I have been thinking about saints a lot recently. Not any particular saint, but just saints in general. You see, a few years ago I started jokingly (but also half seriously) saying that my New Year’s resolution was to become a saint. Not surprisingly, I have learned more about failing in that endeavor than I have about succeeding.
This was brought home to me recently during a rosary or morning prayer or something where I was saying the Our Father, and the line, “Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven” jumped out at me.
How many millions of times have I said that prayer, yet that line has never hit me as it has over the last few weeks. Kathleen and I were talking it over when I shared it with her, and we agreed that it was actually a terrifying prayer, when you really think about it. I mean really, we are praying that we be given the grace to obey God the way the saints and angels in Heaven obey Him. Kathleen described it as “instant and complete obedience to absolutely every single little command.”
Let that sink in for a second.
This means that when Evie cries in the night and I scowl to myself before getting up, I am not doing God’s will “as it is in Heaven.” Anything less than instantly leaping out of bed with a hearty “Thank-you, Lord, for this opportunity to serve you in the least of your brethren” is a deficiency of obedience. The delaying I indulged in over giving up video games is a prime example of delayed, and therefore imperfect obedience.
Think I’m being rather hard on myself? What of Jesus’ command, “Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” He might as well say, “Be ye a blazing ball of light as the sun is a blazing ball of light,” and yet He does say it.
So I was thinking about the saints, and how they answered that call. They were not people who did not sin, but people who desired nothing in the world more than they desired to please Jesus. They were absolutely obsessed; that was their sole goal in life. As Kathleen pointed out, it’s easy to say “I want to become a saint.” Living it out is another matter entirely. It truly is “A condition of complete simplicity / Costing not less than everything.”
The saints became saints because they were heroically holy. Our attitude tends to be, “Wow, that is amazing! Good for them! Unfortunately, I am not called to that height. I am just an ordinary Catholic. I am not trying for absolute perfection, I’m just hoping to squeeze by when I die. I know I’ll be spending a long time in purgatory, but I’m okay with that.”
It reminds me of Cardinal Kasper’s recent interview quote:
“To live together as brother and sister? Of course I have high respect for those who are doing this. But it’s a heroic act, and heroism is not for the average Christian.”
Umm… Excuse me? Whatever happened to obedience unto death?
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.
If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me;
and where I am, there My servant will be also.”
~ John 12:24-26
What happened to,
“He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me;
and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.
And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.”
~ Matthew 10:37-38
What about,
“And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.
For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.”
~ Matthew 5:30
In thinking about the saints, I am beginning to realize that heroic sanctity is not an extraordinary call. It is just the standard for getting into Heaven. There is no “squeaking by.” There is no, “just making it.” Even if I am not trying for absolute perfection, absolute perfection is still the bare minimum for entry into Heaven. Therefore, if I am not trying for absolute perfection, I am not trying to get into heaven at all.
Why? Because Heaven is,
“We shall be like God, for we shall see Him as He is.”
~ 1 John 3:2
Of course instantly I cry out with the apostles, “Lord, then who can be saved?” And I am comforted by Jesus’ reply, “For man this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” I am comforted, but there is a hint of false comfort in my comfort. When Jesus said, “With God all things are possible,” my first instinct is to say, “Okay, whoosh! I won’t be absolutely perfect, but God in His Mercy will let me in anyway.”
But no, that is not actually what Jesus is promising. Rather, He is assuring me that I won’t be absolutely perfect, but that God in His Mercy will perfect me.
That is what Mercy is. That is what Mercy does. That is why we as Catholics recognize the necessity of Purgatory. It is the process of being perfected. Those opportunities for growth in virtue that we let slip by are not optional. God does not assign extra credit, because there is no extra credit. Every single assignment is part of the curriculum, designed to educate and shape us in a specific way that we must be educated and shaped in order to “Be like Him by seeing Him as He Is.” Any opportunity passed up is not just a missed opportunity, but a stunted growth, which must be redeemed and set right.
One more point about that was suggested to me by the experience of Mother Teresa, who went through several decades of intense, almost completely unrelenting, spiritual darkness. It was a purifying and sanctifying darkness, and yet I had often wondered about it. Surely, if anyone had been purified it was Mother Teresa. She made a vow to refuse Jesus absolutely nothing, and she actually kept it. What more did she have to be purified of?
Then I realized that I was thinking of purification as a negative process, that is, as a stripping away of faults and blemishes to reveal the creature God intended underneath. By definition, this would have to be a finite process, because you can only remove until there is nothing left to remove, and there is no such thing as an infinite number of faults. Negative purification has to end sometime.
But what it isn’t a negative process, or at least not completely, perhaps not even most fundamentally. What if purgation is not about the removal of vice and blemish, but the increase of virtue and perfections? That is a positive process, and by definition it can be neverending. God’s goodness and perfection are infinite, so there is no end to the amount of good that He can share with a receptive soul.
Is that why the greatest saints have suffered the most? Not because they had so many faults that needed to be purged away (though that may have been initially the case), but because they had so much room to grow in perfection, and this growth takes the form of pain in this fallen world? Is that part of what Jesus meant when He said, “he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me” and “If anyone serves Me, He must follow Me“?
If so, then once again, it doesn’t seem to be an optional extra-credit sort of thing, and I have a lot of work to do.
Or rather, Jesus does.
