This morning at mass, I listened to Father Gary give an All Saint’s Day homily about how during our life we must continually choose sainthood. I’ve heard this rallying cry before; we, as humans, are born for greatness. We are made to belong to God and to achieve sainthood. And I’m not sure this lesson has ever fully clicked for me.
In my head, I know some saints are never formally recognized by the church, and that the path to sainthood looks different for everyone; Joan of Arc’s approach, for instance, was radically different than that of St. Therese of Lisieux. Saint John Henry Newman lived a vastly different life than Saint Charles Lwanga. And yet they are all saints.
Still, sainthood, to me, has always felt somewhat out of my reach. Perhaps it’s because I find it difficult to reflect on death, or perhaps it’s because the saints I know best feel so distant from the life I lead and the times in which I’ve lived. Perhaps it’s because I’m afraid of what achieving sainthood would mean for my time on earth, because even Therese’s Little Way is a radical way of living and loving those around you.
But recently, I’ve been finding a lot of gentle nudges towards what we’re called to be as Christians. The first of these was seeing the incorrupt body of Blessed Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old boy buried in his sweatshirt and jeans, all over social media. I knew nothing about him before his beatification, but his story is eerily fitting for the times we find ourselves in. He used the internet to evangelize, and right now, as Ireland is in its second Level 5 lockdown, I’ve been forced to look to the internet more and more as a tool of evangelization. Carlo died in 1991, and he was much younger than I am now. It was honestly both empowering and frightening, because it was one of the first times I’ve realized that sainthood is achievable, even though I’m young and living in modern times.
The second nudge was how often the word “witness” has been popping up in my everyday life recently. It’s not an uncommon word, I suppose, but recently I’ve been praying with this verse from Hebrews: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us…” The idea of a cloud of witnesses, a great multitude of saints who have gone before us, gives me a lot of comfort, and ever since praying with this verse, I have begun to find the ways in which I am being called to be a witness of God’s love in the world.
I suppose what I mean to say, in this slightly rambling, stream-of-consciousness blog, is that sainthood is real and attainable, and it’s also frightening. It’s a call to live a radical life of love and witness, a call to take the stories of saints who have gone before us as testimony, but to forge our own path ahead. I think I’ve always thought of sainthood as a distant possibility rather than a call to be better and to choose God every moment of every day. But as we go into this month, remembering those who have gone on before us, I feel a new commitment to joining the cloud of witnesses and living out the call to sainthood.
Saint Therese of Lisieux Dressed as Saint Joan of Arc
Blessed Carlo Acutis
