Who Wants to Live For Ever?

Solemnity of All Saints. Fr Robert Verrill distinguishes between vain ambition and true holiness.

When growing up, I remember watching the 1980s American TV series Fame, which was about a group of students at the New York City High School for the performing arts. In this series, you really got a sense that the desire of these students for stardom was almost a kind of spiritual desire. For instance, the lyrics to the theme tune to Fame contained lines such as “I’m gonna live forever, I’m gonna learn how to fly, and I’m gonna make it to heaven.”

Now today we celebrate the many souls among the Catholic faithful who really have made it to heaven. However, the vast majority of them have attained this goal without achieving fame at all. Although some of the most famous people of all time are saints, being famous does not of itself get us any closer to heaven.

In an age of mass media where so many people are obsessed with self-promotion, the obscurity of the many thousands of unnamed saints can make them seem rather appealing.  For the saints we celebrate today didn’t go about trying to make a name for themselves so that their lives would be remembered. They simply spent their lives persevering in the love of God and sharing that love with those around them. And so their lasting legacy is not something that has been recorded in the history books, but rather their legacy is Christ’s body the Church, and the part they played in building it up and sustaining it.

Now we like them, are also called to build up the Church – for we too have an active part to play in sustaining Christ’s continued presence in the world. The Church of today owes its existence to the countless saints of Christian history who have maintained the faith of the apostles. And likewise, the Church of the future will depend on what we do in our lives in continuing this tradition. So we are called to be holy like the many saints who have gone before us. And these unassuming saints remind us that in our call to holiness, we are not being called to some impossible ideal, but rather we are being called to something that can be easily realized through the grace of Jesus Christ.

When Jesus delivered His sermon on the mount and looked out across the crowds of people, He would have surely seen many saints before Him. And in beginning His sermon with the beatitudes, Jesus was highlighting those characteristics that signified their sanctity.

From a natural perspective, the beatitudes listed in today’s Gospel could sound rather ludicrous to us. For the word beatitude itself comes from the Latin beatus, meaning happy or blessed, but naturally, poverty and persecution is the last place we would expect to find happiness and blessedness. Supernaturally, however, poverty in spirit and being persecuted for doing what is right are in fact ranked first among the places where happiness and blessedness are to be found. For although poverty and persecution are bad in themselves, those who do not or cannot place their trust in worldly riches, and those who would rather suffer persecution than deny what is right are uniquely receptive to the Kingdom of God. In our call to holiness, Christ is therefore calling us to a radical new perspective where we would prefer union with Christ to all the riches in the world, and where we would prefer to unite our sufferings with the sufferings of Christ than deny the cause of righteousness. And the proof that we can embrace this radically new Christ-centred perspective is that countless men and women who have gone before us have done just that. These are the saints we celebrate today, saints who didn’t strive for self-publicity, but saints who strived to unite themselves completely with Christ. The goal of our life is not to live on in the memories of others, but rather it is to live on in God’s loving presence with all the saints forever in heaven. And so we ask for their prayers, that what God has done from them may also be done for us as well.

Readings: Apocalypse 7:2-4,9-14 | 1 John 3:1-3 | Matthew 5:1-12a

Image: detail from an icon with the Virgin and Child, Saints, Angels, and the Hand of God from the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine, Sinai, photographed by Steven Zucker