Our Church’s liturgy takes us through a particular rhythm each year, which is particularly evident to us at this time of the year, since we will soon end ordinary time in just a few weeks, then we’ll enter a new liturgical year with the season of Advent. Throughout the daily masses that we celebrate in the liturgical year, we recognize certain saints that are placed in our Church’s calendar. In the variety of saints that our Church celebrates, we see the many different ways that men & women have lived out their Catholic faith throughout the centuries. Looking at the saints we celebrated in this past month is a witness to the richness of our Catholic faith. They include: Isaac Jogues & Jean de Brebeuf, Jesuit missionaries from the 17th century who were martyred while ministering to the Huron tribe in Canada; Hilarion, who fled to the desert in the 4th century to follow God in the silence & the solitude he found there; Luke, who wrote the Gospel named after him & the Acts of the Apostles; John Henry Newman, a convert to the faith who became a priest & the most influential Catholic theologian in England in the 19th century; & Therese of Liseux, a cloistered Carmelite nun who died at the young age of 23 in the late 19th century in France, but whose “little way” of following God in the ordinary moments of our daily lives has made her a great witness to many of the faithful in our modern world today.
If we look at the different saints we have in the Church, they are not the rich & the powerful of society. Many of them weren’t very popular in their own day because of the ways they often challenged others as to how our faith can be lived out, because of the ways they broadened the way we see God working in our world. Many of these saints had great flaws & obstacles to overcome. Yet, they followed God faithfully, they worked to overcome the obstacles in their lives, they became great witnesses & teachers for us as we go through the ups & downs of our own journeys.
If we look at the people Jesus says are blessed in the beatitudes, it is not the rich & powerful, not the most intelligent & the most popular. The ones Jesus names as blessed were those who were labeled as “unfortunate” or “desperate” in ancient Israel: the poor, the hungry, the weeping, the persecuted, the despised. The saints we celebrate in our mass today, as well as the people Jesus names in the beatitudes, may come from a great diversity of life, but what they have in common is their ability to open up to God through their vulnerability & adversity, to be fully human & to take risks in using their lives to serve God & neighbor. They go beyond their own self-interest in order to place their full trust & reliance on God; they find meaning & significance in their relationship with him. In our reality, in our vulnerability, in the nitty-gritty circumstance of our lives, we, too, are called to open ourselves up to God, to take that leap we need to make in order to be servants for God. In the holiness we’re called to follow here on earth, we’re to open ourselves to the values of the beatitudes that Jesus proclaims, to a new way of seeing the world that reflects the values of God’s kingdom.
As we honor the saints today, both those saints who’ve been officially named so in our Church, & the other men & women who’ve truly lived out their faith here on earth, we remember what we pray together in the Eucharist prayer, that we rely on the intercessions of the saints to help us. May we turn to teach us & guide us as we embrace the cross of Jesus, as we continue to walk on our journey by faith.
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