All Saints
I hear from the seminarians and my UD students all the time, “Father, I want to be a saint.” I usually respond with, “Good for you. And good luck.” If they get my weak attempt at humor, we smile and part ways. If they don't, well, we spend some time talking about what attaining sainthood entails. For the most part, they seem to think that becoming a saint is all about absolute moral purity. It's about never violating the 10C's. Or never thinking bad thoughts. Or being dramatically and publicly “humble.” Or all of the above. They usually have a favorite saint they try to imitate. And that saint is usually one with a fantastic backstory, including a harrowing conversion and a list of miracles James Cameron would find difficult to re-create in a movie. Nothing wrong with any of this. Having a holy hero to look up to is nothing to sneer at. But...we have to be careful that we do not make our saints out to be the Christian answer to the Avengers or the X-Men. Saints – those men and women fully realized in Christ – are more than superheroes. They are children of God who see Him as He is.
John tells us that we – those not yet fully realized in Christ – are children of God too. He says, “...we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.” So, we might say that we are saints-on-the-way. I'm sure you feel it too. That “on-the-way” part seems much more real than the saint part. That is, the feeling of being incomplete, not-yet, almost-there but not quite. Am I right? We can spend years, decades striving for saintliness – building our merits in prayer and good works, going to Mass, avoiding sin – and still barely limp toward the next step. Just barely making it. And then the whole thing starts all over. The frustration is maddening. What's missing in all this struggle? Maybe, just maybe, we let it slip our mind that we are already children of God. We are already graced with everything we need to become saints. We are already well-equipped to live with Not Yet and Almost There. John says it plainly, “...what we shall be has not yet been revealed.” If what we shall be has not yet been revealed, then why are we fighting so hard to figure it out? We know what we are now: children of God. Can't that be enough right now? Can't just being the best children of God we can be be enough until what we will be is revealed?
John goes on to say, “We do know that when [what we shall be] is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” So, we do know something about what we will be. We will be like God b/c we will see Him as he is. What is it “to be like God”? The Catechism of Trent gives us a partial answer: “...beatitude consists of two things: that we shall behold God such as he is in his own nature and substance; and that we ourselves shall become, as it were, gods. For those who enjoy God while they retain their own nature, assume a certain admirable and almost divine form, so as to seem gods rather than men” (I, 13, 7). For us to be like God then is to be fully human and almost divine. That is, for us to be like God is to be saints – first, children of God; then, Christs. Christ plural. To be Christ imperfectly now and perfectly then. To embody the beatitudes right when and where we are. Jesus says again and again that to be among the blessed is to be poor in all the ways that the world thinks is rich. To be among the blessed is never about the work we ourselves put into becoming blessed. We can do nothing w/o Christ. Whatever work we put into becoming saints is first the work of Christ done through us. To believe otherwise is to believe that we can make ourselves into saints. That error is known as Pride. And nothing motivated by Pride can enter the Kingdom of God.
How do we become saints and enter the Kingdom? It is both insanely simple and devilishly complex. Simple b/c all we have to do is receive sainthood from God. Receive His perfection into our imperfect nature. Receive Him and then simply be His son and daughters. But it's complex b/c we have trouble shaking the idea that anything free is valuable. Anything worth having is worth working for. Anything worth anything at all should be difficult to obtain. So, we fight temptation. We struggle against sin. We wrestle with our demons. We bargain with God to get what He has already given us for free. What the Saints know now – being in the presence of God – is that nothing they did on earth was done w/o Christ doing it first. Their prayer, their fasting, their devotion, their miracles, all of it was Christ himself working in them. And they understood their role: get out of his way and let him work! Let him work in you and through you. I'll leave you with a weird image. You're washing your car. Which gets wet first? The car or the hose? Right. To become a saint, you gotta be a hose for God's abundant love!
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