The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
November 2, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 43

Everything But...
           Take time to be holy. A lot of us grew up singing this old gospel hymn. It sounds like a choice, a good choice, but it’s not exactly our choice to make. And to be a saint? You can try to be a saint, to live a holy life, but when we celebrate All Saints Day, keep in mind that virtually all of them were accidental saints. That’s because some one else is planning our sainthood, not you and me.
           While there are official criteria in the Roman Catholic Church for canonizing a saint, there really is no satisfactory definition of a saint. The saintliness of human beings is remarkably uneven. Even saints reveal the lumpiness of their humanity in unpredictable ways. Yet, what is consistent is the holiness that possesses them, for holiness comes from God whose character is pretty even.
           The best way to understand saintliness is to listen to someone people have identified as a saint. Saints have a public relations problem, however, in that all too many of their biographers eliminate or ignore most of the saints’ humanity. Saints do sin, and sometimes are quite good at it, but you would seldom know by the angelic purity of their lives.
           Forget about the miracles for the moment, the kind of “saint” that is really instructive for our lives are some people today who are “ineligible receivers” of sainthood (that’s the Rider comment of the day). Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu were/are all possessed by God in some way, but each has all too human inadequacies and perhaps failures and sins. If we are ever to be saints or just act saintly once in a while, it is important to know that we can sin on occasion and God will still find use for us. Don’t worry, God finds a good use for the unsaints too.