***At the end, the last five minutes is a bonus hymn from our 10AM Holy Mass***

We moderns have so arranged our religious instincts that we think the divine voice must always sound like a lullaby, when in fact it often sounds like a trumpet. We wish to hear of lilies and sparrows, forgetting that even lilies toil and sparrows fall. So when Christ, with the thunder of truth behind His quiet Galilean voice, declares: “Strive to enter by the narrow gate”, we are brought to a sudden and sobering attention. It is the call not of consolation, but of combat.

It is the strange and startling reality of Christianity that it begins with a paradox and ends with a challenge. The paradox is that the gate to life is narrow, while destruction’s road is spacious and easy. The challenge is that we must strive—not drift, not dawdle, not meander—but strive, as one who sweats in the effort to reach something worth attaining. The narrow gate does not admit the flabby soul or couch potato. It is a door carved not in comfort, but in courage.

The narrow gate is hard because it is honest. It makes no allowance for pretension. One cannot swagger through it, carrying the weight of vanity or the baggage of pride. It allows no masks, for it was carved by Him who sees the inner hidden heart. We must stoop to enter it. The tall towers of self-importance will not pass through. The narrow gate is entered singly, like birth and death.

And yet, what joy is hidden in this austere invitation! For though it is narrow, it is not closed. Though it is small, it is open to all. The child can pass through as well as the philosopher. The thief on the cross passed through it in the final hour. It is not guarded by angels with flaming swords, but by truth and repentance. That is why the striving is not the striving of the proud, but of the penitent.

There are those who say the world has grown too wide for such a narrow gate. But I say it is precisely because the world is so wide and wild that we need that slender doorway more than ever. The soul must have a compass. The heart must have a harbor. In an age that flings itself into every appetite, it is the narrow gate that preserves “God's image and likeness” in each of us. 

So then, let us strive—not with clenched fists, but with open hands. Let us strive to surrender, which is the most paradoxical of all efforts. For in striving to enter the narrow gate, we are not striving to become less, but more truly ourselves—less stuffed with shadows, and more filled with light. We are not constricted, but released.

Christ’s words are not the locked door of a vault, but the narrow entrance to a kingdom beyond all imagining. And if it is hard to enter, it is only because Heaven is too large to fit through the doorway of the ego.  Let us bow low. And then, let us walk through.