Often we can think that holiness is impossible for us to attain in this life, as we are constantly being tempted to sin.
In fact, many of us give in to those temptations and are stuck in a rut of sin that is difficult to get out of.
Then sometimes we read the lives of the saints and, depending on the biographer, we think that these saints "walked on water" their entire lives.
Some biographers will even claim that a specific saint fasted on Fridays when they were an infant, refusing to drink milk from their mother on fast days.
This can lead to an erroneous assumption that saints are men and women who did not sin and were never tempted.
Yet, saints were more like us than we normally think. They were tempted in the same way and sometimes even more intesnely.
Overcoming temptation
St. Francis de Sales points this out in his Introduction to the Devout Life, writing about all the saints who experienced strong temptations:
St. Paul bore a long time with temptations of the flesh, but so far from displeasing God thereby, He was glorified in them. The blessed Angela di Foligni underwent terrible carnal temptations, which move us to pity as we read of them. St. Francis and St. Benedict both experienced grievous temptations, so that the one cast himself amid thorns, the other into the snow, to quench them, but so far from losing anything of God’s Grace thereby, they greatly increased it.
The saints were not dispensed from temptations, but were challenged by them and what made them saints was the fact that they overcame them.
The next time we are tempted, we need to remember that our soul can remain pure if we do not delight or consent to them, as St. Francis de Sales explains:
If we should undergo the temptation to every sin whatsoever during our whole life, that would not damage us in the Sight of God’s Majesty, provided we took no pleasure in it, and did not consent to it; and that because in temptation we do not act, we only suffer, and inasmuch as we take no delight in it, we can be liable to no blame.
Ask God for the grace and strength to resist temptations, knowing that you are in good company with all the saints.
They were tempted too and know what you are going through.
