All Saints/All Souls (Luke 6:20-31)

The Beatitudes we hear this morning may be considered a recipe for Christians to become a saint or Christlike. So, here’s the recipe: be poor, hungry, weep, and be hated, excluded, reviled, or defamed. The saintly ingredients may be poverty, hunger, sorrow, and persecution. Here’s what to avoid: be full, rich, laugh, and have an impeccable reputation. Now, would you apply this recipe to your life? Probably not. Who wants to be poor and hungry? Who wants to be in sorrow? Who wants to be hated and excluded? 

We wouldn’t and shouldn’t blindly take this recipe at face value. To cook this recipe, we first need to learn how to cook and we learn it by doing it as Julia Child once said, “...no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.” I would suggest Dorothy Day as our cooking instructor who can certainly cook this saintly recipe well. Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was an American social activist. She’s mostly known as the one who established the Catholic Worker movement that focuses on aiding the poor and homeless. She can be a great cooking instructor for us not simply because her life committed to the poor and homeless is saintly but she candidly talks about how sentimental hagiography or the “pious pap” describes saints as less attractive for us to imitate and follow. 

If you look at any icon or painting of a Christian saint, there’s at least one thing in common. No one smiles. They look rather melancholy. Dorothy Day points out something similar: “Blessed de Montfort sometimes shed tears and sobbed bitterly when sitting at a table to eat…no wonder no one wants to be a saint.” This explains her famous saying about herself being called a saint, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” 

She suggests a different depiction of a saint: “We are all called to be saints, and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us. Inasmuch as we are growing, putting off the old man and putting on Christ, there is some of the saint, the holy, the divine right there…most people nowadays, if they were asked, would say diffidently that they do not profess to be saints, indeed they do not want to be saints. And yet the saint is the holy man, the ‘whole man,’ the integrated man. We all wish to be that…the significance of our smallest acts! The significance of the little things we leave undone! The protests we do not make, the stands we do not take, we who are living in the world.” (All of Dorothy Day’s quotes are from Robert Ellsberg’s wonderful essay from catholicworker.org/pages/ellsberg-called-saints.html, which I highly recommend all of us to read.) 

Now returning to the Beatitudes, Dorothy Day’s hopeful perspective on “some of the saint in all of us” seems to be the key. Before getting stressed about being poor and hungry, defamed, and weeping, our own recognition and acceptance of this “some of the saint in all of us” makes our process of being holy, whole, and integrated rather easier and seamless. This “some of the t in all of us” is nothing unfamiliar to us. It is “God’s presence” in all of us. The presence of the Spirit enables, empowers, and equips us to follow the recipe of sainthood. God’s presence when contemplatively simmered produces a flavor of goodwill for all including those we like and dislike as well as those we don’t even know. This goodwill when meditatively caramelized gives a taste of generosity. 

I suggest all of us remember the three G’s to cook it just right: God’s presence, goodwill, and generosity. These are the skillful means of sainthood. We don’t want to be poor out of deprivation. We choose to be poor and hungry out of abundance. With a sense of fullness, poverty and hunger are not a state of depravity or deficiency. There’s no need to possess more than we need or to hoard. The more we give, the fuller we become. In giving, we become whole. Rooted in God’s presence, compassion is then another name for our goodwill for those who are suffering. In compassion, we weep with them and hope to lessen their suffering. 

All these actions patterned by the three G’s are the actions of love. When we’re committed to this practice of Christ’s love, we may be hated or excluded. Herbert McCabe, an Irish Dominican friar prophetically says, “If you do not love, you will not be alive; if you love effectively, you will be killed.”