Called to be Holy Ep3/The saint next door

This is part of a 4 part series on the Universal Call to Holiness.

As I delve deeper into this document, I come away with deeper revelations and I am glad I have taken the plunge. I did not expect to see "The Saint Next Door" in the document at all! I was more used to hearing about the girl/guy next door - an unassuming girl/guy that sometimes fades into the background because he or she does not particularly stand out. He or she is the approachable and nice person you can always turn to. Replacing this with "saint" speaks volume on the relevance of this phrase. We often think that saints are a group of "spiritual elite", as if they are an in-group that we have no hope of being admitted into. Herein lies a big lie - the "in-group" doesn't exist! Remember the truth we stumbled upon in Ep2? Holiness is for EVERYONE! Yet, here we are reminded that saints are the people next door!

Nor need we think only of those already beatified and canonized. The Holy Spirit bestows holiness in abundance among God’s holy and faithful people, for “it has pleased God to make men and women holy and to save them, not as individuals without any bond between them, but rather as a people who might acknowledge him in truth and serve him in holiness”.

We are tempted to idolise saints sometimes - holding them up as examples that we "copy". Yet we are not meant to be carbon copies of these holy men and women. Neither should be view them as the "only" way to be holy. I learn different things from different saints. I draw upon their wisdom and their testimony for strength. I get excited about St Ignatius (sketch him even sometimes), I illustrate a heart of St Augustine's wisdom (Our hearts are restless until they rest in you), I climb the stairs and wait for Jesus to take me into His arms as I fail daily ala St Therese. But they are not the only examples of holiness. They are not spiritual celebrities whose lives I imitate down to the number of times they said their rosary or their specific routines. I go back to the source which they drew from and acknowledge that saints are a vessel for the divine love pouring out here on Earth. Just like a beautiful painting in a musuem, we may sometimes get lost in the painting itself that we forget to appreciate the Creator behind it all.

Let us be spurred on by the signs of holiness that the Lord shows us through the humblest members of that people which “shares also in Christ’s prophetic office, spreading abroad a living witness to him, especially by means of a life of faith and charity”.[5] We should consider the fact that, as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross suggests, real history is made by so many of them. As she writes: “The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night. But for the most part, the formative stream of the mystical life remains invisible. Certainly the most decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed”

More often than we realise, we are living amidst saints in the making - our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, struggling towards holiness, falling on their way to Heaven. Many people around us are heroes in their own right, they demonstrate heroic virtue , the consistent practice of moral virtues. The important thing here is not that there is some sort of "perfect" route - where we are always patient and always kind. In our human nature, we all struggle with sin and the temptation to give in to our own weak human condition, for indeed the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. The amazing thing I realised is that even the saints we look up to as beacons of virtue struggled, they also went through their own dark night (shout out to St John of the Cross!). The important thing is that we keep trying, we take love to its extremes! We go above and beyond our own limited capacity to love beyond what we would consider humanly rational. Often, this is what we see around us. Our friends and family faithfully serving, even in their brokenness, even in their struggles. They labour on, often unnoticed, they tend the fields and bind up the wounds of the broken hearted and sometimes history does not remember them. In fact, they are in our midst - they are truly the saints next door! They may not be the flower we gravitate towards in the flower field - they may be the small flower that is battered by strong winds, yet in its frailty - the little flower displays enormous strength.

And perhaps all along, He only desires that we desire for holiness and pursue it wholeheartedly, completely aware that we may fail, that we may not live a carbon copy life. The saints accompany us on this pathway to holiness but maybe instead of being "above" us, they are truly our companions - our spiritual friends on the journey! Let us also slow down a little to inhale the perfume, the spiritual fragrance of the saints who live next door to us. Perhaps they are already on your Whatsapp contact list and you just haven't seen that hidden holy glow radiating yet? Maybe we don't need those Instagram filters anymore, the radiance of His love shines bright for all to see and maybe it's time to tag each other as not just friends but #thesaintnextdoor !