Every All Saints’ Day, I personally prefer to focus my homage to those nameless, voiceless saints who have gone ahead of us. Holiness, the late Pope Francis reminds us in Gaudete et Exsultate, is “present in the patience of God’s people, in those parents who raise their children with immense love, in those men and women who work hard to support their families, in the sick, in the elderly religious who never lose their smile.”
There are saints with specific dates assigned as their feast days, Jan. 28 for Thomas Aquinas, July 31 for Ignatius of Loyola, Oct. 11 for Pope John XXIII and so on. Special people are deservedly given special dates. They are part of the Solemnity of All Saints. But again, I want to focus on the nameless friends of God. These are the people who followed God’s will, many of them didn’t know they were following God by following their conscience — but who are not recognized for doing such.
The reply of Lorenzo Ruiz to his captors is recorded, “If I have thousand lives, I will offer them all to God,” and the writings of John of the Cross are still studied by students of spirituality. But the cries of the victims of the recent earthquake went to the graves together with them. The defiant words of Thomas More are recorded for posterity, “I am the King’s faithful servant, but God’s first,” but we never can hear the words of Filipino policemen who refused to participate in the systematic campaign to exterminate drug users extrajudicially.” Francis was a hero for the environment and his Hymn to Brother Sun, Sister Moon is sung even by those who are doing severe damage to mother nature. But the voices of those people displaced by the mining and logging industries are muted.
Even among the living, it is common to think that the saintly are those who join pilgrimages, go to Church often and read the Bible daily. We normally do not consider saintly a mother with no money to join retreats and who struggles to make a living and send her children to school, while she has to bear the pontification of the churchy flock who tell her how she should practice holiness. We consider the financial donors to be closer to God but not those who are trying to eke out a living. But should there not be a primordial saintliness in the very struggle to live?
The voicelessness of ordinary people in our collective memory goes hand in hand with our tendency to romanticize the canonized saints. Certainly, they showed either extraordinary feats or superlative repentance. For instance, the writings of Thomas Aquinas are difficult to parallel and the bravery of missionaries who went to lands previously unknown is the stuffs for legends.
These saints-heroes are now considered as intermediaries between the disciples on earth and a God who is otherwise difficult to reach. Indeed, in popular homilies, God is pictured as a monarch with several assistants. Since God is far, we need intercessors who are closer to the Deity. It seems like the padrino system elevated to the realm of the heavenly.
But since most of us do not have the calling to greatness, can we not emulate the saints in their ordinariness? Our devotion to Mary, Mother of God, is a case in point. We picture her as extraordinarily beautiful, mother inviolate. But can we not honor a Blessed Virgin who was a peasant, who at one point in her life had to share a stable with smelly sheep, whose family was displaced by the political machinations of Herod, who had to struggle to understand a Son whose radical lifestyle was bringing her troubles, but who followed her Son all the way to execution?
The saints are our brothers and sisters who share our common humanity and who struggle like all of us. But many of us do not consider ourselves saints, and rightly so. One ceases to be a saint if one thinks that he or she is saintly. Real saints are painfully aware that they are far from the persons that God wants them to be. But on the other hand, is not our inability to consider ourselves saints arising from our image of heroic ideal most often defined in terms that only those associated with the hierarchical church can live?
Going back to the nameless saints, is it not our task to hear the voiceless ordinary people in our society? Or better still, why not be their voices? Long before they are mere members of “the faithful departed” or the “forgotten souls” they are actually reduced to statistical figures even while they are still alive.