The other day a friend reminded me of a story that goes like this: a man ran up and down the streets of his town shouting, “We must put God in our lives!” Hearing this, an old monk shook his head and said, “You’re wrong. God is already in our lives. Our task is simply to recognize that.” It seems to me that the people who do recognize – and respond to – the presence of God in their lives are the saints among us. Now, I realize that lots of people think that saints must be super human – far beyond the capability of the rest of us mere mortals. But that’s not my idea at all. I think saints are simply men and women who have taken the word – and presence – of God to heart.
They are real flesh and blood people who live ordinary lives in extraordinary ways. Their brand of holiness and goodness is unique to them. That’s why there is such a range of saints: beggars and royalty, scholars and soldiers, single and married. The vast majority live their lives serving God through their neighbors, especially those most in need.
Every one of us is called to be holy. No religion or church has a monopoly. People of all races, cultures and creeds have shown great signs of holiness.
Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman, died in Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp, in 1943. Despite the brutality around her, she was able to write: “The misery here is quite terrible, and yet I often walk with a spring in my step. Time and again, it soars straight from my heart, this feeling that life is glorious and magnificent. You have made me so rich, O God: please let me share your beauty with open hands. My life has become an uninterrupted dialogue with you.”
More recently, we were all horrified by the shooting at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, even as we were humbled by the generous response of the community. A deranged gunman shot 11 girls, the youngest only six years old. Five of them were killed. But the Amish, who have a long history of pacifism, matched their grief with forgiveness. They made a point of forgiving the dead shooter and reaching out to his wife and family, even including them in a fund begun to help the survivors.
Tom Shachtman, a journalist who has written extensively on the Amish community, says, “This is imitation of Christ at its most naked. If anybody is going to turn the other cheek in our society, it’s going to be the Amish who walk the walk as much as they talk the talk.”
“Walking the walk” is a pretty good description of someone who is one of God’s heroes.
Caryll Houselander, a spiritual writer and artist, put it this way: “The saints are a rebuke and a challenge hardly to be suffered, for their way is always the impractical way of the Sermon on the Mount: poverty, humility, the following of the cross. And yet, when the years move on and we look back, we find that it is not the social reformer or the economist or even the church leader who has done tremendous things for the human race, but the silly saints in their rags and tatters, with their empty pockets and their impossible dreams.”
God is in our lives. All we have to do is act like it.