Look for the saints

It has become something of a staple of All Saints’ Day homilies, especially when they happen at school Masses where children are encouraged to dress up as saints, instead of wearing whatever ghoulish get-up they wore for Halloween: We should all be aiming for sainthood. That’s God’s plan for salvation, that we all spend eternity in God’s presence.

It seems so simple, and obvious. Of course we should all be saints. That’s what God wants for us.

But then I start to think on the lives of some of the saints, those officially recognized by canonization at least. Get past the gruesome deaths of the apostles and the early Christian martyrs if you want, and think of some of the others.

Nearly all of the most well-known saints, at one point or another, gave up the life they led in exchange for another, one that maybe they hadn’t expected. They faced opposition from family and friends, people who did not want to lose the person they knew. Even after that, they faced obstacles, whether it was a dark night of the soul or a lack of understanding or confidence even from those who should have supported them.

When I first learned the story of Father Augustus Tolton, when the archdiocese first opened his cause for sainthood, I couldn’t help thinking that if that’s what it took to be a saint, I wasn’t sure I wanted it.

It wasn’t just the being born into slavery and the dramatic escape as his mother rowed her children across the Mississippi. It was the rejection by at least some of the Catholic authorities in Quincy, both as a schoolboy and a priest, the rejection by U.S. Catholic seminaries at the time, even the decision by his religious superiors to send him back to Quincy.

But maybe those saints, the ones with the dramatic stories, aren’t all of them. If we’re all supposed to be saints, if we’re all marked for salvation — a gift we are given, not something we earn — then surely they are not.

There must be saints all around us, in our families and in our schools and in our communities. Like the saints who are memorialized in the church calendar, they are also sinners; all of us humans are. Like the saints we seek intercession from, they make mistakes and they do things wrong.

But they love God and they love the people around them, so they keep trying. They keep trying to find ways to help and support their communities, friends and family and people they don’t know. They keep trying to find ways to care for rather than exploit creation. They keep trying to understand what God wants them to do.

Mr. Rogers famously said that when the world is scary, we should “look for the helpers.” We should also take time to look for the saints.