I Want to Be A Saint

"I want to be a saint"

This is what the 15 year old St Therese of Lisieux said when asked what her intention were in entering the cloistered religious Carmel.  Cooperating with the grace of God, she did just that, she became a living replica of Jesus Christ.

Listen to my homily for today:

If you have trouble listening click here.

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints, the day on which we thank God for the the heavenly cohort of men and women who have "washed their garments in the Blood of the Lamb," who passed the test of this life and gained heaven.

The word sanctus, or holy in Latin, means different.  This is what you encounter in someone who is holy, someone who has a unique sincerity about them that can only be the fruit of a pure heart that is set like flint upon the face of Jesus Christ.

How do you become holy, how do you become a saint.  The answer is in the second reading for today:

Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us,
by letting us be called God’s children;

Holiness is living in the realization that you are deeply beloved of the Father.  In Christ the Eucharistic Lord who visits us, we find the immeasurable and unconditional Love of the Father.  Frequent and devout reception of the Holy Eucharist is one of t he surest and quickest roads to holiness.  Our problem is that we approach the Lord without expecting him to be God, with little faith.  So we go away even from God himself without being transformed and without permitting him to act in his divine Power in our lives.

The saints inspire us to, as Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, "To give God permission to make us holy as he is holy."  The lived a life in which, as St Teresa of Avila said, they "wholeheartedly trampled upon the spirit of this world."

May the prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mother of God, the Queen of Sainst, inspire and pray for us to obtain for us the gift of sanctity.