Saints in the Making

As a young girl I remember wanting to be a saint. Of course, I didn’t really understand what that meant. I only had a basic awareness that it involved being acknowledged for doing a good job and, honestly, who doesn’t want that? As I got older the ease of childhood faith faded. My faith has gone through many ups and downs and, sadly, even includes a long parting from church in general and Catholicism in particular.

Mercifully, the Lord is a relentless pursuer of His children and I eventually found my way home to the Catholic Church. The question of sainthood somehow percolated to the top of discussion early upon my return and it has been pulled to the forefront of my mind again recently. So, today I went back to the book that helped paint the picture clearly in my mind, The Truth of Catholicism, by George Weigel.

I do not intend to attempt here a report or essay on Weigel’s book or even his full treatment of the topic, but rather to highlight a few of his key points and thus, hopefully, encourage you to further reading on the matter.

First, Weigel looks briefly at George Orwell’s, 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s, Brave New World. These days it is hard not to reflect on works such as these and wonder what it means for the future as we inch precariously close to the realities they only imagined. Already we have things like genetic engineering (the first child born with DNA from three parents was reportedly born in April), selective reduction “to manage pregnancy” and even “gestational carriers” or “hosts” (surrogate mothers) that not so long ago seemed quite farfetched. In examining the fictional worlds created in these books, Weigel notes:

Huxley’s brave new world is not miserably oppressive, like the jackbooted world of 1984; Huxley’s is a happy antiutopia. But it is a world of stunted humanity: a world of souls without longing, without passion, without sacrifice, without suffering, without surprises or desire – in a word, a world without love. What made such a world seem humane to its creators? The conviction that made the brave new world possible was the conviction that the world and the human beings who inhabit it are essentially purposeless…

Then Weigel asks:

What does the Catholic Church and the Catholic vision of things have to say about the human future? “What will become of us?” is a question for Christians, too – and fittingly enough, because it was the cry of Jesus from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27.46). Catholics believe that God’s ultimate answer to Christ’s question, and ours, was given in the resurrection. But what does that say about us now? God’s promise of eternal beatitude can seem a long way off, no matter how old we are. What is to become of us between now and then?

The answer in brief: we must become saints.

I love it! “We must become saints.” But what does that mean, really? Weigel quotes from Letters of Evelyn Waugh, “each individual has his own peculiar form of sanctity which he must achieve or parish. It is no good my saying, ‘I wish I were more like Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross.’ I can only be St. Evelyn Waugh…” So, ultimately, I can only ever be me, but the goal is to be the absolute best version of me, the me that God intended me to be. Weigel highlights that key in Waugh’s summation are “two facets of the Catholic view of who we are and what we must become.” Namely, “sainthood is everyone’s destiny” and “sainthood is not generic, but quite specific.” I must strive to be St. Chanacee, because being another St. Joan is absolutely unattainable. She was as unique as I am.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in his inaugural homily, emphasized that “[w]e are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” Isn’t it interesting that becoming a saint is what we must do to become who we are meant to be? That there is a specific task assigned to each one of us that no one else can fulfill? And yet, by rising to the occasion of our very calling, fulfilling the role that we alone were made for, by doing just that to the best of our abilities and by the Grace of God, we become a saint. Whichever your starting point, I want to be a saint or I want to fulfill my God-given destiny, it matters not, because one necessitates and fulfills the other. They are inseparable. This means that each of us, if we are truly striving to fulfill our destiny, is a saint in the making.