Newsletter November 1st 2020 (All Saints Day)

Who is a saint?

Many of us have weird notions of what a saint looks like. Years ago, at the funeral in England of Princess Diana, Diana’s brother cautioned against making her into a kind of a saint. Addressing his dead sister he announced: ‘indeed to sanctify your memory would be to miss out on the very core of your being, your wonderfully mischievous sense of humour with the laugh that bent you double, your joy for life transmitted wherever you took your smile.’

But is it really true that the saints never broke the rules (St Augustine?), never experienced the dark night of the soul (The Little Flower?), never had a sense of humour? (‘God save us from sullen Saints’ — St Teresa of Avila), never broke into a great smile? The answer is, ‘of course it is not true.’ The saints were fully human. They struggled with temptation; they savoured life’s joy. On All Saint’s day I think of all the good people who have crossed my path and enriched my life — parents, class mates, parishioners here in the parish. They were not perfect, but they were in their own way great human beings.

The priest once asked the class: what do you have to do to become a saint? One hand shot up: ‘You have to die, Father’ said the little boy. In a sense of course he was right. But I think that I know many living saints who are truly living with the spirit of Christ and are on the way to eternal union with him.

Sanctity isn’t something we achieve. It is a divine impulse in which we share. It is much too big for us to experience alone. As we share in the experience of sin and death, so too can we share in holiness and life. Each person is already implanted with the Spirit and the grace of God. The main thing that can prevent us from living by the power of God’s grace is not being aware that we have it. We are all children of God, not later when we die, but now, at this very moment and all through our lives.