Homily: Wanting; Falling; Finding

Year B / Ordinary Time / Thirty-first Sunday / All Saints (Solemnity)

Readings: Revelation 7.2-4, 9-14 / Psalm 23.1-2,3-4b. 5-6 (R/v 6) / I John 3.1-3 / Matthew 5.1-12a

What does it mean to be a saint? 

Our answers depend on the varied images of saints we hold dear, the countless stories of saints’ lives that inspire us, and the unwavering hopes we have in some saints to intercede for us.  

Whether it is St Francis of Assisi, or St Therese of Lisieux, St Ignatius of Loyola or St Anne, our answers speak about saints being holy people God sets apart. The quality of their Christian life or their heroic martyrdom distinguishes them as exemplary Christians. The Church holds them up as examples of how living the Christian life fully is the indeed the path to sainthood.

But it is God who makes the saint, not us. This contrasts with what we are so often told: be good, be selfless, be God-fearing, be God-like, and so become a saint.  

If God is our maker, then saint-making must be God’s work. Our work must simply be to give God permission to do this for us and to cooperate fully with God to complete it. 

Paul called the early Christians “saints” because he knew that saintliness has to do first of all with letting Jesus’ way, truth and life become the very manner God empowers us to become saints. Through baptism, God bestows a blessedness on believers to live this Christ-like life. This blessedness in every Christian is Paul’s reason for calling them “saints” in his letters to the early Christians in Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, and Rome. 

For Paul, ordinary Christians are saints because they allow the spirit of Jesus to cloak them in God’s love, to live the fullness of God’s life and to become one with God. This understanding of Christian saintliness from scripture is a far more hope-filled understanding of who  the saint is for you and me who often struggle to live the Christian life well. 

But we forget Paul’s understanding of saints because we are told so many times in Catechism class, in homilies and in biographies about holy men and women that saints are only those the Church canonizes as holy, righteous, pious, consecrated.  

But isn’t Paul’s insight about being a saint – even before becoming one – our rightful inheritance as God’s children? Our second reading assures us about this: as God’s children, we can hope that when we see God, we will be like God, for we will see God as God is. Saints know this truth. 

And what will God be like when saints see God? St Bernard of Clairvaux writes that God is good to those who seek him, for they will find no better gift for them that God himself. Indeed, God gives himself as prize, reward, and refreshment for the soul. The one who finds God, Bernard adds, is bound to repay God with love, even if this human love is much less than God’s boundless love. 

But the beauty of this exchange of love, Bernard notes, is paradoxically our assurance of salvation: for “no one can seek God who has not already found Him” (On Loving God, Bernard of Clairvaux). This paradox is indeed the key we have to surrender to God, if we want to let God open the doors of our lives wider and so enter to form us as God’s saints. This key will help us to want to seek God more, to want to know God more, to want to be with God more. The name of this key is “wanting to”.

“Wanting to” is indeed the advice Thomas Merton, Cistercian monk and spiritual writer, received about becoming a saint. 

In his biography, The Seven Story Mountain, Merton writes about a conversation he had with his friend, Lax, as they walked down Sixth Avenue in New York City. They talked about many things that friends talk about. Suddenly, Lax asked Thomas this question: “What do you want to be?” Thomas replied, “I don’t know; I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic”. “What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?” Lax inquired. Thomas provided several lame reasons that Lax rejected 

“What you should say” – Lax told Merton – “what you should say is that you want to be a saint.” This is how their conversation ended in Merton’s words:

   

A saint!  

The thought struck me as a little weird.  

I said: “How do you expect me to become a saint?”

 “By wanting to,” said Lax simply.

Indeed, becoming a saint has everything to do with wanting to find God who first finds us because God wants us to be saints. 

And isn’t this what Jesus is teaching his disciples in today’s gospel passage? First, that they should want to live the promise of the Beatitudes. Such beatitudes as being poor, meek, merciful, and clean of heart are the certain Christ-like ways that will surely lead them to God and to inheriting a place in God’s heavenly kingdom. And second, that they should want to take up the challenge of living out these beatitudes. This is how they will make the reign of God flourish for God’s children who are the blessed ones, the saints, both in the heavenly and the earthly, the future and the present.

Today, Jesus is inviting you and me to reflect on the depth of our wanting to become saints. Do we really want this so badly that we are prepared to let go of all that we have and are, and become poor for God to bless us even more?

Do we want to? The saints wanted to. They understood what Jesus really meant when he said: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven." The saints knew this need for God. We know it too from their life stories of wanting God so much that they threw themselves onto God’s mercy? 

And what did they find when they did so? That Jesus who came to redeem us had first descended so low that after this no one would be able to fall so low without falling into him (Hans Urs von Balthasar).

If the saints could fall into Jesus, it is because they were first and foremost connected to Jesus and lived in his ways. What about us who are Jesus’ disciples? Do we dare fall in our pains and fears, fall in our failings, and fall in our sinning into Jesus? I believe we can because whenever we fall, we will find Jesus already there for us. There to break our fall. There to catch us. There to hold and raise us up into life again. 

I’d like to suggest that it is when we can recognize our desperate need for God that we can truly let go and let ourselves fall backwards into Jesus’ compassionate embrace. This truth is always disconcerting but an exquisite refuge and relief. In this moment we will experience that wanting God the saints had.

On this Solemnity of All the Saints, let us then remember, celebrate and believe in this kind of wanting. It has led the saints to put everything else aside for the love of God in Jesus. And it will help us let God make us saints too.

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

Photo: www.theatlantic.com