All Saints’ Day
November 1, 2015
Matthew 5:1-12a
“Blessed
are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven (Mat 5:10).”
Today, the Church is celebrating
the Solemnity of All Saints. They are those people who have gone ahead of us
and by the grace of God and their merits, have received the eternal life in
God. While enjoying their everlasting happiness with God, we believe that they
are also constantly praying for us here on earth and those souls in purgatory.
The Church has recognized some of her children as the saints through the
process of canonization, like recently canonized St. John Paul II and St. Pedro
Calungsod of the Philippines. However, we believe that through God’s mercy, even
more souls are in eternal bliss, even though we do not know who they are.
The word saint, in fact, is
coming from Latin word, Sanctus,
meaning ‘holy’. And, the Church reminds us that all of us are called to be
saints, that our vocation is holiness. Thus, by celebrating All Saints’ Day, we
turn our eyes to the saints who serve as our models in life of holiness. In
certain sense, our saints are heroes. They embodied the spirit of courage and
loyalty in the midst of extreme difficulties and dangers. St. Stephen, our
first martyr, refused to deny his faith despite being stoned to the death. St.
Maximillian Kolbe bravely traded his own life with a young father who was about
to be executed in a Nazi’s concentration camp.
However, being a hero is not
totally the same with being a saint. A hero in every story, serve as the main
character, the main protagonist. Without a hero a story or movie loses its
face. Normally, a hero is set against a villain, antagonist, or anti-hero. To
turn the movie into a super-movie, then make the hero into superhero, and his
enemy the super-villain. Superman needs brilliant Lex Luthor, twisted Bizarro,
and powerful Doomsday to beat. Spiderman fights mighty Green Goblin, venomous Venom
and cunning Dr. Octopus. The main idea is that heroes has face almost
unsurmountable difficulties, yet they prevail in the end. The hero must not
lose, because if he fails, the story ends in tragedy.
Unlike heroes, saints are not the
central figure of the story. Saints do not need to fight enemies and be
triumphant. Some saints, indeed, combated the devil and his cohorts, like St.
Benedict of Nursia and St. Anthony of the Desert, but that is not their primary
mission. In the eyes of the world, many of the saints are actually losers. They
are beaten down, stricken badly and hit by so many trials. The martyrs are just
hapless Christians who did not know to fight back and thus, were executed. St.
Dominic must be a rather boring man who only spoke to God and about God. It
must be difficult to mingle with St. Thomas Aquinas who spent practically his
life teaching and writing about God. St. Bernadette Soubirous, who received the
appearance of the Immaculate Conception in Lourdes, had to suffer a lot of
illness including extremely painful tuberculosis of the bone until her death.
Yet, their losses and failures are not a tragedy, because through these
difficulties, their lives are no longer pointing to themselves but to God. They
must decrease and God must increase.
A mother who wakes up early in
the morning, prepares breakfast for the family, brings their children to the
school, work until late afternoon, and still cook dinner, is a hero. But, a
mother who does the same sacrifices and yet teaches their children to pray and
give thanks always to God for the little things they have, is a saint. We are
called to be saints, and basically, to become a saint is to allow our lives to
point to God, instead to point to ourselves. Let us learn from the example of
our saints in heaven and continue to ask their prayers.
All the Saints in heaven, pray
for us!
Br. Valentinus Bayuhadi Ruseno, OP
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