In the early Church, when those
following the way of Jesus were being persecuted in great numbers, being a
saint was synonymous with being a martyr, with giving up one’s life for the
faith. Back in the early fourth century,
the Church commemorated a feast to remember all of the martyrs who gave their
lives up for the Church. This feast can
be seen as a precursor to All Saints Day that we celebrate today.
When
the Church became legally recognized in Roman society, the definition of a
saint was expanded beyond martyrdom. And
as we celebrate the saints of our Church today, we might mistakenly believe
that today’s solemnity recognizes only those individuals who have been named
official “saints” by the Roman Catholic Church.
But, in reality, today we recognize all of the saints in our community
of faith, all who have lived out the faith throughout the centuries and who
have passed down the faith to us. We
recognize all who have led lives of faith and lives of holiness, whether they
were famous and recognized throughout the world, or whether they lived out the
faith in quiet, gentle, humility without any official recognition.
When
we think of a saint, it is true that we are thinking of a person that lived out
a life of holiness, of a person that was true to his faith and true to the way
God called out him in life. But, the
saints were not perfect, they were not without flaws. When it came out several years ago that
Mother Teresa of Calcutta suffered from a dark night of the soul and felt
abandoned by God for most of the time she ministered to the poor, many people
were shocked and scandalized, and thought that it took away from her
holiness. Yet, I think the opposite
should be true. It should help us
understand Mother Teresa for who she really was, for all she had to overcome in
order to truly serve the Lord. The
saints were very human, with both human strengths and human weaknesses. All of us as followers of Christ are called
to lives of holiness, and we do so in the midst of the nitty-gritty reality of
our lives, in the midst of our brokenness and weaknesses.
So,
when we hear the Beatitudes proclaimed by Jesus in the Gospel today, perhaps we
see ourselves. Perhaps we are the poor
in spirit in that we pray for the faith to carry on and to make it to the next
day. We take it one day at a time, and
we do what we can to live that day in service to the Lord. Perhaps we are those mourn, whose love and
compassion and empathy goes out to our neighbor who is suffering; whose mourning
goes out to those loved ones we no longer have in our lives. Perhaps we hunger and thirst for
righteousness in the midst of all the pain and injustice and violence in our
lives. We yearn for a day when we as a
society can put all of this aside, when we can truly say we are proclaiming
God’s kingdom here on earth.
In
our humility, in our faithfulness, in our simple gratitude to God, we are to
live out these attitudes that Jesus proclaims today in the Beatitudes in the
reality of our lives, meaning that we are to make God the source, the strength,
and the foundation of who we are. As we
honor the saints today, as we recognize how they are very much a part of our
lives, of how we rely on their intercessions, we give thanks to the God for the
gift of the saints.
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