All Saints Day 2007 & All Soul’s Day

Rocco at Whispers in the Loggia beat me to it and has highlighted Deacon Greg Kandra’s excellent Homily for All Sainst Day. But I’m going to quote Kandra, too, anyway:

Shortly after he converted to Catholicism in the late 1930s, Thomas Merton was walking the streets of New York with his friend, Robert Lax. Lax was Jewish, and he asked Merton what he wanted to be, now that he was Catholic.

“I don’t know,” Merton replied, adding simply that he wanted to be a good Catholic.

Lax stopped him in his tracks.

“What you should say,” he told him, “is that you want to be a saint!”

Merton was dumbfounded.

“How do you expect me to become a saint?,” Merton asked him.

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.”

You’ll want to read it all – it’s inspiring. However, do remember that when you tell God you want to be a Saint, particularly if you make a specific offer of yourself…you will be used, and used up.

Sainthood is not for wimps. :-)

Meanwhile the ever-interesting Patrick O’ Hannigan writes about heroic faith which rings very well on All Soul’s Day:

If you’ve pondered the paradoxical phrase, “triumph of the cross,” you’ve come near the mark Mother Teresa was talking about, and near to the heart of Christianity itself in the person of Jesus. In fact the whole canon of Christian saints depends on the assumption that heroic faith, if not misplaced, is ultimately the most enduring kind of success. Saint Paul is startlingly bold in his letter to the Romans, proclaiming that “all things work together for good to those who love God.” That he wrote those words about the order of grace after deicide had already been tried should tell us something about the mysterious strength of his conviction.

There is a secular analog to this same dynamic in the motto for the U.S. Marine Corps, which often finds success by being faithful. Any number of gurus will also tell you that happiness is a byproduct of other things you do, rather than a goal to be clutched at for its own sake.