Alexandra’s Essay

PERSONAL STATEMENT

Standing twenty feet in the air and cloistered away from the world in a halo of tree branches, I attempted a most peculiar and legendary feat of austerity: At twelve years old, I was determined to imitate St. Simeon, the original stylite, or pillar hermit, who achieved sainthood after living for 37 years atop a 50 foot pillar in what is now modern day Syria.

My incentive for this undertaking was threefold: First, the acquisition of spiritual knowledge; Second, the cultivation of virtue; Third, I happened to have a treehouse in my backyard. Noble as these motives may have been, my valiant effort at hermitage endured for barely ten minutes. Nevertheless, I spent much of my early adolescence looking towards heaven. I was convinced by the likes of St. Simeon that divine virtue and revelation lay hidden within some castle in the sky, far removed from the Earth’s vale of tears. 

Such a conviction stoked my intrigue for the Catholic saints. I was enthralled by these servants of God and the exceptional circumstances in which they cultivated heroic virtue. Consequently, a shift overtook the landscape of my personal library: science fiction novels were ousted by the autobiographies of St. Faustina Kowalska and St. Teresa of Avila. Fantasy series were usurped from their seats of prominence by accounts of saintly visionaries at Fatima and Guadalupe. I filled journals with theological queries, researched the great mystics and learned words like “stigmata” and “bilocation.” While my friends raved about the newest Taylor Swift lyrics, I read St. Gemma Galgani’s love poems to God. 

I assembled within my mind an army of these remarkable individuals and pondered the question I had asked atop my tree house: Was saintly virtue only a product of exceptional circumstances? As my research progressed, my initial captivation by St. Simeon, radical feats of asceticism and spiritual ecstasies, was challenged by my discovery of “ordinary” saints like St. Gianna Molla. Her life did not involve scaling giant pillars. She was a mother and doctor who practiced heroic virtue in her daily chores. The perfection of such a saint, in the words of St. Gabriel Possenti, simply manifested in the ability “to do the ordinary well.”

Now I walk through my life imagining the saints by my side, reminding me that every moment is an opportunity to cultivate virtue, most especially the mundane. Consider my 11th grade math class: If one were to visualize the scene from Revelation where St. Michael the Archangel faces Lucifer in battle, that image would be nearly identical to the one that unfolded upon my introduction to trigonometry. My defeat at the hands of sine and cosine would have been swift had I not recognized it as an opportunity to grow in humility. Much like St. Michael, humility became my weapon of choice. Instead of stuffing poor test grades in the back of my bag, I returned the next day to ask for help. I no longer cringed after offering a wrong answer in class, but instead turned to a classmate to correct me. St. Gabriel’s words rang in my ear, and I remembered that the soul is forged in these simple moments. 

Spoiler alert: Climbing the pillar did not make Simeon a saint. Rather, Simeon climbed the pillar because he was already heroically virtuous, and had become so in the small moments with his feet on the ground. I do not have to be atop my treehouse to practice virtue or to understand the divine. Instead of climbing that pillar, I smile at my opponents after I’ve lost a soccer game, stay up a little later to help a friend with homework, and embrace small discomforts. In these ways I can still walk with the saints, even while my feet are firmly — and happily — planted on the earth.