Have you heard of Ss Boris and Gleb? I have not either. I made a
research of obscure saints to prove a point. Saints are useless. Unless they
serve a purpose. For example, September is the month of Padre Pio. 23rd Sept to
be exact. For the duration of the Novena, the Ulu Tiram Friary will be crowded
by those who go either to give thanks for favours received or to beg for saintly
intercession.
Saints are useless unless they serve a practical purpose and their
utility is usually to further our earthly improvement. For many of us, and this
is not a condemnatory statement[1], our vision does not
usually extend beyond the material horizon. In other words, we no longer have a
hunger for heaven.
Why have we lost the taste for heaven?
We have lost sight of heaven firstly because our rather
self-enclosed autonomous and secular world measures success in rather
materialistic terms. For example, between Lourdes and Fatima, there is no
contention that Lourdes, with its focus on healing and health is definitely
more popular than Fatima, where the focus is on sin and the hard work of
conversion. Closer to home, the ever-expanding city boundary is testimony to
this profane pursuit. Whilst this is a legitimate undertaking, we are
challenged to look beyond. Is that this the only life we will have?
Material gain is not the only myopic or short-sighted fixation we
have. Our celestial vision is at the same time stymied or frustrated by the
lack of intellectual clarity. For example, have you watched the movie
Maleficent? In principle, I have refused to. Of course, I might be accused of
being judgemental for judging a movie by its title. That does not bother me
because the title itself represents a confusion that is clouding our celestial
vision.
This confusion is caused by the blurring of lines between what is
good and what is bad. We are asked not to be judgemental. Fair enough. But,
what does it mean? In Nathaniel Hawthorn’s book, the Scarlet Letter, an
Adulteress woman (Hester Prynne) is made to wear a red-letter “A” in public in
order to shame her. No prize for guessing that “A” stands for adulteress. In
today’s world, she would be less of a sinner than she would be of a victim. The
society during her time, which acted as a kind of moral standard in the
narrative, would, in today’s world be condemned as tyrannical for daring to
impose its standard on this poor woman. Moral progress in the last few decades
has trodden the path of perversity. Whilst we are allowed to assess progress as
a good since it is an advancement, we are not allowed to criticise its
consequence as perverse thereby leaving us with the conclusion that any
progress is good even if its consequence is perverse.
There is no more moral standard as it were. In fact, you must have
heard it said, “You gotta be bad to be good”? Such linguistic usage has
rendered the terms bad and good almost synonymous, thus emptying them of their
moral content. To say that someone is great, it is not sufficient to say, “You
are fantastic”. Somehow, one has to be “badass”. This has had a deleterious or
harmless effect on us. Why the need to be good when bad is just good enough?
When bad is good enough, is there any need for striving? Why be
noble then? As a title of a movie suggests, “Heaven can wait”, we find
ourselves languishing in this world believing that mediocrity is close enough
substitute for heaven. Furthermore, the irony of this “tolerant and inclusive”
world is its intolerance of the good. Another movie with a title “The
40-year-old-Virgin” surely suggests that one who is not promiscuous is
certainly a “loser”. As a friend of mine would like to remind me that there is
a concerted effort by this “tolerant” society to vilify the good whilst at the
same time sanctifies the evil. Thus, we should avoid passing judgement on
people’s beliefs and lifestyle preferences. Choices are just preferences and
have no moral content to them. In other words, we lower the bar so much that
sin is not sinful anymore.
If Christ is to be believed, then we must recognise that there is
a world which does not like the light He brings. Instead, this world presents
us with a philosophy of existence without condemnation, without guilt and
without consequence. If it is right for you, then it is right. What is wrong
for you is not necessarily wrong for anyone else. We breathe the rarefied
air where moral absolute does not exist, and truth is dependent on one’s
perspective.
It explains why the Church is in such a dire strait now. There is
a failure in our perception. Hence, the Church designates today for us to
commemorate the saints. In a highly utilitarian world, all the more we need
beacons to guide our way. Why? Holiness or personal sanctity is our key to
heaven. If anything, we imitate what we are to become, creatures of heaven. One
of the things which we ought to remind ourselves is that this journey of holiness
to heaven cannot be undertaken without the Church and of course, the Sacraments
given by Christ for the sanctification of her sons and daughters. Both the
Church and the Sacraments are infused in the life of every saint.
According to Archbishop Chaput, “If we want to repair the Lord’s
Church in the shadow of today’s scandals and confusion; we need to understand
that without saints, nothing we do will work. We cannot give what we do not
have. If Jesus Christ and a real Catholic identity do not burn in the interior
cathedral of our hearts, we can never possibly rebuild the external life of the
Church in the world.”
Whether we like it or not, the world judges us by our failures
rather than by our successes. They look at the fallen few and see them as
vindication of their view that the Church has been wrong all the time, especially
with regard to her moral teachings. All the more we need personal holiness
because sanctity is the true face of the Church.
Hence, saints are useful even if they are useless to us in a
utilitarian manner of speaking because they are a spiritual reminder of what we
are called to be. All Saints celebrates all the saints, whether canonised or
not but they are not just an amorphous mass of individuals with no name as the
Book of Revelation tells us—there are numbered symbolically as a hundred and
forty-four thousand. They are remembered for their holiness and their sanctity
is a great encouragement in our pilgrimage of our conversion and is also a
helpful reminder that holiness is attractive even if the “tolerant” world may
be repulsed by it. Holiness just by itself is evangelisation—"I want to be
like that”. As the Apostles’ Creed proposes, let us love the saints not because
of what we can get. Let us love them because we want to be like them for we
belong to them—the Communion of Saints. If not, whilst failing to embrace
sanctity, we will be damned to a utilitarian belief in saints. That would not
be a poverty that is blessed but a poverty that enslaves us in a world of
utility.
[1] The Benediction at the end of Mass itself speaks of
“blessing” and to be blessed with plenty is a sign of God’s providence.
