Solemnity of All Saints 2012

A few years ago NBC hit the jackpot with the show Heros. Probably you remember it, there’s a man who can fly without wings, a man who walks through walls, another one stops time and travels in time, etc. NBC built on people’s fascination with the ability to do that beyond the physically possible. The Fantastic Four movies, Spider man, Superman, and many television shows also build on this fascination.

The biographers of saints of the past centuries also built on this fascination. Many times saints were presented as having all sorts of preternatural powers. For example, St. John Bosco was a deeply spiritual and dedicated priest of the 19th century. Sadly, the Salesian baiographers emphasized stories that Don Bosco had super human powers and did not give the proper attention they should have given to his spirituality. St. Francis of Assisi was a preacher with his eyes set on the journey to Christ. He was determined to fight against the materialism that was taking hold of the people of his time. He demanded that they return to the spirituality that was the strength of the Church. But St. Francis is often portrayed as having powers like having conversations with animals. Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. The point is that we often stop at the fantastic details and we lose the essence of things.

Giving all sorts of strange powers to the saints actually diminishes their message. Instead of seeing them as people like us whose heroic lives we can follow, we turn them into preternatural creatures with powers beyond our capability. We should not dismiss the saints so easily by turning them into plastic, fantasy figurines, whose lives are nice stories but impossible for us to follow. No! the saints were and are real people who had to fight the same battles we all fight to serve the Lord.  Some of them had terrible tempers, like St. Jerome and St. Paul. Some of them had to recover their spiritual lives after giving in to sin, like St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis of Assisi, and, of course, St. Augustine.  Some had to be courageous and stand for the faith when every fiber of their body was terrified at what would happen to them, like St. Thomas More, St. Agnes, and St. Vincent de Paul.

The saints were normal human beings like you and me, they were fully human.  To be fully human is to allow the best of our humanity to dominate our lives.  As human beings we are both physical and spiritual. The saints allow the spiritual aspect of their lives to be integrated into the physical. They were and are the best of us. But they are not plastic. They are real.

So, what are we doing this morning [evening] well, we are honoring the saints. We recognize that they are with God and we call upon their intercession. What do we mean by that? Well, we ask the saints to pray to the Lord for us, to help us in the struggles of our lives. We ask the saints to help us also embrace our baptism in such a way that we also will be clothed in the Blood of the Lamb.

The saints are our heroes. But they are neither the Fantastic Four nor Captain America or Spiderman, the saints are real people whose heroic lives give us the example of what it is to be fully human; the saints are our intercesors whose prayers give us the grace to be men and women who are in the midst of the world, but with the focus on God and the things of heaven, the things that will shine for eternity ■