Last weekend I had the good pleasure of presiding at the wedding of my niece and her fiancé in North Carolina. It was a relatively small gathering but one filled with big anticipation and great joy. Following the wedding and ensuing picture-taking, I chatted with one of the parishioners who had helped us set up for the wedding liturgy. She said she was originally from Philadelphia and belonged to a parish downtown in the city. She told me the story of the time a priest was sent to hear confessions at her parish. But his penances were unusually severe. To one penitent he said to pray 60 rosaries. To another he said to give away half their belongings. As you might suspect, people were walking out the confessional looking more than a little dazed and confused! Finally, one them notified the pastor who decided to investigate. He walked up to the confessional, opened the priest’s door, and there was a local transient with a sheepish grin on his face! Obviously not a priest, this local man knew enough about confessions to play the part of a priest.
Tuesday of this week is the Feast of All Saints, a holy day of obligation. As we know, canonized saints come from different eras in history. Their lives of service could vary a great deal from one to another. They are male and female, consecrated religious or secular, ordained or non-ordained. Some were martyrs while others were not. Many additional differences lie among them.
But all saints had this much in common: they weren’t playing the role of a holy person. They were holy people. They weren’t plaster statues with dramatic poses; rather, they were flesh and blood people with the same everyday joys and sorrows that we experience. We might think that every saint had rock-solid faith at every moment of their lives. But the reality is different. Many of them did struggle deeply with faith. They did have their “dark nights of the soul” when God seemed more absent than present. In this way, they are like us all.
The famous Catholic spiritual author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton gives us a profound insight about saintliness when he said this….
To be a saint is to be yourself. It is true to say that for me sanctity consists in being myself and for you sanctity consists of being yourself and that, in the last analysis, your sanctity will never be mine and mine will never be yours, except in the communion of charity and grace.
Turns out, to be ourselves is to discover who each of us is in God. That’s where we discover holiness. Our sins—no matter how prevalent or entrenched in our lives—do not define us. Our goodness does define us. The saints we honor found the grace they needed to discover their true selves. It enabled them to shine wherever they found darkness. They not only received the sacraments, they lived them.
Saints never acted the part. Rather, they were the part— part of God’s plan of salvation and new life.
