On Being a Saint, and Being Yourself

On All Saints’ Day, I find it especially delightful to be Catholic. There are so many saints to explore and enjoy. Being Protestant, at least in terms of awareness of the Saints, was like being in a very small family with few relatives to know or visit, even on holidays.

When I became Catholic, it was like waking up one morning in a very noisy household with many people using the bathroom and watching television and eating pancakes and scrambled eggs in the kitchen. Not all of those Saints are perfect or pleasant, but they all love me and encourage me as I’m growing up.

I was especially delighted to find the ones who were reputed to have faults, such as St. Jerome with his reportedly often nasty disposition. I imagine him as the very smart but very grouchy uncle in the recliner who is always watching the Discovery Channel and won’t share the remote control. He gives me hope for sanctity, especially when I consider the prospect of erratic premenopausal mood swings.

Father Thomas Merton, although not beatified (as far as I know), is a deep soul who had a great deal to do with my entering the Church. He was the first Catholic writer, other than Flannery O’Connor, who made me sit up and consider to what it meant to be Catholic, and what it might mean to be a saint.

In honor of All Saints Day, I am going to quote a substantial portion from Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation essay, Integrity.

“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints; they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.

They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint. For many absurd reasons, they are convinced that they are obliged to become somebody else who died two hundred years ago and who lived in circumstances utterly alien to their own.

They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else’s experiences or write somebody else’s poems or possess somebody else’s spirituality.

There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.

In great saints you find that perfect humility and perfect integrity coincide. The two turn out to be practically the same thing. The saint is unlike everybody else precisely because he is humble.”

Isn’t it interesting that All Saints’ Day is the morning after Halloween? The morning after so many people festively don masks and diverse identities to disguise themselves, we celebrate those amazing Christian people who somehow managed to be, above all, most fully themselves—the saints whom God intended them to be. From St. Benedict to St. Jerome to St. Therese, it is true that none of the saints imitated anyone but Christ. Each was most humbly, most fully himself or herself, before God. This is their sanctity, a gift of fullness from God’s own hand.

May God bless us so, on this All Saints’ Day, and every day.