All Saints: So How Do You Become One of those Happy People Anyway?

On All Saints’ Day the Church holds up a crowd of millions and says: this! this is what you were made for. Sometimes you read all those lives and think, oh my, how do I do that? How do you become one of them? The answer was given by Fr. John A. Hardon — preaching on this very feast:

Sexual concupiscence is called lust and is regularly placed … always, over the centuries … right after the sinful drive to pride. In the mind of the Church, these two, pride and lust, are the primary impulses that cannot … and never can be … controlled by the human being alone. They require divine grace to master. But once mastered, they are also the foundation stones of sanctity. There is no sanctity … there wouldn’t be a feast of All Saints … unless with the help of divine grace there were people who lived lives of humility and chastity. No one else reaches heaven — no one else, no one else. Heaven is reserved for the humble and the chaste.

Heaven is reserved for the humble and the chaste.

Sounds easy, right? I think we need to look more at these two virtues and see why Father said we can’t do it ourselves (but with Divine help). Humility is probably the most misread of the virtues: the timid mistake it for timidity, and the proud mistake it for a consolation prize for losers. I think that’s a fair way to explain how worldliness see the virtue, but let’s look at two pictures of humility that show more essence of the virtue as a direction. Humility is proven chiefly by the direction a man turns when everything comes apart. Two anecdotes that follow show two people at the testing point. One turned toward God. One turned toward himself. The outcomes reveal the difference.

The Defenestration (the Falling Man)

 In 1618, the Protestant estates of Bohemia seized the imperial viceroys Martinitz and Slawata and, invoking an “ancient custom” for traitors, hurled them from a window of the Prague palace. (I can’t help myself, but careful readers will recognize this tradition still to this day in news stories from eastern countries). This defenestration became the event that sparked the Thirty Years’ War. As he was dragged to the sill, Martinitz did not strategize, did not philosophize. Rather, he shouted the names of Jesus and Mary. The crowd jeered the experiment: “Let us see whether Mary will come to help him.” I love the ending: He landed in a dry moat from a great height and rose to his feet without the slightest injury. An impossible result! The Catholics called it providence; the heretics called it “magic.”

Here is the first thing to notice: in free-fall, a man says whatever his life has trained him to say. Martinitz had spent so many ordinary hours invoking Jesus and Mary that the invocation fired before his feet left the ground. Prayer had become the reflex of his will. That is what a saint is: a person whose will has been so thoroughly exercised in “thy will be done” that even gravity cannot interrupt it.

A praying mother “saves” her son. 

A child falls deathly ill. The mother begs God for his life, and when her prayers seem unanswered a priest advises her: pray rather that God’s will be done. She answers with the most damning sentence: “No, I cannot do that; my will must be done.” The boy recovers. The problem is that he grows up and gets into every vice available and ends his days on the gallows. The commentary here appears gentle but the facts are not: she got what she demanded.

I want to highlight this distinction. Notice what each of them was trying to do about salvation. The falling man knew, in the way that admits no argument, that he could not save himself, so he called on the one who could, and he was saved. The kneeling mother would not let anyone else save her son. “My will must be done” is not impatience, but rather is a claim to the office of God. She was playing mother-god to her boy, and note that this is the identical fault of the unchaste man: taking possession of what is not his. Her son belonged to God first and He knew. And here is the most terrible word in her story: her prayer was answered. The boy recovered. The world delivers its promises precisely, on time, to the letter — and the delivery is what kills. The son on the gallows is the endpoint of every self-salvation: she got what she demanded.

Coincidentally, St. Kolbe gives this observation on the saints:

“The rather widespread notion that the saints were not like us is simply false. They also were subject to temptation, also fell and got up again… In this way their falls served them as steps toward an ever greater perfection.

Just like our guy falling out the window, saints were people just like us who kept getting back up after their falls.

Both pictures are aiming at the same target the feast aims at: happiness. The saints are simply the people who arrived, and Fr. Hardon tells us what the place looks like when you ask the question the modern mind is forbidden to ask — are all the saints in heaven equally happy? Absolutely not. Every capacity for glory will have been built by a different generosity in this life; no two souls equally blessed. (And note the discussion on merit that is implied here). And yet Father Hardon caps the apparent problem: “inequality where there is no misery.” Perfect inequality, zero envy. Only one society in the universe can sustain that, and it is the one where nobody is left competing for first place — because envy, you see, is a disease possible only for wills that still want the throne.

That word “equality.” The worldly misunderstanding of heaven collapses against the mother’s sickroom. The modern project promises a happiness engineered from enforced equality: level the heights, because hierarchy of glory flies in the face of proud egos. “All are welcome!” after all. Everyone is held in “esteem.” We are constantly barraged with messages that everyone is special. It makes a place where every citizen of worldly “heaven” (i.e. utopia) is claiming the throne. To get that “heaven” it must manufacture resentment to cut down the exceptional or talented, and call the trimming “justice.” But utopia here is only the sickroom universalized: my will must be done, scaled to a society, and its children get the same inheritance — the gallows. The world as a goal cannot make you happy, and the terrifying part is that it is not even a false promise: it gives exactly what you ask for. Ask the mother. Heaven is the only goal that cannot betray you — not because it is far away, but because it alone tells you the truth about what you are: unequal, redeemable, and happy only when the will is surrendered to God’s.

One footnote: this feast was, down through the mid 20th century, the only saint’s feast binding American Catholics under pain of sin. Since 1991 our bishops relieve us of the obligation whenever Nov. 1 falls on a Saturday or Monday — as it does next year.

How do you become a saint? I could joke and quip “by throwing your will out of the window.” I think the better advice is what Kolbe said at the end of the sermon above. He answered this question by quoting St. Benedict’s words to his sister, St. Scholastica: “You must want to.”

This article, All Saints: So How Do You Become One of those Happy People Anyway? is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
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