For All the Saints

I wrote this on All Saints Day this year. And as I wrote it, the tune Sine Nomine to which we yearly sing “For all the saints who from their glories rest… was going through my head, just as it had been all day. But rather than thinking about the words I have sung so often, I found myself thinking about who or what a saint really is… and let me tell you, there are many ideas out there. A saint is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a good and holy person and especially one who the Christian church declared to be worthy of special honour, or a person who is very good, helpful or patient.

“A man does not have to be an angel in order to be a saint.” Albert Schweitzer

This is demonstrably true. One only has to look at those officially named saints by the church. There is the fourth century St. Augustine of Hippo, who was a playboy of sorts. There there was Junipero Serra who was tied to a system that decimated the population of Native Americans ad was canonized by Pope Francis in 2015. Or there is Saint Barbara who became a martyred saint in the fourth century… but there is no evidence that she ever existed. Apparently, one doesn’t even have to be real!

“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” Dorothy Day

I can relate to what Dorothy Day is saying here. (Day was an activist who worked for social causes such as pacifism and women’s suffrage, tackling issues of social justice through the Catholic Worker Movement. She died in 1980.) After all, how often have you heard a conversation that goes something duke this: “Susie has so much patience dealing with…. [you name it].” To be met with the response “She’s a saint!”. The underlying and unstated collolary to that response is “and that lets me out of doing the same thing”. Yes, saints are dismissed out of hand, as if being a saint meant there was no effort, no sacrifice or pain involved.

“Saints are those who managed to love more than we did.” Sorin Cerin,

Perhaps Cerin has come the closest of these three when he described a saint as someone who managed to love.

These are the saints we see in our lives, the people who made a difference for us because they managed to love us, to love others, to love the planet. We all have those people in our lives either now or in the past without whom our lives would be infinitely poorer, without whom we would be infinitely less. It is those people who I thought about on this day. I thanked them wordlessly, for being saints in my life.

"To me, there are saints everyday. They stand up and help others and live for others and do things for others." Theodore Melfi

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