Saint Hilarion: Difference between revisions

: Being desirous to begin to serve God in perfect solitude,... he gave part of his goods to his brethren and the rest to the poor, reserving nothing for himself.... He retired into the desert.... He was a comely and even delicate youth, affected by the least excess of heat or cold, yet his clothing consisted only of a sackcloth shirt, a leather tunic which St. Antony gave him, and an ordinary short cloak....

: For years together his food was fifteen figs a day, which he never took till sunset. When he felt any temptation of the flesh he would say to his body, “I will see to it, thou ass, that thou shalt not kick,” and then cut off part of his scanty meal....  

: During the first years he had no other shelter than a little arbour, which he made of woven reeds and rushes. Afterwards he built himself a cell ... four feet broad and five in height, and a little longer than his body, like a tomb rather than a house. Soon he found that figs alone were insufficient to support life properly and permitted himself to eat as well vegetables, bread and oil. But advancing age was not allowed to lessen his austerities.

: St. Hilarion underwent many grievous trials. Sometimes his soul was covered with a dark cloud and his heart was dry and oppressed with bitter anguish; but the deafer Heaven seemed to his cries on such occasions, the more earnestly he persevered in prayer.<ref>Herbert Thurston and Donald Atwater, eds., ''Butler’s Lives of the Saints'', rev. (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1962), 4:163.</ref>

: The frequency of his signs in Sicily drew to him sick people and religious men in multitudes; and one of the chief men was cured of dropsy the same day that he came, and offered Hilarion boundless gifts; but he obeyed the Saviour’s saying, “Freely ye have received; freely give.”<ref>Matt. 10:8.</ref>

And then the Lord did something truly extraordinary through him. On the occasion of a great earthquake, when the sea was threatening to destroy the town, Hilarion turned back a tidal wave. According to Jerome, “The sea broke its bounds; and, as if God was threatening another flood, or all was returning to primeval chaos, ships were carried up steep rocks and hung there.”

The townsfolk, seeing these mountains of water coming towards the shore, ran and got Hilarion and, “as if they were leading him out to battle, stationed him on the shore. And when he had marked three signs of the cross upon the sand, and stretched out his hands against the waves, it is past belief to what a height the sea swelled, and stood up before him, and then, raging long, as if indignant at the barrier, fell back, little by little, into itself.”

: I AM Hilarion! I have walked in the desert places! I have taken my refuge in the desert of life, but the multitudes came after me into the desert as I lived in my final incarnation as Hilarion. They came for the healing fountain; they came for love. Though I would retreat, they would follow. And so the Lord told me that the gift of Truth and of healing is only for the sharing, only for the giving away.<ref>Hilarion, “The Personal Saviour, The Personal Guru,” {{LSR}}, book 2, p. 181.</ref>

[[Category:Christian saints]]