All Saints Day

As a kid, saints always fascinated me. I liked hearing their stories from my Sister of Providence teachers and reading their stories on my own.

The martyrs, in my young mind, were the best! I really liked those stories and reveled in the fantasy that someday I, too, would die for my faith, just as they did — burned at the stake or fed to the lions.

Well, forget that! Reality soon set in and with it a desire to stay as far away from that kind of suffering (make that any kind of suffering) as possible!

But I didn’t scrap my belief in and admiration of saints. I just came to the slow realization (over years really) that most saints are usually ordinary folks like you and me. Yes, some saints are the “official” ones, declared so by the church, like our foundress, Saint Mother Theodore Guerin.

Most saints, though, are and will always be “unofficial.” And what makes people saints is not the stuff of martyrdom, but the stuff of humdrum, everyday living. Mother Theodore qualifies there, too!

Being a saint is about answering the “universal call to holiness,” that simple, but oh! so challenging phrase, we read in the documents of Vatican II. Mother Theodore “got it” and had some sound, practical advice on the matter of saintly, holy living, as she does on so many topics.

“What have we to do in order to be saints? Nothing extraordinary; nothing more than what we do every day. Only do it for the love of God.”

Today, the feast of All Saints, let’s put the emphasis on all and spend some time thinking of those persons in our lives, living or deceased, who are/were indeed holy. The ordinary people whose loving, kind and compassionate ways have made a difference in our lives. And let’s resolve to live that way ourselves.