Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Greater than the greatest greatness

Homily: All Saints – Cycle B
          “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  Although it may seem like an innocuous question at first, this is actually a great question to ask kids as it often opens up a chance to see into their hearts.  For some reason, somewhere around the beginning of high school, we stop asking kids what they want to be and start asking them what they want to do.  As adults, we often stick with that language: resigning ourselves to a life of doing something instead of being something.
          This is why asking kids this question is so great: because a kid is going to tell you the deepest longings of his or her heart.  “I want to be a doctor” or “a fireman”, or “a teacher” or “a nurse” or “a race car driver” or even “a mom” or “a dad”.  And what are these kids all saying when they reply with one of these “careers”?  They’re saying “I want to be great.”  Each kid, when he or she looks at one of these careers, thinks to him or herself “That person is great, and I want to be that person.”  Obviously, this isn’t a conscious thought, because kids don’t think like that; and so perhaps it would be better to say that it is a “movement of the heart” that each kid experiences that speaks to an innate desire for greatness.
          Why is this innate desire within us?  Well, because in God we are destined for glory.  In the second reading from the first letter of Saint John we read: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.  We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”  What else can he mean when he says “we shall be like him” except “we shall be like him in his glory”?  As children of God, we are destined to be like him, who is all-glorious; thus, we are destined for glory: that is, to be great beyond all imagination.  This, my friends, is what it means to be a saint.
          Unfortunately, however, we seem to have lost the connection between achieving saintliness and human excellence.  In other words, we’ve decided, it seems, that “greatness” and “saintliness” are different ambitions; and that if you want to achieve one you have to give up your hopes for the other.  But I’m here to tell you, my friends, that there is no greater greatness that you can achieve that is any greater than becoming a saint!
          It’s true that many saints were despised in their own times and seemed to eschew greatness while on earth—Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Anthony of the Desert, or any of the Martyrs—but that was because in their times the idea of greatness was a distorted one: these saints were great because they refused the lure of a distorted notion of greatness—a “this-world-only greatness”—in favor of the heroic greatness of preserving in virtue in spite of resistance.  Still other saints, of course, achieved great things in this world—Saint Louis IX of France, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary… a king and a queen! …or perhaps a more modern example, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta—yet their worldly recognition was only a reflection of the appreciation that the world gave to them for persevering in heroic virtue throughout their lives.  Therefore, we can see that true greatness—heroic greatness—comes when we pursue saintliness.
          Let’s take a look, therefore, at that last example that I named: Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (or “Mother Teresa”).  I think that most people you encounter would agree that Mother Teresa was a great human being.  This little woman from Albania, who strove simply to respond to the Lord’s call to care for the world’s poorest in the streets of Calcutta, had world-wide influence: not because she was a skilled politician or was business savvy, but rather because she strove for saintliness in everything that she did; and in achieving this heroic greatness she awakened that dormant desire for greatness in the hearts of everyone that she met.
          What Mother Teresa proved—and what all the saints prove, really—is that true greatness is found when we live the Beatitudes: for she was poor in spirit before she was poor, she mourned for the most neglected in the streets of Calcutta, she was meek in how she approached others and in her own perception of her work, she hungered and thirsted for righteousness both for herself and especially for others, she was merciful to all whom she encountered, she strove to remain clean of heart by frequently confessing her sins, she strove to make peace because she saw war and conflict as cause of so much injustice, and she was persecuted by those who wrongly saw in her a veiled attempt to gain influence and power in the world.  Mother Teresa achieved greatness, not in spite of her saintliness, but precisely because of it.
          My brothers and sisters, All Saints Day is celebration of the women and men who have gone before us having achieved greatness precisely in their saintliness.  And it is a reminder to each of us of our need to pursue the greatness that we are destined for—to be glorified like God in heaven—by pursuing heroic virtue in this world as modeled for us in the saints.  Our inspiration?  Saint John gives this to us in our second reading when he says, “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called children of God” and “Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure.”
          It’s true, isn’t it, that when we know that we are someone’s beloved, and when we desire to be loved by that person, we strive to make ourselves better for that person, don’t we?  Raise your hand if you’ve ever had that sappy romantic moment when you wanted to say to your best friend, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife, “You make me want to be a better person”.  Saint John is naming that for us in our relationship with God.  If we know that we are beloved by God, and if we desire to be God’s beloved, then we will make ourselves “pure” so as to be found even more favorable by God.  It’s not vanity, and it’s not trying to make God love us; rather, it is a response to being loved.
          My brothers and sisters, this All Saints Day, let’s wipe out the false separation between the two questions—“What do you want to be?” and “What do you want to do?”—and let’s unite them by asking them this way: “What do you want to be?” and “How are you going to be it?”  In this way we will see that all that we do must be ordered to what we want to be.  And if what we want to be are “saints”, then what we do will begin to be colored more and more by the Beatitudes and will move us ever closer to the true greatness that our hearts so deeply desire and for which we are destined.
          Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI famously once said, “The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort.  You were made for greatness!”  This All Saints Day, my brothers and sisters, let us commit ourselves, strengthened by the grace that we have in Jesus Christ through his sacrifice which we re-present here at this altar, to strive for that greatness for which we were made.  For it is in striving for it that we will truly achieve human excellence; and it is then that we will truly be All Saints.
Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN

October 31st and November 1st, 2015

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