You have approached Mount Zion
and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,
and countless angels in festal gathering,
and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven,
and God the judge of all, and the spirits of the just made perfect,
and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant,
and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel.
[Hebrews 12:22-24a, NAB]
“More and more, I was wishing I could be Kyle Decker.”
So says Doug Barnes, the adolescent narrator of Dave Barry’s Christmas tale, The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog. As Doug tells it, Kyle excels at sports, is “cute” (according to the girls), and “doesn’t hack around” (according to the teachers). The problem for Doug, however, is that Kyle appears to have captured the heart of Judy Flanders, Doug’s big crush.
Kyle’s advantage seems formidable, which leads to Doug’s existential aspiration. Of course, we all know that Doug can’t be Kyle. Only Kyle can be Kyle. And Doug can only be Doug—plain, old Doug.
This story, and specifically Doug’s wish to take Kyle Decker’s place, came to mind as our pastor gave his “Our goal is to become saints” homily at the first-day-of-school Mass a couple weeks back. It’s a theme that runs through all his homilies: Everything—in school, in work, in life—everything has to be subservient to getting to heaven, to getting to Jesus in an ultimate and eternal way.
That’s as it should be. It’s basic to the Gospel message, and particularly underscored by the Second Vatican Council—the “universal call to holiness” they called it. Every follower of Jesus must seek to put away sin, and to grow in the virtues of faith, hope, and love—it’s not optional. All those saints we see depicted in church—the statues, icons, and stained glass windows? That’s supposed to be us someday: Citizens of heaven mingling with the angels and the holy ones around God’s throne forever.
C’mon, let’s be real, right? It’s a bit daunting, holiness and all. Saints are saints, and we’re, in a word, just…Dougs.
Take, for example, the saint commemorated at that first school Mass: St. Maximilian Kolbe. He was a Polish Franciscan of extraordinary resourcefulness and resolve, who made use of every form of media available at the time to spread the Gospel around the world—surely a patron saint of the communication age.
Yet Fr. Kolbe is best known for what he did at Auschwitz where he was imprisoned in 1941. There had been a successful prison outbreak, and the Nazis selected ten men to die for revenge and as a deterrent. When Fr. Kolbe found out that one of the men was a young husband and father, he volunteered to take his place—an offer the Nazis readily agreed to. Kolbe died in Auschwitz on August 14, 1941. And the man whose life was spared by Kolbe’s sacrifice? He survived the war, and even attended Kolbe’s canonization in 1982.
What a story! What a hero! Could I be a saint like Maximilan Kolbe?
Well, no—because I’m not Maximilian Kolbe. I mean, the chances are slim and none that I’d ever be given an opportunity to sacrifice my life for another person, but that’s not the point. If it were, I might be tempted to let myself off easy—you know, with a sigh of relief, and maybe a prayer or two for all those who still suffer religious persecution throughout the world.
So, no, I’m not called to be another St. Maximilan Kolbe, or any other canonized saint for that matter. Their stories are edifying, and their examples inspiring, but I’m called to be a different kind of saint—and it’s an even more unnerving prospect than trying to be another Maxilimilian. For I’m called to be a sanctified version of myself—to become, in fact, St. Rick Becker.
Not canonized, mind you, but a real saint all the same. It’s the goal of the Christian life, after all—to become a citizen of heaven and to enter into that heavenly family reunion for all eternity. That’s what saints are, whether they’re officially recognized or not. And as humiliating as it is to suggest, it’s what God made me for—you, too! Needless to say, God does all the work, molding and prodding, shaping and pruning. As He goes about His business, we just need to avoid mucking things up—and we even depend on Him to help us do that!
Dorothy Day, among others, would agree. Herself a candidate for official recognition as a saint these days, Dorothy had much to say about holiness and sainthood. She strongly discouraged talk about her own sanctity, and was famous for saying, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”
Yet Dorothy frequently stressed the requirement that every Christian live a holy life—that saintly living wasn’t reserved to the halo crowd, but was fundamental to the Faith. “All are called to be saints, not to do the extraordinary,” she wrote. “If sanctity depended on doing the extraordinary, there would be few saints.”
This is consistent with how she lived her life: Caring for the poor, standing up for justice, challenging the strong, guarding the week were, to her, the ordinary duties of anyone claiming the name Christian. Not to “earn” her salvation, but to “show” her salvation, as St. James argued. And she certainly wasn’t seeking to be a Great Saint. Instead, and despite her demurrals, she was simply seeking to become whom God intended her to be: Dorothy Day the saint.
And that’s our goal too—not to be little replicas of Dorothy Day or Maximilian or whichever saint we aspire to imitate. Our goal—God’s goal, in fact—is that we would become our own saints by allowing Jesus to conquer and transform in us every last vestige of resistance to Him.
Another saintly feast happened to coincide with the second day of school—the Assumption of Mary—and it’s a feast that highlights two realities that are pertinent here. First, Mary is our prototype for becoming saints. All we need do is utter our “yes” like she did, and God will do the rest.
And, second, by living that “yes” and persevering, we can anticipate sharing in Mary’s heavenly reward—something we affirm every time we recite the Creed: “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.”
Mary blazed the trail for us—you, me, everybody—and we have her maternal support and guidance to help us follow her to Glory. Pope Francis said as much on Assumption Day when he spoke of Mary’s Magnificat as “the song of hope,” which is also “the song of many saints … some famous, and very many others unknown to us but known to God: moms, dads, catechists, missionaries, priests, sisters, young people, even children and grandparents.”
Even Dougs.
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