Feast of All Saints
But sometimes we do not feel this creative beauty. Our sense of failure brings us down. We are confused by our complex and contradictory behaviours. We can be overtaken by boredom and the seeming uselessness of our lives. And this is where the saints are an inspiration for us. Often when we read their lives, they can seem to be a strange lot. Well, they are! The more I read of saints’ lives the more I’m amazed at the patient creative care of God. Neurotics, here they are! Depressives, here they are! Confused, here they are! Excessive and misguided, here they are! But over a lifetime, God shaped them into being people who could love God and their neighbour passionately. One of the problems with lives of the saints as they are usually written is that they focus on the strange ascetic practices saints when they first took the Christian life seriously - usually they went overboard. But would you take advice from someone who is just learning their trade. We don’t ask an apprentice to design and build our house. We don’t ask a first year medical student to do brain surgery. So why look at the early bubblings of the saints. But if we focus on what they were like at the end of their lives, we see something much more balanced and attractive. The focus in nearly always on trust in God in the simple place of where they were, and love of the people with whom we lived. For most of us, being saints means embracing the place and the people God has given us. And here God can create glorious beauty.
Sr Kym Harris OSB |