Holiness is not just to stop sinning but it is to love

John the Baptist appears in the Gospel as the figure to go away for Jesus to appear: “Christ must increase and I must decrease.” Jesus has to increase and this is the essence of Holiness.

A Saint is a person who unites with God and who says: “I live, but it is not I who lives, it is Christ who lives in me“. If you ask most people what it means to be holy they will answer: ‘ it’s not to sin and to follow the commandments ‘. The person who doesn’t steal, doesn’t kill, doesn’t commit adultery is not Holy. Stopping sinning is getting you nowhere. While you sin your account is overdrawn. Have you stopped sinning? You stopped duty.

Now let’s start the life of Holiness. It is not enough to stop sinning, we need to love. But, how can it be that selfish people like us are capable of loving? We need God’s help. When you unite with God He will turn to you and making you capable of love. But how does God do this, there are two phases in this purification.

St John of the Cross explains how. Green wood , for that to turn into charcoal, you start to heat it up. In this process the wood smells, it is losing its characteristics, it gets darker, until it turns into charcoal. The first part of our purification is something negative because we need to get rid of the bad things that are dingy on the inside.

The second part is when we come together to God. Wood joins the fire so that it is equal to the fire. So are we, in our Union with God. You’ve got to love as God loves. We need to go through these stages in spiritual love.

Learn how to grow in your spiritual life

If you stopped sinning, mortal sins, you began a path of Christianity. In the first place you need to develop your faith. You need to increase your faith because it needs to grow up every day.

Even great saints have to keep growing in faith. The faith grows here in this life. And what is the biggest problem of those who stopped growing in faith? People think the solution is to love more, but how can you grow in love if you have no faith?

Our spiritual life is a building in which the main base is the faith and the highest point is love. If you don’t have a solid foundation, you can’t build the building. For you to grow in love you have to have roots in faith. It’s like a tree that grows not just up, but down, too. If you want to be a Saint who loves God with a heroic love you need more faith, and faith must grow increasingly.

How to grow in faith

Just ask for the faith for you to progress in it. If you ask to have more faith, God will hear your prayer because this request is infallible. If you teach a prostitute to ask for more faith sincerely every day, it is foolproof, she will change her life. This is unquestionable, it is an absolute certainty, but one has to ask with sincerity. I believe Lord, but increase my faith every day.

The first thing I do everyday  is to say ‘ Lord, I believe but increase my faith. ‘ I challenge you that you’re home and you don’t have faith and are reading this homily, ask God for faith every day, if you ask for the faith you have to increase. You need to ask with sincerity, humility and perseverance because it is not automatic.

So the first step to being a Saint is asking for faith in God. And the faith means that you need to really believe, believe, give your Amen in what God reveals to you. For example: with relation to your sins. A thing is not sin because you feel it is. If God revealed to you that is a sin you have to hate it.

When you start to believe in what God you reveal you leave the life of sin and will believe even more.But there are people who think they have faith but do not have it. Heretics think they have faith, but they have no supernatural faith. They have a human faith.

If the 2000-year-old church is teaching you something you didn’t know, you learn and have faith.The heretic chooses what he will believe. Then he sees a Church teaching and chooses where he wants to believe.

There is no such things as ‘ faith has to progress, you have to adapt to modern times. It’s really lame to say that masturbation is a sin. It’s very annoying that old outdated Church. ‘

People, the truth is the same yesterday, today and always. The poison that will kill are 2000 years old is still killing today. If I see that the Apostles had a faith that St. Augustine a century later had, who am I to question? I can be quiet because I am in the Church of Jesus Christ.

Faith is only because I just need to believe in the God who created all other things. God conveys that faith for 2000 years. You can’t fool God, He doesn’t reveal Himself and then change His mind. God reveals himself once and for all. The truth is the same yesterday, today and always. For that, we need to increase this faith.

Learn to pray asking for faith

You need to pray every day, you need to take a truth of faith and go to the shrine and ask Jesus to help you understand and allow Him to come into your heart. The Epistle to the Romans says “the just live by faith.”

You need to go burning your tastes, foibles and opinions so that you don’t have another opinion than the saints of over 2000 years. Saint Teresa D’Avila died saying: “Finally, I am the daughter of the Church”.

If you’ve been praying, praying and praying but you don’t love, it  is because your faith is too weak. You are praying wrong, you need to learn to love and ask God to increase your faith. Is is this transforming Union, that is Holiness. Holiness is not just to stop sinning, but it is to  love. For that, we need to grow in faith.

I’m no Saint, but I am very good company. My older brothers, the Saints, know God and can praise can sing a new song. The most I can claim to be is a pirate parrot, sitting on his shoulder and repeating what the pirate says. I want to repeat what the Saints said. I don’t want you to go home saying: ‘ Father Paul taught us with a lot of wisdom ‘, but I want you to say, ‘ he didn’t say anything, he just repeated the way the Saints taught. ‘ That’s the way it should be with priests.

Transcription and adaptation: Fernanda Soares