A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, blessed are your eyes because they see, and blessed are your ears because they hear. I assure you, many a prophet and many a saint longed to see what you see but did not see it, to hear what you hear but did not hear it. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
One of the major objections that many protestants in the sixteenth century found with the traditional church, the church of Rome, was the multiplication of all these feasts where we honor saints, and it is a very heterogeneous crowd, extremely so. And the few that we happen to notice from the pulpit are just a sample. In the seminary at the noonday meal, we used to read the martyrology, and that was an enumeration of the saints, the plural, of the day. And even that didn't exhaust the entire number of saints that the church of Christ remembers. It is very easy, of course, to exaggerate the best of things.
The destruction of the best is the worst. Aristotle said that, I think. The destruction of the best is the worst. And the better a thing is, the more easily it is destroyed. Go back into your kitchen and pick up a stainless steel knife and you can use it as a screwdriver to pry open a can of beans or something.
Go into your dining room and take a p a a sterling silver knife and see what happens to it if you try to use it as a screwdriver. The destruction of the best is the worst, and there is nothing so good that it can't be ruined, that it can't be turned into something very perverse. But the fact that this is that this happens doesn't doesn't at all affect the worth of what is destroyed. The fact that you use your sterling knife to try to to open a can with it, it's not a commentary on sterling silver, it's a commentary on you. There's nothing wrong with sterling silver.
And so we have to keep our our poise. We have to realize what is the church trying to do. The church never goes wrong. The church of Jesus Christ doesn't make miss big mistakes, you know. Not the church.
Churchmen can. The from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, we are being constantly reminded of the saints. We have saints' names. The church celebrates their feasts. We make a big thing of some of them.
Of course, some of it's tied to nationalism. That's not good either for the saint. But that's a fact. Some people have taken certain saints to the heart and made them a national symbol. Again, that doesn't destroy the concept of the saint.
Now there are two things we can say about what we call saints. That is they're human beings and they're historical. They live. They had they their existence in this world. They had their ups and their downs, and some of them had more downs than ups.
I would say generally that's the way it was. They are one of us. And when we look at their lives, as we look at any the life of any other person of history, we can take it to heart and say, look, if they did it, I'm not hopeless. I'm not hopeless if they made it because the grace of god, I can depend on. I may not depend on myself, but I can depend on god.
He will not desert me. I can only abandon him. That's the first thing. That's the commonplace thing. But in the Catholic church, there's much more to it than this, much more to it.
We don't pray to the saints as past dead entities. We don't think of the saints only as memories even if they be heroic, even if they be stimulating and inspiring. The saints are much more than that. They are the actuality of the present. You have a saint's name.
Do you ever think about that? Do you? The significance of it, you know, is lost. We have a problem sometimes sometimes in trying to get parents to give the child at baptism a saint's name. Believe it or not, this happens.
It's even happened to me on the few baptisms I performed in my life. Because the whole idea of putting somebody under the protection or the guidance or the special attention of a saint, it doesn't exist in some instances. And yet, that's precisely the idea that the church wants to give us. We cannot honor an anchoic in the sense of adding anything to them in heaven. They've got it.
They have it made. They have arrived. They are fulfilled. Believe me. We can't add to that.
But in honoring them and recalling them, we we what do we do? We introduce ourselves into their company. We we consciously are now aware of the people around us. We are now we should be inspired with the great confidence that we're not in the trenches alone. We're not finding a solitary battle.
We have a lot of help. It wasn't angels that held up Moses' arms or Aaron's arms so that the victory could be theirs. It was men, plain ordinary men who held his arms up. We need that. We need that.
It's very difficult. Remember, you cannot picture god. You cannot grasp god. You can't smell or touch or taste or hear God. Jesus Christ, you can.
But even he is God, and in that sense, he is remote. He's not one of us in the sense in which he was just an ordinary man or woman. He was God. The son of Mary, truly man, was only one person, and that person is God. And there's a chasm between me and him.
But between me and Saint Anne or Saint Joachim or Saint James yesterday or the Curie Of Ars or Labre or Colbe or all of these people, Saint Peter Claver, a lot of them were nuts, clowns. Certainly they were. They were eccentrics, but a lot of them weren't. The little flower wasn't. The great Saint Teresa of Avila wasn't.
Plenty of saints have been very ordinary people, very ordinary. And let me tell you, there are a lot of anonymous saints. A lot of anonymous saints. And that's what I want you to realize. Think of your parents.
Think of your grandparents, your great grandparents. We are all together. We just didn't come into this world without a history, without an ancestry. We go back to Adam and Eve. It's a pretty large family, you know.
And we are all embraced here, all of us. And we call this the mystical body of Christ following our lord's arrival in this world and his salvific mission. But this is something that Christians ought to get a hold of and live. You hear it on all sides that people are lonely. Talk to doctors and a lot of other people, psychiatrists, you get the same message.
People are floundering around about the meaning of life, the hopelessness of it all, but above all the meaningless of it. Why? Why? Why? These are sensible questions.
And maybe we can't get a very sensible answer from the world. You won't get an answer from the world because the world can't answer the question. The blind can only lead the blind into a ditch. We need light, and that light comes from Jesus Christ, and it embraces us all. We are the community of God.
We live for god. And living for god, we have to live with and for one another. You can't escape this. If you try, you're wrong. And it's been tried, and people have been wrong.
So we come back to the great truth of our union with god, and so are we are united all one with another. In that sense, Tolstoy and Dovsky were absolutely right, absolutely right. So let us on this feast of Saint Anajokum, I don't know much about them. I don't know anything more about them than you know except that they were the parents of Our Lady, but they belong to my family. I'm one with them.
In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.