All Saints Day
Today’s celebration not only comes to remind us of the saints who have preceded us and to teach us the path that has led them to complete happiness. It also wants us to discover the saints who accompany us now and here on our earthly path.
In today’s demystifying and desacralizing world, it seems like an antiquarian find to stumble upon a saint. In fact, however, we are very close to men and women who are truly saints: men and women who walk the same path with us and who strive to achieve an authentically Christian life, faithful to the Gospel of Jesus; men and women who strive to be just and peacemakers, poor and compassionate, pure of heart and compassionate in heart, according to the spirit of the beatitudes.
Today there are saints who live among us. Maybe it’s hard for us to discover them. But there they are. The thing is that they are silent. And that’s why they go unnoticed among us, even if we bump into them in the store or the market, at work or at the bar. They are the saints of today and from here that we still have to discover.
Every human being, and especially contemporary being, sees, above all, things, ideas, businesses, machines around him; and distractedly and lightly, around and on the occasion of that skein of material, bureaucratic or mental structures, he perceives people, of whom he barely cares.
The saint, for his part, has slowly modified his view and placed his selective sensitivity on the true scale of values: his universe has become personalized: the first thing he sees in the human network in which he is immersed are people, they are even brothers. “For whom Christ has died”; and simply, around and at the service of these people, all the earthly structures that allow them or not to reach the Kingdom of God.
The saint, in the midst of a humanity divided by ideology, economy, race, more than ever separated into rich and poor; knows that in that humanity sin reigns: where men confront each other before they meet, they do not know each other before they discover each other, they remain indifferent to each other at the very moment in which their wealth changes. The saint is the first to know that the reconciliation of humanity has cost the cross of Christ and that he himself will have to add what is missing to the sufferings of Christ for his Body, which is the Church.
By Fr. Robert Nsinga, MCCJ
