Soul on Fire

“Even though I walk in the dark valley, I fear no evil; for You are at my side.” Psalm 23:4

I was amused when Father Mitch Pacwa in one of his talks about Scripture, revealed that Saint Jerome would study Hebrew furiously to get rid of the dancing girls in his head. Saint Jerome had lived a dissolute life when he was young, and when he decided to live for God, the passions followed him. 

I am sorry I was amused, for when I decided to read further, it was obvious Saint Jerome was in such pain and turmoil. “In the remotest part of a wild and stony desert," he wrote years afterwards to his friend Eustochium, "burnt up with the heat of the sun, so scorching that it frightens even the monks who live there, I seemed to myself to be in the midst of the delights and crowds of Rome.... In this exile and prison to which through fear of Hell I had voluntarily condemned myself, with no other company but scorpions and wild beasts, I many times imagined myself watching the dancing of Roman maidens as if I had been in the midst of them. My face was pallid with fasting, yet my will felt the assaults of desire. In my cold body and my parched flesh, which seemed dead before its death, passion was still able to live. Alone with the enemy, I threw myself in spirit at the feet of Jesus, watering them with my tears, and tamed my flesh by fasting whole weeks.”

"When my soul was on fire with wicked thoughts," Jerome wrote in 411, "as a last resort, I became a pupil to a monk who had been a Jew, in order to learn the Hebrew alphabet...I turned to this language of hissing and broken-winded words. What labor it cost me, what difficulties I went through, how often I despaired and abandoned it and began again to learn...I thank our Lord that I now gather such sweet fruit from the bitter sowing of those studies." 

His sweet fruit from the bitter soil of his trials include his translation of most of the Bible into Latin (what we now know as the Vulgate), his commentaries on the Gospels and much much more. He became the greatest Hebrew scholar of the first 1500 years of the Church! Yes, Saint Jerome walked through the dark valley victoriously because God was at his side. 

We too can say, like the saints, that the Lord is our shepherd. He will lead us and refresh our soul. He will lead us through dark valleys if we call on Him.