All Saints' Day: We Should All Desire to Be Saints

Today is All Saints' Day when the Church commemorates all saints, whether known or unknown. It is a Holy Day of Obligation.

I repost this for today's feast of All Saints' Day because I simply love this excerpt from The Seven Storey Mountain ... and the meditation still holds true for me.

“What you should say”– Lax told me — ”what you should say is that you want to be a saint.”

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.

“I can’t be a saint,” I said, “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that they must reach: the cowardice that says: “I am satisfied to save my soul, to keep out of mortal sin,” but which means, by those words: “I do not want to give up my sins and my attachments.”

Lax said: “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

This kept returning to my mind after I read it.

Yes, the goal is to get to Heaven, but didn't I expect a stopover in Purgatory? Didn't everyone I talked to laugh somewhat about how long they'd be stuck there too?

It struck me that what this attitude reflects is not aiming for Heaven, but settling for Purgatory. We should be happy that Purgatory is there like the net under tightrope walkers, to catch us if we fall short. But we should be aiming for, and expecting, to achieve our greatest potential ... that for which God created each and every one of us. That with His grace and our cooperation we can each be a saint.

St. Teresa of Avila crossed my mind. St. John of the Cross. You know where I'm going with this right? Saint Teresa of Calcutta (a.k.a. Mother Teresa). The dark night of the soul. I know that these saints thought it worthwhile but I'm not into signing up for that duty.

I then thought of my grandfather, Raymond. A wonderful man, always happy and cheerful, willing to work hard to help anyone who needed it ... an anonymous saint to the Church but one to all who knew him. No dark night of the soul there. Yet, I'm sure he skipped right over Purgatory. Would I be willing to follow his example? Of course.

I thought of my patron, Saint Martha (you know, of the "Mary has chosen the better part" story). The last time we see her serving is notably different from the first. Mary is washing Jesus' feet and Martha is mentioned as serving in the background. To me that says she has learned the lesson Jesus gave her about "the better part." Would I be willing to follow her example? Natch.

My glance fell on a book I recently received about Solanus Casey, a favorite of mine because he was a humble porter whose holiness shown through to the people of Detroit. Similar to St. John Vianney, another favorite of mine (yes, I have lots of favorites), in that both found studies difficult and consequently were not thought much of by their orders.

Of course, it was borne in upon me yet again that we have so many examples of all the different sorts of saints God makes to suit each time and place. Why I would feel that it necessarily requires a "dark night of the soul" I don't know ... how silly of me!

The culmination of all this thinking took place last night while I was waiting for the Vigil Mass to begin. I was saying the rosary (more about that in another post) and kept coming back to the subject of saints. I got a growing feeling of excitement and anticipation at the unknown future when we completely give ourselves over to God ... when we desire to become a saint. Nothing new here intellectually that's sure, but for me it is that sense of possibilities, of waiting for a surprise ... and that is always what we discover when God is involved.

I'm not settling any more. I'm aiming higher.

Isn't this gorgeous? There's more where that came from ... Recta Ratio.

St. John Bosco's Ghost Story

This is a little reminder that All Saints' Day is on Tuesday (formerly known as All Hallow's Day), without which we would not have Hallowe'en (formerly known as All Hallow's Eve).

Nothing like a saint telling a ghost story to both celebrate spookiness and also ... saintliness!

While a young man, St. John Bosco (1815-1888) and his friend, Comollo, agreed that whoever died first would return and give a sign about the state of their soul. Comollo died on April 2, 1839. The evening following the funeral, Bosco sat sleepless on his bed in the room he shared with twenty seminarians.

“Midnight struck and I then heard a dull rolling sound from the end of the passage, which grew ever more clear, loud and deep, the nearer it came. It sounded as though a heavy dray were being drawn by many horses, like a railway train, almost like the discharge of a cannon…While the noise came nearer the dormitory, the walls, ceiling and floor of the passage re-echoed and trembled behind it…

Then the door opened violently of its own accord without anybody seeing anything except a dim light of changing colour that seemed to control the sound…Then a voice was clearly heard, ‘Bosco, Bosco, Bosco, I am saved.’… The seminarists leapt out of bed and fled without knowing where to go. … for a long time there was no other subject of conversation in the seminary.”

All Saints Day (Holy Day of Obligation): We Must All Desire to Be Saints

Reposted from last year ... because it still holds true for me.

The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs (about 1423-24), Fra Angelico, via Wikipedia

Therefore, another one of those times that turned out to be historical, as far as my own soul is concerned, was when Lax and I were walking down Sixth Avenue, one night in the spring. The Street was all torn up and trenched and banked high with dirt and marked out. with red lanterns where they were digging the subway, and we picked our way along the fronts of the dark little stores, going downtown to Greenwich Village. I forget what we were arguing about, but in the end Lax suddenly turned around and asked me the question:

“What do you want to be, anyway?”

I could not say, “I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews in the back pages of the Times Book Review,” or “Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman English at the New Life Social Institute for Progress and Culture,” so I put the thing on the spiritual plane, where I knew it belonged and said:

“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?”

The explanation I gave was lame enough, and ex pressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it at all.

Lax did not accept it.

“What you should say”– he told me — ”what you should say is that you want to be a saint.”

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.

“I can’t be a saint,” I said, “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that they must reach: the cowardice that says: “I am satisfied to save my soul, to keep out of mortal sin,” but which means, by those words: “I do not want to give up my sins and my attachments.”

Lax said: “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

Looking back I see that I have posted the quote about desiring to be a saint every year.

Finally having listened to most of The Seven Storey Mountain, though, I know that the context provided by Merton's confession of inner thoughts is key to the desire.

At least that is the case for me.

I, too, like Merton, use the saints' holiness as an excuse for laxness and lukewarmness.

Once I realized this, I also realized the simplicity and truth of Lax's statement, "All you have to do is desire it."

I have begun focusing on that desire more ever since that self-discovery.

Obviously, I have not become a saint. For one thing, saints usually take very long times to grow and mature. I am no exception.

However, I can say that I recently noticed a big change in that my desire to be a saint has grown by leaps and bounds. It is the center of my prayer. It sometimes bobs to the surface just when I need a hint to put a rein on undesirable behavior.

In turning my desire over to God, He has responded by letting that desire increase.

It is not an obsession but it is always there and often is the center of all my prayer.

I count that as a great grace and today, on All Saints' Day, it helps me look at the great cloud of witnesses and feel closer to them, my brothers and sisters of the Church Triumphant who are cheering all of us on in our race to Heaven.

They, too, had that great desire.

They let that desire and love push them past fear, lukewarmness, laziness, and any other impediments.

They put themselves into God's hands to see what He would make of them.

Their hearts were changed and they, in turn, changed the world around them as they showed God's love for us all.

I pray that He will do the same with me and with you.

All we must do is desire it.

That seems too simple, doesn't it? We have lives to live, families, supper to cook, houses to clean, and so forth and so on. Certainly these are the mental objections I raise sometimes.

The problem is in thinking that the saints waited until their schedules were clear to do great things for God.

OR, in thinking that there are no saints that do regular things.

My grandfather is one of those saints who this feast day is for ... a saint that the Church doesn't know about. He was a businessman, a father, a husband, a grandfather (possibly the best ever), a neighbor, and to the cursory glance he was ordinary.

Everyone who ever knew him though, knew one thing. He was a saint among us.

Just as surely as Mother Teresa. Just as surely as St. Patrick. Just as surely as any saint you want to name.

He did it all within the confines of living his "ordinary" life.

If God put me or you into the midst of an "ordinary" life, then what does He want us to do?

He wants us to transform it into an extraordinary life while cooking, cleaning, going to work, buying groceries, mowing the lawn, and loving all those around us.

So, we can't let ourselves off the hook.

There is no other time.

All we have is now.

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.

Mother Teresa