A Saint of Our Times and For Our Times

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - September 7, 2007

The impact that the saints in heaven are supposed to have on us still on the pilgrimage of life is concisely summarized in the Preface for Holy Men and Women which the priest prays at Mass: "In their lives on earth, you give us an example. In our communion with them, you give us their friendship. In their prayer for the Church, you give us strength and protection." Their example, friendship and intercession are meant to fill us with hope and "spur us on to victory, to share their prize of everlasting glory." The saints, in other words, are supposed to motivate and help us to become saints ourselves.

The example of saints is meant to bring us to conversion as we see what is possible in a human being who says "yes" to God. When Augustine read the life of St. Antony of the Desert, he turned to his friend Alipius and remarked that if someone who was so simple was capable of such love, goodness and wisdom, then they with all their learning should be capable of it, too. When the vain yet chivalrous Ignatius of Loyola read the lives of the saints while convalescing from a battle wound, he was pierced to the quick and asked why he could not do what Francis and Dominic did. After all, he reasoned, he was made of the same human stuff as they.

While the saints of every century can have type of impact on the faithful today, sometimes the temporal separation can be like asbestos preventing our being lit by the flame of their sanctity. We can reason that they lived in a time when holiness was easier, when life was not so complicated, when they did not have to face the obstacles that so often for us become excuses.

This wiggling process is much tougher to accomplish with a saint who lived during our lifetime, who confronted the major issues of our culture, who visited our cities and prayed alongside us in our churches — someone like Blessed Mother Teresa, who shows us not only what is possible today but what the Lord wants today.

The best way to celebrate the tenth anniversary of her birth into eternal life is to take seriously her example and seek to imitate it in our personal circumstances. While the Lord is not calling everyone to dress in blue-and-white saris, enter religious life, and live according to the radical poverty of the Missionaries of Charity, the Lord does call us to seek to emulate her virtues, especially her faith and love of the Lord and of others.

Mother Teresa was one who acted on the Lord's words that whatever we do to the least of his brothers and sisters we do to him (Mt 25:40). She and the Missionaries of Charity the Lord had her found sought therefore to love Christ "as he has never been loved before" in the "distressing disguise" of the poorest of the poor. "God still loves the world," she said, "and he sends you and me to be his love and his compassion to the poor." All of us, in other words, are called to be missionaries of charity. All of us are called to seek to quench the Lord's infinite thirst for love and for souls.

Mother Teresa is also an example of persevering faith. We now know that for five decades she struggled through the sense of total abandonment by God in prayer called the dark night of the soul. As hard as it was at first, she would come to see it as a privilege to unite herself ever more deeply in love to Christ in his abandonment on the Cross. "I have come to love the darkness," she wrote in 1962, "for I believe now that it is a very small part of Jesus' darkness and pain on earth. Jesus can't go anymore through the agony, but he wants to go through it in me."

With loving trust, total surrender and cheerfulness, she clung in faith to the Lord she could not sense. It was the most radical form of her poverty. "I have the joy of having nothing," she said, "not even the reality of the Presence of God [in the Eucharist]." The hours she would spend daily without consolation in front of the Lord's Eucharistic camouflage helped her even more disinterestedly to spend hours caring for him in the disguise of the poor. It was one continual act of loving faith.

"If I ever become a Saint," she once said, "I will surely be one of 'darkness.'" Better put, she would be one for those in darkness. When Christ called her in 1946 to found the Missionaries of Charity, he said, "Come, be my light." Like Christ her light, she entered into the darkness but the darkness did not overcome her (Jn 1:5).

Her light still brightly burns, as a courageous guide and contagious summons for us.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.