All Saints
Apocalypse 7:2-4,9-14 | Psalm 23(24):1-6 | 1 John 3:1-3 | Matthew 5:1-12a
Someone in St. Thomas Aquinas’ life once asked him this question:
What must I do to become a saint?
It might have been his sister, or a friend, or a stranger. It matters not, especially when compared to the good Doctor’s succinct answer for them, and for us:
Will it, desire it, want it.
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Fast-forward seven centuries, and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton recounts a game-changing conversation with his best friend Robert Lax in The Seven Storey Mountain. His account reflects all too painfully the situation we’ve all found ourselves in, so I’ll let his words speak for themselves:
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 expressed 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.”
But Lax said: “No. 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.”
A long time ago, St. Thomas Aquinas had said the same thing and it is something that is obvious to everybody who ever understood the Gospels. After Lax was gone, I thought about it, and it became obvious to me.
—Thomas Merton, O. C. S. O.; The Seven Storey Mountain (pp. 237-238)
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As we head to church to celebrate the feast of All Saints today, let us ponder these all-important questions:
Do I really want to be a saint?
Why not?
What’s keeping me from reaching for sainthood?
What am I waiting for?
And let us pray the novena that Christ Himself gave to the friar Don Dolindo Ruotolo a hundred years ago, 11 simple words both comforting and terrifying:
O Jesus, I abandon myself to you. Jesus, you take over.
Amen.