Paradox of Power

I was reading an excerpt from Thomas Merton and I thought it was profound . . . so I thought I'd share it with you:

The saints love their sanctity not because it separates them from the rest of us and places them above us, but because, on the contrary, it brings them closer to us and in a sense places them below us. Their sanctity is given them in order that they may help us and serve us -- for the saints are like doctors and nurses who are better than the sick in the sense that they are healthy and possess arts of healing them, and yet they make themselves the servants of the sick and devote their own health and their art to them.

The saints are what they are, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else. It gives them a clarity of compassion that can find good in the most terrible criminals. It delivers them from the burden of judging others, condemning other men. It teaches them to bring the good out of others by compassion, mercy and pardon. A man becomes a saint not by conviction that he is better than sinners but  by the realization that he is one of them, and that all together need the mercy of God.

- Seeds of Contemplation

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Sainthood or discipleship (Kingdom citizenship) is realized not in our ability to achieve external conformity to standards of behavior but in a growing awareness of our own sinful condition (1 Tim. 1:15). It is our awareness of our wretched and limited conditions as creatures who are incapable of loving God and others as we love ourselves. The fruits of the Spirit is then not a busy activity of our souls but a growing awareness of our utter lack and receptivity to the movement of the Spirit. The power paradoxically is not realized in an inherent capacity but in our utter dependency.