Be a Saint - New Evangelizers

Catholic Answers Live radio show host Patrick Coffin always closes the show with the admonition, “Be a saint…what else is there?” For a long time it just sort of went in one ear and out the other, until one day I started thinking about it.

What else is there?

The word “saint” comes from the Latin “sanctus” meaning “sacred” or “holy.” Someone who’s a saint has led a life of heroic virtue. But specifically in the Catholic Church the word is commonly used to mean a person in heaven.

So, if don’t wind up in heaven (a saint), what else is there? Well, there’s no alternative but hell, and who wants to end up there? If you said purgatory, realize that purgatory is not a final destination, but a stop on the way to heaven.

In the end there are only two choices.

I wish I were a saint.

So I think I can safely say that we all want to be saints, or at least we want the benefits of being a saint (heaven), but do we really want to do the work to get to heaven? Do we want to be saints here on Earth? I think we do.

If you contrast the attributes of saints and sinners, which would you rather be? Do you want to be the person everyone trusts, or the person who “skims a little” and who consequently will never be put in a position to manage things?

Do you want to be the person you friend relies on, or the person they don’t trust to not hit on their spouse? Do you want to be the person whose word is their bond or the person nobody believes?

We all would like to be loved and admired and trusted, and that means a saint.

I could never be a saint.

When I was little we had a book on saints, and now that I am older I have more books on saints. I admire the brave men and women in those stories, and yet, the more I read about them the more discouraged I become.

Look at St. Maximilian Kolbe, for instance. In a Nazi concentration camp, he volunteered to be starved to death in place of another man. Could I do that? Would I wonder if the other man was “worth it” or not? Would I have second thoughts? St. Kolbe didn’t – he led the others in prayer calmly for two weeks, until he was the only one left alive and the Nazis got tired of waiting for him to die and injected him with carbolic acid.

Or take St Lucy, who was tortured to death and had her eyes put out. Or St. Lawrence, who was roasted alive on a grill and famously told his torturers, “Turn me over, I’m done on this side.”

These saints seem to live lives that are so harsh, and they endure so much, who would want to be like them? Even saints who were not martyred, like St. Padre Pio lived a very austere life, and faced many hardships. How could I ever want to live like that?

I could be a saint.

We should keep in mind two things when reading about the lives of the saints. First, their hardships were not what made them saints. We read the lives of martyrs because their stories are dramatic, but many saints did not face trials that horrible.

St Augustine (one of my personal favorites) was bishop of Hippo and died of an illness. St. Louis de Montfort also died a “normal” death. Both of them are not only saints, but Doctors of the Church.

The other thing to remember is that virtue, like most things in life, is something we get better at with practice. When we read of the fantastic things those saints did we are looking at the results of long practice of virtue.

It’s like watching a marathon runner. They did not become a marathon runner overnight. They ran a little, and a little more, and gradually worked up to running the twenty-six-plus miles of the race. By the time they run the race, it is not the extreme hardship that would probably kill most of us, but something that they are competent to do and even enjoy.

So, if you want to run a marathon, you don’t go out, try to run twenty-six miles, and then beat yourself up for not being able to and declare you never will run a marathon. Instead, you do what you can do, and work up to it. Sainthood is the same way. I’m far from perfect, but I can make an effort when I sin or fall short of the mark to improve, even slightly.

It’s this improvement over time that makes a saint. And yes it is hard, but God wants you to be a saint. As the Catechism tells us (for those of us old enough to have learned from it) “God made us to know Him, to love Him and to serve Him in this world and be happy with Him forever in the next.”

And yes, you can’t do it on your own. As Jesus told us in Matthew 19:25-26:

When the disciples heard this they were greatly astonished, saying, “Who then can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said to them, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

God gives us the grace to become saints. The only thing lacking is our cooperation. He gives us the gift of Confession, that most of us take little to no advantage of. You’d be surprised at the big difference you will see in your life if you go to Confession regularly (say once a month). He gives us Sacred Scripture to help us. He gives us the gift of prayer, and of each other. You’d be surprised at the changes in your life if you make an effort to take prayer seriously.

So there’s really no excuse. You know you want to be a saint.

Now is the perfect time to start.

Take the first steps. Pray a novena, or for the adventurous pray the liturgy of the hours. Go to mass and Confession regularly. Accept the gifts of God’s friendship and be a saint. After all, what else is there?

Copyright 2015, Michael Lindner

Image By Crucifixion [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Michael Lindner

Mike is a scouter, a science geek, a dad, a husband and a Catholic. He earns a living as a software engineer in beautiful New Jersey. In his spare time (ha ha) he muses at his blog What Does Mike Think? He is not a writer (which will be painfully obvious after reading his posts) but feels called to apologetics and evangelization anyway. You have been warned.