Aron Lee Ralston (born October 27, 1975) is an American mountaineer, mechanical engineer, and motivational speaker, known for surviving a canyoneering accident by cutting off part of his own right arm.
On April 26, 2003, during a solo descent of Bluejohn Canyon in southeastern Utah, he dislodged a boulder, pinning his right wrist to the side of the canyon wall. After five days, with a blunt knife, he began to cut away the flesh, muscles and tendons that held him prisoner. The operation, performed with intense pain and desperate precision, culminated in the amputation of his right limb. He used a piece of tubing from his hydration pack as a tourniquet to prevent bleeding.
Freed but weakened, Ralston did not let fatigue and pain stop him. With incredible determination, he made his way back through the rest of the canyon, rappel down a 65ft. drop, and hiked 7 miles in search of help. Dehydrated and on the verge of collapse, he came upon a family of Dutch hikers who immediately alerted the authorities.
I wanted to highlight two things from this story and then apply them to our spiritual life. The first is the need to drastically cut off whatever is an impediment to living. In the spiritual life sin is what kills us and the occasions of sin is what keeps us trapped there. Therefore, we must think like Aron probably thought after he was trapped between the rock and the wall for 5 days without being able to get out: “if I stay here I am going to die” and we must make the drastic decision he made: to cut out the occasions that make us or could make us fall into sin.
For this to happen, it is important that we learn to sacrifice ourselves. Thus the external mortifications that we practice help us learn to do this and also to sacrifice what must be sacrificed in order to grow in grace and virtue before God. All people who want to live as good Christians must learn to practice external mortification, particularly in those things they have not yet mastered: it would be food for those who have not yet mastered the appetite of gluttony, it would be the tongue for those who have not yet mastered the appetite of talking about others, etc. Therefore, we must learn to mortify ourselves by not exposing ourselves to occasions of sin.
The second thing I wanted to point out is that it took Aron 5 days to make that drastic decision that saved his life. I leave aside the reason why it took him so long, which is not relevant, in order to point out that we often do the same in the face of sin. We look for detours and other ways to leave sin without actually leaving the occasion of sin because of the pleasure it gives us, which is a clear sign of affection for sin. We want to stop sinning without leaving the affection for sin, which does not allow us to grow in grace and virtue, which grow to the extent that we disaffect ourselves from sin and its setting.
The problem is that many times, when we want to react, we are not as lucky as Aron who reacted in time to save his life. Often it is too late by the time we react so the occasion of sin has not only turned into actual sin but also into a vice or many times even into an addiction.
