Are saints really that great? They would be the first to say “no.” In fact, it would be more accurate to say that God is great in them. But, because saints are rare, there must be something they do that sets them apart from the crowd.
Our goal as Christians – God’s desire for all of His creatures – is to be in constant communion with our Creator. No one ever achieves that this side of Heaven. But that is how it would have been for all of us had the original fall from Grace not taken place.
We can, however, achieve degrees of communion with God with the help of His grace. And we ought to. With all our being we ought to strive to know and grow close to our God.
What is a saint?
So what makes the saints stand apart? What is it they do that the masses don’t? It’s a matter of extreme cooperation with God and His designs.
To be a saint – a quest that will never succeed if done to be seen as a saint – requires a real sense of adventure. Adventure in that we must be willing to let God lead us and take us where we would not think to go and sometimes would not like to go. Another way of saying that is total surrender to God.
Being led by God doesn’t mean we don’t have our own part to play. God wants us to engage fully as the living human, spiritual beings he created us to be. Again, it’s a matter of cooperation, of working together with God and allowing Him to work on us.
A saint essentially is a person who is willing – a lot more than not – to let God have His way with him or her. At times, it means be willing to NOT have all the answers in advance or everything under control. It also means using our intelligence and God’s teachings to inform our plans and actions, with the faith that God will lead all things to a good end.
The sincere Christian
A saint is the sincerest sort of Christian. Sincere in the quest for God and keeping God’s commandments and obeying personally directed commands from God. The sincere Christian is willing to put himself on God’s operating table and be examined and treated from head to toe.
The sincere Christian takes the difficult steps of detaching himself from his temperament and lower nature and constantly adjusts his actions to pursue something much greater than his own rights and fleshly desires – however right and good they might seem. God trains us as we work for him, leading us to successively higher degrees of development. He sometimes drags us along the way with us kicking and screaming until, finally – here on earth or in purgatory – we reach that perfect spiritual age.
The real quest of a saint is not to be “good” but to let God be all. Because, so long as someone wants to be thought of as good – or achieve the good on his or her own – there is always the element of egotism undermining the effort. Saints know better than anybody else how deficient they really are. So, humility is essential in arriving at constancy of communion with God.
Giving it all we got
Again, that is not to say the individual does not have anything to contribute. Quite the opposite. The sincere Christian participates to the point of emotional, psychological and physical exhaustion. We do it for all other sorts of quests in life, so why not for God.
My challenge as a Christian is to put my ego in service of spiritual development and holy communion with the Eternal. That is, I must sacrifice my ego, my sensual desires and personal “greatness” to know God, and to love Him for what I have discovered about His grandeur, beauty and goodness. It is then my job to serve Him by sharing that discovery and imaging God within myself, by teaching and actively loving others.
Because we are human and sinful, we have to keep making a conscious and physical effort to get back to the work of becoming like our Father. We are all in some stage of sainthood if we plan on going to Heaven. But, sometimes, God will put us on the fast track and relentlessly drive us to accomplishing His will. And to the extent possible, draw our whole existence to living in His Divine Will.
But God cannot do any of that without our “yes” and personal participation. We cannot be a wet noodle in His hands. We must be malleable like good clay. And we never really give up our will, which would leave us without merit. We give up our way, our personal agenda, and use our will to second God’s.
Being a saint is constantly being at God’s disposal, like not having a life of your own, yet being very much alive as an individual – something that could never be achieved on our own. It’s getting on with our personal obligations and daily routine while living in a world that is for the most part separate from the world others live in – at least psychologically. For these reasons, it can be a torturous life.
The payoff
Yet this discipline of spiritual development, of sincerely pursuing God, also is extremely rewarding. The person who is given over to God finds many blessings streaming from Heaven, most in the form of knowledge of God, His ways and plans, knowledge of the truth and knowledge of oneself. These are the “secrets” God shares with his most intimate friends or cooperators.
And while we might suffer greatly for God, He always, always repays us a thousand times what we give. And He never takes us beyond what we can handle, what’s good for us. And many times, it’s what we in our heart of hearts already would like to say yes to, even if we sometimes don’t volunteer that “yes.”
Our God is a tremendous God: tremendous in sacrificial love and in abundance of grace, gifts and power. And He calls each one of us to explore – to be part of – that greatness with Him. But we cannot do it from the armchair or in isolation with our minds alone. We have to pray, read, meditate and serve. We have to expend our energy and spend our lives for the One who created us and calls us to a personal communion every day.