You have forgotten the exhortation addressed to you as children: “My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord or lose heart when reproved by him; for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines;
– Hebrews 12:5-6a

We do not like to be disciplined. As Americans, as Catholics, and even just as humans.

But without discipline what are we? We are animals. We cannot live the life to which we are called.

God allows us to experience trial, hardship and suffering so that we might learn to restrain our passions and to learn virtue. He does not permit these things out of malice, for malice and God are the opposite. God is love, and all his work is an act of love. We do not understand or comprehend why God permits things. But we are not asked to understand or comprehend. We are called to love God.

This can seem unfair to us. That God allows us to be disciplined. But this is far from reality, because the reality is that each of us has turned away from God, the one who has given us everything. And after he gave us everything, he suffering the torture of the Cross, demonstrating his love for us as he won our freedom from the power of sin and death and opened the path to Heaven.

But most of us, myself included, think that it is really quite extraordinary that the Church asks us to fast for two days a year, or to avoid meat on Fridays, or to kneel a few minutes in prayer for the Roman Canon (the long EP, which the Church actually does suggest we should pray every Sunday), or to stay until Mass is actually over and saying a little prayer of thanksgiving afterwards instead of barreling out of Church before the priest so we can make our dinner reservations. But these are little things.

Up until 1960, when the Church gave precedence to the prayers for Sunday, the Mass we are celebrating this Sunday would have been the Mass in honor of the apostle St. Bartholomew. St. Bartholomew has occupied a lot of space in my mind lately. I’m not sure why, but perhaps it is to remind me that the disciplines the Lord and his Church have asked of me are nothing.

St. Bartholomew, called Nathanael in St. John’s Gospel, went to India to preach the Gospel after our Lord’s Ascension, and then made his way to Armenia. He was so successful in his preaching that he converted the king and his household to Christianity. By long tradition in our Church, he was rewarded for this by being flayed alive. Because of this, he is usually depicted in art, such as Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment, carrying his skin and a knife.

With such examples as St. Bartholomew, the disciplines and the suffering we are asked to endure gains new perspective.

We are called to love God. To do this, we must purify our hearts, our minds, and our actions. But purification comes only through discipline. We are told to “not disdain the discipline of the Lord or lose heart when reproved by him; for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines.” In the following verses of the letter we hear, “If you are without discipline, in which all have shared, you are not sons” but fatherless children. (cf. Heb 12:8) Much more fearsome would be this fate: to be without God as our Father.

This message flies in the face of what our modern world preaches to us: that we must be comfortable, that all suffering must be mitigated, and that discipline is cruel and unnecessary. On the contrary, as Catholics we are called to be a sign to all the world, to stand apart from it as we live in it. The world hates this, and so we will suffer at the hands of the world when we choose to live our faith, but that doesn’t matter: our true citizenship, our true home is in Heaven. In this world, we are called to love God and not comfort, to accept–but not necessarily seek out–suffering and offer it to God for the salvation and conversion of all the world, and to recognize that discipline is a gift, because it prepares us for the glory of living in the Kingdom of Heaven.