Desire for God, Solemnity of All Saints, November 1, 2010

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Anthony of Padua Church, New Bedford, MA
All Saints Day 2010
Rev 7:2-4,9-14; 1 Jn 3:1-3; Mt 5:1-12

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Today we celebrate all the saints, all those who have victoriously crossed the finish line of life. This ought to be one of the highlights of our year, because today we celebrate not only St. Anthony, St. Joseph, St. Therese, St. John Vianney and the saints we know about, but also so many others, including some probably we’ve known, members of our families, those who may have heroically passed on the faith to us. I think of some really holy priests I’ve known who have died. While I have no certainty that they’re in heaven and therefore pray and sacrifice for them, I do have a quiet conviction within that the odds are good that they’re with all the greats who have ever lived. Today is also important because we hope that one day this will be our day. Few of us are ever going to live the type of life that others after us will undertake the formal process of canonization. Few of us, therefore, will ever have a “feast day,” like, for example, St. Charles Borromeo will have on Thursday. But all of us hope that this will be our day.
• If it’s going to be our day, we need to ask ourselves now, what distinguishes a saint? It’s clear from today’s first reading that not everyone makes it. Revelation uses the number 144,000, which is a symbolic number, based on the importance of the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 apostles. But, even compared to the populations that existed in the ancient world, 144,000 was simply not that big. Rome had 2 million. Jerusalem would have been teaming with much more than that for the celebration of the big feasts. What distinguished those who are numbered among the 144,000 and those who aren’t?
• The first thing is desire:
  • In today’s responsorial psalm, we say of the saints, “Lord, this is the people that LONGS to see your face.”
  • In the Gospel today, Jesus praises those who “hunger and thirst” for holiness.
  • Do we desire heaven? Do we desire to see God’s face? Do we hunger and thirst for holiness?
• The second thing is purity. Our desire must be pure.
  • Jesus says in today’s Gospel that the pure of heart will see God.
  • St. John tells us that those who have the hope that comes from being beloved sons and daughters of God make themselves pure, just as God is pure.
  • We see the means of that purity in the first reading, when the 144,000 make their garments white by washing them, not with bleach, but with the blood of the lamb, Jesus, those who live truly Eucharistic lives, who enter into communion with Jesus in purity of heart and keep that communion, even to the point of martyrdom.
• This pure desire is not a desire for heaven because it’s better than the alternative. It’s a hunger, a longing, a thirsting for God, a real love for him. This is what we see in the Blessed Mother, Saint Anthony, St. Margaret Mary, St. Andre of Quebec. This is what we’ve seen in those we’ve known and loved. This is the type of desire that God, and all the angels and saints, want to see in us.
• When Pope Benedict was in England in September, he tried to help Brits realize that the only reason why we’re still alive is to become holy. If we do everything else besides that, our lives have failed; if we fail at everything besides that, we’ll live forever with God. He spoke as a loving father to the Catholic school kids of England, but his words apply to all of us:

• • It is not often that a Pope, or indeed anyone else, has the opportunity to speak to the students of all the Catholic schools of England, Wales and Scotland at the same time. And since I have the chance now, there is something I very much want to say to you. I hope that among those of you listening to me today there are some of the future saints of the twenty-first century. What God wants most of all for each one of you is that you should become holy. He loves you much more than you could ever begin to imagine, and he wants the very best for you. And by far the best thing for you is to grow in holiness.

• • Perhaps some of you have never thought about this before. Perhaps some of you think being a saint is not for you. Let me explain what I mean. When we are young, we can usually think of people that we look up to, people we admire, people we want to be like. It could be someone we meet in our daily lives that we hold in great esteem. Or it could be someone famous. We live in a celebrity culture, and young people are often encouraged to model themselves on figures from the world of sport or entertainment. My question for you is this: what are the qualities you see in others that you would most like to have yourselves? What kind of person would you really like to be?

• • When I invite you to become saints, I am asking you not to be content with second best. I am asking you not to pursue one limited goal and ignore all the others. Having money makes it possible to be generous and to do good in the world, but on its own, it is not enough to make us happy. Being highly skilled in some activity or profession is good, but it will not satisfy us unless we aim for something greater still. It might make us famous, but it will not make us happy. Happiness is something we all want, but one of the great tragedies in this world is that so many people never find it, because they look for it in the wrong places. The key to it is very simple – true happiness is to be found in God. We need to have the courage to place our deepest hopes in God alone, not in money, in a career, in worldly success, or in our relationships with others, but in God. Only he can satisfy the deepest needs of our hearts.

• • Not only does God love us with a depth and an intensity that we can scarcely begin to comprehend, but he invites us to respond to that love. You all know what it is like when you meet someone interesting and attractive, and you want to be that person’s friend. You always hope they will find you interesting and attractive, and want to be your friend. God wants your friendship. And once you enter into friendship with God, everything in your life begins to change. As you come to know him better, you find you want to reflect something of his infinite goodness in your own life. You are attracted to the practice of virtue. You begin to see greed and selfishness and all the other sins for what they really are, destructive and dangerous tendencies that cause deep suffering and do great damage, and you want to avoid falling into that trap yourselves. You begin to feel compassion for people in difficulties and you are eager to do something to help them. You want to come to the aid of the poor and the hungry, you want to comfort the sorrowful, you want to be kind and generous. And once these things begin to matter to you, you are well on the way to becoming saints.
• In order to become saints, he says:
  • We need to recognize that the most important thing is growth in holiness.
  • We need to begin to admire not Lady Gaga, but Our Lady; to seek to become not Thomas Brady but Thomas More; we need to seek to admire those who are holy, including and especially those who are alive. These are the ones who will be famous forever, not those who make people magazine today.
  • We can’t be content with second best.
  • We need to recognize that money, professional skill, fame, won’t make us happy. Only God can make us happy.
  • Holiness comes through a friendship with God, a friendship that is reciprocate. Once we recognize how loved we are by him and start to love him back, then everything changes. We start to do out of love what before might have seemed like bitter duties.
• We are called to holiness. God wants to nourish this friendship so that it will never end. Let’s begin in this world, by living as true sons and daughters, by continually living a Eucharistic life and washing ourselves in the blood of the Jesus, through becoming people who do not merely know but live the beatitudes, by being people who hunger and thirst for the most important things and most important Person of all.

The readings for today’s Mass were: