And You Can Be As Holy As They Were

And You Can Be As Holy As They Were

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The Saints Were as Unusual as You Are - And You Can Be as Holy as They Have been
eleven/01/2010 08:23 am ET Updated Might 25, 2011
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Should you're like a number of the people who put up feedback on the Religion web page of HuffingtonPost, your main reaction to the news that at present is All Saints Day is likely to be: "Who cares?" Or for those who're in a more expansive temper: "God is a ridiculous, superstitious software used as a crutch by the delusional. Faith is a instrument for evil in the world. So the saints are simply fooled saps who've sacrificed their life for a lie."
If that's the case, you must most likely cease reading here, as a result of - spoiler alert! - you in all probability won't like what I will say.
But even should you're a believer, it's possible you'll suppose that the saints don't have anything to do with your own life. You've got no doubt read some of these gory stories of women and men having their eyes plucked out, or tongues lower out, or bodies devoured by lions within the Coliseum, not to mention stories of their being beheaded, drawn and quartered and so forth. Probably the most properly-known icons in the Catholic Church is that of St. Lucy , the third-century martyr pictured holding her eyeballs on a silver platter, the image of her own grotesque finish.
"Ugh," you may think. "I'm alleged to emulate that?"
For those who're squeamish and might't bear to consider the sufferings that the martyrs endured for his or her faith (and I have never even mentioned the destiny of St. Jean de Brébeuf ) you might as a substitute consider saints who led ultra-pious lives, like St. Thérèse of Lisieux , the nineteenth-century Carmelite nun who refused to say a harsh phrase to anybody; or ultra-ascetic lives like St. Simon Stylites , the fifth-century Christian who lived atop a pillar for years on finish; or ultra-energetic lives like Blessed Teresa of Calcutta aka Mom Teresa , who, properly, you understand what she did.
And you may nonetheless ask: What do all these hyperreligious lives should do it me?
The brief answer is: lots.
While you read the entire tales of the lives of these saints, and shift your focus from the ugly particulars of their martyrdoms and their more excessive ascetical practices, you would possibly meet people who can train you about being who you are. For every saint lived out his or her call to observe God in a person means, tailored to their very own personalities; and while some of elements of their biographies seem odd to us as we speak (like all life before, say, 1900 does), for those who dig beneath the surface of their often-puzzling lives, you could discover one thing that you would possibly want to emulate: generosity, charity and love.
Their lives are far richer than tales of bloody deaths or overblown feats of prayer. They were human, after all, and needed to face the same struggles we do. For instance, that they had difficulties with their households: St. Thomas Aquinas' family was so opposed to his getting into the Dominican order in the 13th century that they locked him up in a jail. They suffered from bodily illnesses: St. Francis of Assisi spent a great deal of his later life battling horrible eye infections. And so they confronted difficulties from the spiritual organizations to which they belonged: St. Ignatius of Loyola , the sixteenth-century founder of the Jesuit order, was a number of times thrown into jail by the Inquisition, which was suspicious of his methods of praying.
The saints were - and right here is one thing we normally overlook - human. ("Identical to us," because the celeb mags say about their topics.) All of them tried the best they could to discover a way to God throughout their own times, in their own circumstances and given their own limited worldviews. That goes slightly way to explaining a number of the practices that they undertook, which to our minds seem utterly outlandish. St. Aloysius Gonzaga , a younger sixteenth-century Jesuit, for instance, maintained strict "custody of the eyes," which meant that he prevented wanting women within the face to protect his modesty.
Ridiculous? After all. However it wasn't seen so in his time. Which begs the apparent question: What practices, religious or in any other case, of our time will look absurd in one other 300 years?
Oh, actually? Nothing you do goes to look silly, ridiculous and even offensive in 300 years? Don't be so positive. It's in all probability best to not dismiss a saint who, in any case, was a creature of his time and place and of the mores of that point and place. Like all of us are.
Higher to have a look at their entire lives, not simply the bizarre tales that everyone normally focuses on. Then their relevance to our entire lives becomes clearer. St. Thomas Aquinas, mired as he was in his 13th-century European worldview, nonetheless spent most of his grownup life meditating on the connection between religion and reason and spent years writing his Summa Theologica , a textual content that asked difficult questions on God, about nature and science, about cause and indeed about virtually every human expertise. St. Thomas would first ask a query like "Whether God exists," and then he would contemplate the entire related objections to the argument at hand, fastidiously answering them one by one.
At a time when religion was merely one thing to be believed in, no questions requested, St. Thomas reminded his contemporaries of the worth of reason. An actual model for his time. For ours, too.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the cosseted product of an overheated nineteenth-century French Catholic piety, decided that her life, which was circumscribed behind the partitions of her Carmelite monastery, was to be targeted on a single factor: love. This, she decided, was one thing inside her grasp. So followed what she referred to as her " Little Method ," doing great issues with love - washing dishes, scrubbing flooring, praying without obvious outcomes at occasions and placing up with sisters who irked her. That is one thing that everyone can relate to, even if you do not plan to spend your life cloistered in a Carmelite monastery.
And St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the Jesuit who maintained the "custody of the eyes," relinquished an enormous fortune and turned down a noble title to commit his life to God and to caring for the poor. The man you have been in all probability laughing at just a few paragraphs ago died caring for plague victims in Rome, at age 22, and is now typically looked to by victims of HIV/AIDS as their patron saint
The lives of the saints, elements of which appear confusing, weird and misguided, are - when you understand the whole story - really tales of love. And they can offer some essential lessons for all of us. If we just allow them to.
So, blissful All Saints' Day.
Comply with Rev. James Martin, S.J. on Twitter: /JamesMartinSJ
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