Sainthood: Crazy Dream or Current Call?

Growing up, I was often discouraged that married saints were in the minority (as I wanted to be a saint and a mother in my stubborn, girlish mind). My disgruntled fuming actually increased when my parents pointed me to books featuring such multi-faceted models, because so many of them also entered religious life or devoted themselves to lives of prayer at some point – some couples even mutually agreeing to live out the rest of their married life in seclusion and prayer. Couldn’t one be a saint just living in the world?

But now, some days, I wonder…I think back to one day this week that begun with a toddler’s poop explosion, and then was full with sweeping up dust and ash and mouse droppings while constantly cajoling a teary toddler and frustrated four year old to hush…Hey, quiet convent life doesn’t sound too bad. In fact, give me those desert or mountain hermitages! Maybe separating from one’s spouse so that both could enter religious life was actually the medieval version of successful NFP…Gosh. I’m SO smart. Untangled that mystery! Wonder if I should take a shot at what those saints were thinking who liked to live and pray atop of pillars…

However their lives began or ended, these saints were just people. Perhaps they lived in different circumstances but they possessed the same passions, the same fears, and shared the same struggles.

Another paradox struck me this All Saint’s Day, watching my children gear up in their saintly habits (thankfully, the 8-year-old orchestrated this year’s costumes for me) and hearing them and all their friends murmur their favorite saint that year as we parents directed an impromptu litany of the saints. This feast day is directed towards the celebration of all the unnamed saints in heaven, all those holy men and women who have preceded us through those pearly gates but remain largely unknown. Perhaps that communion of faithful include grandparents, old friends and mentors, and we can remember how they glorified God in their little un-publicized lives. Which can give us all hope as we stumble and sweep up today’s messes.

Why then do we encourage children to dress up as those holy men and women we honor and remember individually? Parents seem to have two goals in this endeavor: to remind their little ones how fun our reunion in heaven will be and show them that they, too, can be there one day as their favorite saint is now!  While this tradition is beautiful and I seek to recall it throughout the year by adding festivities to the days we honor each child’s patron saint or our family’s “adopted” saints, I stopped now and wondered,

Am I really doing anything to remind myself that I too am called to sainthood?

It’s so easy for this call to be drowned out in the busyness of work and the chaos of life. As the years pass, I see my ideals tarnished with cynicism, my dreams dusted and pushed back with defeat, and my life’s mission trivialized by the importance of getting through today. My childhood goal of being a saint is right up there with my childish desires to become famous and own a grand piano and find that year’s Easter basket. In other words, it’s become a little lost.

There is beauty in the ordinary, love is accomplished in the little things, and my mission is found living in this present moment.

But we can’t lose sight of the BIGNESS of what we’re called to.

We have to look forward to the victor’s crown at the end of the race.

Earlier this week, we read Jesus’s words, “Behold, I cast out demons and I perform healings today and tomorrow, and on the third day I accomplish my purpose. Yet I must continue on my way today, tomorrow, and the following day…” (Luke 13:32) Jesus, too was thinking of what had to be accomplished “today, tomorrow, and the following day” yet his whole reason for going through these days was his end goal – to die.

If I contrast that with my hope’s end – to be happy beyond imagining with Him in heaven – can I not be as motivated to “continue on my way today, tomorrow, and the following day”?

And this feast shouldn’t just call me on to greater perseverance in my duties – it should also recall to me how this end will be accomplished – by knowing Him and his works. The poet T. S. Eliot wrote “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate / When the last of earth left to discover / Is that which was the beginning” (Little Gidding). The end will be the same as where we began. Home. Him.

Remember that delightful feeling of going home? Shrugging off whatever worries hunch your shoulders to be greeted by Mom or Dad with a hug or a warm meal? Visiting that well-loved view from your old window or stopping to touch the gnarled bark on your favorite tree? It’s still the same and yet always a little different.

Well, we’re all going home. To the one who knows us the best. And I mean “know” here in its deepest sense.

Knowing someone or something so deeply that it becomes part of you and you are joined to it until there’s no longer this and the other but one.

This is also why we can’t fully envision what heaven will be like. In the words of St. John, “We are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2.) If we completely knew what He was and what heaven was, then we’d already be participating fully in that Beatific Vision. How do we move towards this union? By striving to know Him more and more – in the gentle kindness of sharing our space and time and talents with our family, in the quiet and the rushed prayers, in the love with which we sweep, the sweat by which we build each home to reflect our Home, and the cardboard and fabric from which we fashion saintly costumes year after year. Until that knowing passes over into being.

So, continue onward today and tomorrow. Remind yourself that today’s tasks matter because your final goal matters.

Imbue each part of every day with the meaning that it leads to the peace of fully loving and being fully loved.

The saints were simply those who knew this partially. And reached out for the grace that was already offered them.  

“May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, 
that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, 
what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones, 
and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe” 
(Ephesians 1:18-19).