I have my own pathway to God. I can find no one on earth with whom on every point I am in complete accord, and therefore I can find no other way to God than the way of my own being. Others may advise and help; but they can never know me really, for they have little else to go on for judgement except what I tell them myself, so that whatever they may say has to be modified and, as it were, re-edited before it can be of any use to me. Their counsel and directions are based upon their own experience, but of mine they know very little. After all, none other has had my life, my hereditary influences, my education at home and in school, my interests and hobbies and tastes and pleasures; in other words, I am myself different from anyone else, and, in the full sense of the word, unique. It is for this reason that my prayers must be my own: no words of others, no books that others compose, can ever fitly represent the needs I have and the thanks I personally owe to the Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. For the same reason also I have continually to be reminding myself that I have some thing to give God which He can get from none other. There are times when I cannot help wondering what use I am in the world to Him, and how He could ever have sent me here at all. Then I have to realize that however much I am a failure, stupid and sinful, yet because I am unique I have a unique offering to make, i.e. myself. God gets from me a peculiar glory which no other work of His hands can show, and therefore in me alone is some fragment of His splendour reflected. My own pathway to Him, however much it may resemble the ways of others, must be really my own, in the sense that it is on the whole different from every other.
Now I have also to realize that as I am unique, so is everyone else. Just as my hereditary tendencies, my upbringing, my temperament, my mixture of faults and virtues, my ambitions, my hopes, my fears, my past, my present, my future, are entirely peculiar to myself, so also are to others their own tendencies and temperaments and tempers. All of them look out into the world from themselves as the central point; they are conscious of their own view of life as 1 am of mine. The universe is something my soul is aware of when it looks through the windows of the senses on the things and persons about it. As I am different from them, so are they also different from each other. We are always repeating our wonder at the endless variety of nature, with every leaf and every flower and every sunset apart and alone and unique. We notice the monotony of life, yet have to confess that no day is really exactly like another; and though to us each sheep in a flock is exactly like the rest, yet to the shepherd each is absolutely distinct, with a character of its own. So God also tells us that He has called each of us by a name, that from all eternity He has singled us out for Himself, that even the hairs of our head are numbered; so close an inventory has He made of our gifts, that our work is unique and alone; each is a separate stone in the vast edifice that He is erecting to His own glory out of the sons of men. As, therefore, on this account I claim for myself the right to go to God in my own way, accepting, of course, the truths and practices of the Church, so, precisely for that reason, must I also be willing to allow the same freedom to others. The rights I demand for myself are rights, not privileges; therefore they must be conceded equally to all the world.
Therefore I must needs be tolerant. Each has his own way to God: I cannot pretend that I alone know the way in which He wishes to be served. I know, indeed, by faith that He has established His Church to be the sole teacher of truth, and therefore I try to bring all to this wonderful mistress of the ways of God; but, even so, I am certain that He does give the light of truth to all who serve Him, and if I find that what I say has no influence on my fellows, I can surely leave it to Him to guide them aright; it need arise He will send an angel from heaven or a star to direct their feet. And, again, within the Church the varieties of holiness are innumerable, the patterns of the saints endlessly diverse; to each, therefore, his own way, and I must be in no hurry to foist my own upon them. Nay, it is this very variety that produces the beauty of holiness in the world: just as in a garden the loveliness of the effect is due to the shades of colour, the diversity of form, the contrast of flower with flower, so in the garden of God is it with the glowing differences of soul from soul. Hence it is noticeable in the lives of the saints that their own growing independence in life has effected an increasing tolerance: as they realized their own special calling (for to each living soul comes a distinct vocation), they came to recognize the sweet harmony that all these notes produced. "Such a man rejoices in everything. He does not make himself a judge of the servants of God nor of any rational creature; nay, he rejoices in every condition and every type that he sees. . . . And he rejoices more in the different kinds of men that he sees than he would do in seeing them all walk in the same way, for so he sees the greatness of God's goodness more manifest." (Saint Catharine of Siena)
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.