Happy Halloween! Even better, Happy Hallows' Eve! Or, happy eve of All Saints Day! And yes, tomorrow is a Holy Day of Obligation, so if you're Catholic, make sure to join the giant saint party at Mass tomorrow. Gosh, I love All Saints Day. We get to celebrate, as the name suggests, all of the saints. Not just those holy people who died thousands of years ago, but the community of saint-wannabes. Yeah, I'm a saint-wannabe if you can't tell. I freely admit that living a holy life, dying, and then reaching eternal glory and happiness with the grand God of the Universe is very appealing to me. Okay...maybe the dying part is not so appealing, but the after part--that's what I like! I find myself wondering. How will we do it? How will you and I(the saint-wannabes) become saints? I read about saints performing dramatic miracles, levitating, being so happy that they literally glow, being the best of the biblical scholars, being either a priest or a nun, being best friends with the pope, fearlessly walking through war zones, and making enormous sacrifices like cutting off all of his/her hair, doing extreme penances, having visions of the suffering Jesus, and ultimately suffering horrid diseases like leprosy or dying a martyrs death. Yikes! Even if we qualify under one of those things I listed...how can we ever be saints (and if you do happen to be best friends with the pope, then I beseech you: INTRODUCE ME)? How can we be saints if we don't do those great things that I've listed? Thankfully, St. Therese of Lisieux teaches that we don't need to do great things to be great saints. She speaks of sainthood being achieved through being little and childlike. Even cooler, St. Therese was not the first one to tell us this. Guess who was the first? The one and only, Jesus of Nazareth! "Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven," Jesus says in Matthew 18:3. Woah! Is anyone else freaking out? I can't enter heaven unless I'm like a child? Jesus, do You know what You are asking for? The child Jacqueline? If You want me to be like a child that means...
I list these things off to Jesus and say, "Are you sure You mean what You say about us becoming like children? Do You understand what being childlike actually means?" Jesus means what He says (no surprise there). He says, "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:14). And the crazy thing is that Jesus doesn't just say that I have to be like a child, He becomes a child Himself! He actually lives childhood. Check out the following verses: "....and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother." Matthew 2:11 "And a voice came from the heavens, 'You are my beloved Son...'" Mark 1:11 "...with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child." Luke 2:5 "....the glory as of the Father’s only Son..." John 3:14 Notice the words I am highlighting from each of the gospels: "Child," "Mary," "Son," and "Father." What am I getting at here? Two things!
Here is what is blowing me away: To enter heaven (aka be a saint) we need to be like little children, just as Jesus became a little child. To be a little child like Jesus, we have to be children of Mary and totally depend on the grace that God gave her. It's pretty simple. Let's be children; children of Mary! Then all of us saint-wannabes will achieve our goal of sainthood! "I leave to great souls and lofty minds the beautiful books I cannot understand, much less put into practice and I rejoice that I am little because children alone and those who resemble them will be admitted to the heavenly banquet. I am glad that there are many mansions in the Kingdom of God, because if there were only those whose description and whose road seem to me incomprehensible, I could never enter there." St. Therese “[The] Blessed Mother… is the safest, easiest, shortest and most perfect way of approaching Jesus.” St Louis de Montfort, True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, 56.
1 Comment
Chris Beltowski
11/2/2017 02:33:56 am
Love how you pulled it all together. Keep up the great, child-like work!
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AuthorJacqueline St. Clare: I spent six months in a cloistered convent, and now I'm a college student! Archives
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