(“Try your best to enter through the narrow door”)
Brothers and sisters in Christ. In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks to us about the narrow door—a way that is demanding, uncomfortable, even resisted by many. A follower asks, “sir, will there be only a few saved?” And Jesus answers not with numbers or statistics, but with a challenge: “Try your best to enter through the narrow door”because I tell you, many will try to enter but will not suceeed.”
The image is sharp: salvation is not automatic, nor is it a vague background hope. It requires striving, discipline, an intentional walking in the footsteps of Christ.
This saying echoes throughout Christian tradition, but it finds particular resonance in the Cistercian spiritual heritage. For Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the narrow gate is not a cold restriction, but an invitation to freedom. In his Sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard reminds us that “the path is narrow, but love makes it wide.” The austerity of monastic life—silence, obedience, simplicity—was not intended as punishment but as a path to the spaciousness of the heart in God. The gate is narrow because it strips us of distractions and self-will, leaving room for Christ alone.
William of St-Thierry, Bernard’s friend, takes this further: “The more you give up of yourself, the more you become yourself in God.” Here the paradox of the Gospel shines. We resist the narrowness because we think it diminishes us. Yet it is precisely in surrender, in entering the gate of humility and self-emptying, that our true self is born.
The Cistercian tradition has continued to echo this wisdom in modern times. Blessed Guerric of Igny urged his monks to “hurry while you have the light,” reminding them that the narrow gate is not an indefinite option but a present urgency. And in our own day, writers like Thomas Merton and Michael Casey remind us that the narrow gate often looks very ordinary: fidelity in prayer, attentiveness to others, humility in community, a daily ‘yes’ to God’s will.
Merton once observed that the narrow gate is not necessarily about choosing grand sacrifices, but about consenting to God’s transforming love in the very concreteness of our lives: “It is not so much a matter of renunciation,” he wrote, “as of consent—consent to let go of our illusory self, so that our true self in Christ may live.”
This is deeply Cistercian, and deeply Catholic: the narrow way is the way of love purified. It may feel like loss, but it leads to the great banquet Jesus describes, where people will come from east and west, north and south, to sit at table in the kingdom of God.
And so, brothers and sisters, today’s Gospel challenges us:
• Where are we avoiding the narrow gate—where do we prefer comfort over conversion?
• How can we let love make the narrow path wide, as St Bernard urged?
• Are we striving—not merely drifting—in our discipleship?
Let us take courage from the great Cistercian witnesses: their lives were not easy, but they found in the narrowness of their path a joy wider than the world. May we, too, consent to enter the narrow gate, trusting that on the other side is the feast of the Kingdom, where the first will be last, and the last will be first.
Amen.