prayer and the sacraments. All those who became saints have frequented the sacraments and have lifted up their soul to God in prayer."

About prayer, he loved to quote a poor man of his parish who, in describing how he made his holy hour, stated simply, "Those who pray so devoutly are the saints. I have the intention to do what they do, to say what they say." To become a saint, we need to pray like the saints.

With regard to the seven efficacious signs of divine grace Jesus had instituted, the Curé of Ars would insist, "All those who approach the sacraments are not saints, but the saints will always be among those who receive them often." He encouraged them to receive as often as possible the sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist, the two means of grace Christ gave us to sanctify us and sustain us repeatedly on our earthly pilgrimage. To become a saint, we need to allow God to do in us what he did in the saints through these gifts.

For Fr. Vianney, however, prayer and the sacraments were not isolated means of sanctification, but two of the most important helps along the path to holiness, which for him was synonymous with "life according to the Holy Spirit" (Rom 8:5). The Holy Spirit is the one who teaches us to pray as we ought (Rom 8:26). The Holy Spirit is the one who sanctifies us through the sacraments. The Holy Spirit is the one who helps us to live out our faith with ardent love and courage.

The patron saint of priests once asked rhetorically in a sermon what distinguishes the saints here on earth and allows them to detach themselves from earthly goods in order to seek and choose the things that are above. He replied definitively that the saints "allow themselves to be led by the Holy Spirit." Cooperating with the work of the Holy Spirit in us, through prayer, the sacraments and Christian morality, was, for Vianney, the secret of a holy life.

He used a powerful image of the process of sanctification by the Holy Spirit that captivated his parishioners and is fitting for us to ponder as we approach on Sunday the Solemnity of Pentecost: "The Holy Spirit is like a man with a carriage with a good horse who is ready to drive us to Paris. We have only to say yes and climb inside!" The saints are the ones who have climbed aboard with trust and docility and allowed the Holy Spirit to drive them all the way to life's true capital.

For Fr. Vianney, the path to heaven — to which he spent his priest life trying to guide his people — is not principally an excruciating hike of human exertion up to heaven, but rather a wild chariot ride, in which the Holy Spirit leads us through dark valleys and dangerous passes, over crevices and canyons, at all types of speed through all types of weather, even through death, until we arrive at our heavenly home. Our main task is to get on board and hold on tight for the length of the journey.

St. John Vianney did get on board for the entire journey. He also inspired so many of his parishioners to imitate him and the saints by getting them to join him on that same heavenly transport. There's a spot reserved, too, for us.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.