In 2019, there was a movie about Mr. Rogers called, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” starring Tom Hanks. It’s a great movie, you can watch it with Netflix. In the movie there’s one scene when the journalist (who is the main character) is watching Mr. Rogers, from a distance, as he greets fans in a rope-upped line. The journalist turns to the woman standing next to him and introduces himself. He discovers that she is MRS. Rogers. He asks, “So how does it feel to be married to a living saint?”
Mrs. Rogers winces, “Yeah, I don’t much like that word. It suggests that his way of being is unattainable. He’s not a perfect person. He gets angry. He’s learned how to deal with it.” She now looks at the journalist, “He works at it. It's practice.”
Wow. We celebrate Saints today and what is remarkable is that most of, if not all of, the Saints in our official Communion of Saints weren’t perfect. Think of the legends in the bible . . .
Abraham lied about his wife being his sister. He abandoned his slave, Hagar who bore his child Ishmael, in the
desert. Then we almost killed his son. And yet God promised to build a generation through him.
King David was a murderer and adulterer.
Jacob achieved success by trickery.
Samson consorted with the enemy.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who is a Saint but we discovered that during her life she had many doubts about her faith. She said, “I am a little pencil in God’s hands. He does the thinking. He does the writing. He does everything and sometimes it is really hard because it is a broken pencil and He has to sharpen it a little more.”
We all are broken pencils. We are not perfect, like the Saints. But our task continues to strive to be a saint. What in your life could you change to be more saintly? What could you stop doing? What could you start doing?
Dorothy Day, who is on the way to be canonized a Saint. She is called a “Servant of God.” Its step one of the three step process. We are offering a play next week on her. Once she was called a living saint. She responded, "Don't call me a saint, I don't want to be dismissed that easily." Day feared that the pedestal of sainthood would make us, mere mortals, forget the many tasks at hand and the daily struggle of building a better world.
For our task . . . is not to become a Saint, but to build a better world, even in our imperfections, even when we are not at our best (as the gospel points out).
Fr. Thomas Merton (who I think will one day be canonized as a Saint) once wrote, “To become a saint therefore may mean the anguish of looking like an outcast, and in a real sense “being” a sinner. It may mean apparent conflict with certain standards that are wrongly understood by others. The thing is to cling to God’s will and truth in their purity and try to be sincere and to act in all things out of genuine love.”