Today the Church remembers her saints, those who have gone before us in the faith, whose names are written in our family Bibles, whose photographs hang upon our walls, whose voices we can almost hear if we’re quiet enough. We remember fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, children and friends. We remember pastors and teachers, missionaries and martyrs, servants known to the whole Church and those known only to God.
We also do something more than remember the dead. We ask ourselves: what kind of people are we becoming? Because the saints are not merely those who have finished the race; they are witnesses to the possibility that we, too, are in a journey toward holiness.
We need to hear that because we have grown accustomed to Christian language without Christian holiness, to talking about Christian ideals in another life without embracing the reality of Christian sanctification—our growth toward holiness—in this one. We speak of faith, yet sometimes our lives remain unchanged. We sing of grace while clinging to resentment. We confess Christ as Lord while serving the lesser lords of pride, greed, bitterness, envy, and indifference to the plight of others.
The gospel Jesus proclaimed offers something greater. Not merely forgiveness for yesterday but the possibility of holiness today. Not merely pardon from sin, but freedom from the power of sin, and in that freedom more and better life, here on earth, than we ever dreamed of having. That’s why the saints matter. They remind us that grace is not a theory, it’s a gift that can change the human heart and so change our lives here and now.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews tells us that, “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” we are to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (Heb. 12:1). We’re not running this race alone, and we’re not running it for our sakes alone. We are running it with the companioning witness and encouragement of those who have run the same race before us.
And we are running it because they need us to finish well. For the same writer tells us that “all of [the saints], though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, for God had provided something better, so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect” (11:39-40). The saints we remember today depend upon us for their perfection, for their wholeness, for their completion.
So we have a sacred responsibility, not only to God and our neighbors but to the saints who have gone before us and whom we celebrate today—a responsibility to help them complete their sanctification by completing ours. We have a sacred responsibility, as the writer says, to “go on toward perfection” (6:1), to go on toward our completion, to become perfectly suited for the purpose for which we are created, for that is what perfection means. We are to be holy as God is holy, perfect, complete, authentically ourselves (Lev. 19:2; Rom. 12:1; 1 Pet. 1:15-16).
That doesn’t mean becoming someone we are not, some better-than-thou ideal that we can never really live up to. Sainthood or holiness in this life is not grimness; it’s not religious pride; it’s not the ability to quote more scripture than your neighbor; it’s not making everyone around miserable in the name of righteousness. Being a saint, being made holy, means being who we are, authentically. To be holy, to grow into our sainthood, is to find out who we are, to discover our true self that lies behind all the masks we wear and all the roles we play—masks and roles assigned to us by our culture. Here’s what Thomas Merton wrote about that.
“Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied. With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. . . .
“Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny. We are free beings and [children] of God. This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in [God’s] creative freedom, in our own lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity” (“Things in Their Identity,” in New Seeds of Contemplation).
The way to becoming who we are can be a long and winding road, and we may not see the end of it until we get there. But in the great cloud of witnesses to our journey, we see Abraham, who trusted God when he couldn’t see the road ahead. We see Moses, who persevered through failure and opposition. Ruth is there, who chose faithfulness when the future was uncertain. We see David, who failed grievously and yet discovered the mercy of God. We hear Mary say, “Let it be unto me according to your word.” We see Peter denying his relationship with Christ and then being restored. We see Paul, beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, yet unable to stop proclaiming the gospel.
“So here’s what I want you to do,” St. Paul wrote, “God helping you. Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for [God]. Don’t become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out” (Rom. 12:1-2 The Message).
Holiness, sanctity, is not the privilege of a spiritual aristocracy. It’s the call of God addressed to all of us and to each one personally. Jesus invited us to be perfect (Matt. 5:48), to be holy, to live into the fullness of our sainthood, to be our true selves, to be our genuine, honest-to-God, gracefully eccentric selves. So let’s begin where we are. And, “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside [everything that would inhibit us], and run with perseverance the race that is set before [us], looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:1-2a).
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