Saints Like Us

 Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
 

St. Teresa of Calcutta

   In 2006 when I was studying in Rome on a study abroad, I was required to work with the Missionaries of Charity, the order that St. Teresa of Calcutta founded, each month at a shelter where they fed the hungry and housed the homeless.  Before we started to work with them, though, a priest from Minnesota, who was our chaplain for the study abroad program, who had worked with Mother Teresa, told us about her.  Most of what I heard was not surprising: her love for the poor, her encounter with Jesus who told her, “I thirst,” and how she was to quench Jesus’ thirst through her care for the poorest of the poor.  But he also mentioned that, for most of her adult life, she didn’t receive any good feelings in prayer, what we call consolations.  This was a huge shock for me!  How could someone so holy not feel good about praying!  Not long after my study abroad, a book came out called Come, Be My Light, which detailed how Mother Teresa, after her encounter with Jesus to found the Missionaries of Charity, rarely had any experience that God was even present, let alone good feelings in prayer.
    When we think of the saints, we often think of the finished product.  We think of the incredible stories that are told of the saints doing marvelous things.  We often gloss over the struggles and the ups and downs that they had in their life, even while trying to be a saint.  But throughout the Scriptures, and throughout the stories of the saints, we see people who were very much like we are, prone to the same temptations, who, the vast majority of the time, chose God over self, but who, nonetheless, sometimes struggled.
    Our Gospel today is the perfect example of the similarity of the saints to us.  We hear St. Mark’s version of the commission of St. Peter to be the first pope.  We have heard the story before: Jesus asks His Apostles who others say that He is, and they give the common understanding at the time.  Some say that Jesus is John the Baptist back from the dead.  Others say that Jesus is Elijah, or another one of the prophets.  But then Jesus puts the question to them, and St. Peter, not on his own, but by the grace of God, proclaims that Jesus is the Christ, in Aramaic he would have said something like messhichah, in English we say Messiah.  Matthew’s account is the one with which we are more familiar, and fills out that, after that proclamation, Jesus tells Peter that Jesus will build His Church on Peter, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it, and gives Peter the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.  This is the great moment that we are used to encountering with the saints!  
    But then, Jesus tells the Apostles that He will suffer, be rejected, and be killed, but then rise on the third day.  St. Peter takes Jesus aside to tell him that this is not what should happen.  Jesus gathers all the Apostles, and rebukes Peter in the midst of them, and calls Peter, the one upon whom Jesus had just said He will build His Church, Satan.  This is not the image of our first pope upon which we like to dwell, or that we are used to sharing with others.  But St. Mark (like St. Matthew) does not hide it, or make Peter seem better than he is.  In fact, by ancient tradition, St. Peter helped St. Mark compose this account of the Gospel, so St. Peter doesn’t even hide his failure.
    The saints were people just like ourselves.  It would be easy to think of them as people who had superpowers, like the Avengers, because we do hear many amazing stories of how they witnessed their faith in word and deed.  But superheroes are easy to honor, but easy to write-off, because they are not like us.  I can excuse myself for not doing the things Captain America does because I didn’t get an injection that increased my muscle mass (despite my hopes that the COVID vaccine would do exactly that!).  I don’t worry about not doing what Captain America does because he and I are so different.
    But the saints are not different than we are.  They are exactly the same, except they end up responding to God’s grace, whereas we often reject those same graces.  But still, they don’t have any super-human advantages that we don’t have.  They are exactly like us.  They, though, did what Jesus said: they denied themselves, took up their crosses, and followed Jesus, in a myriad of different ways.  Some, like St. Boniface, were great missionaries.  Some, like St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, taught in schools and founded religious orders.  Some, like Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati, quietly helped the poor.  Some, like Sts. Louis and Zelie, the parents of St. Thérèse, became saints as parents.  And the list goes on and on.  They had some different challenges, based upon the times in which they lived, but they had the same kinds of temptations that we have.

Sts. Louis & Zelie

Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati

    

Living as a saint always takes work; it doesn’t happen through osmosis or simply by letting each day pass by as normal.  To be a saint means that we “set [our] face like flint” to the challenges that approach us each day, “knowing that we shall not be put to shame,” as we heard in our first reading.  When we choose to follow God, we choose to take up our cross, our death, but God sustains us, and will always raise us up to new life; He will never abandon us, even if the whole world does.  But it’s possible, and the saints show us, through their ups and downs. that if we follow Christ, even if we do not do it perfectly (as St. Peter didn’t do it perfectly), if we remain faithful to God and do everything we can to follow Him, then we can be the saints that we are all called to be, just like St. Peter and St. Teresa of Calcutta.