The Truth about Ourselves, the Saints and the Poor
Pope Francis’s new exhortation called Gaudete et Exsultate (Rejoice and Be Glad) challenges Catholics to take a fresh look at our model of holiness and our call to be saints. For too many Catholics, the saints are often unreachable. They are seen as being unattainable superhuman examples, so far removed from our everyday lived experience that instead of inspiring us, they only serve to discourage us. We have placed the saints so high on a pedestal that they are not only out of reach for us but even seem out of touch with reality; as if they had lived in another world instead of here on earth and now are too far above us to relate to.
Pope Francis therefore seeks to “reprepose” a more accessible paradigm of holiness by first redirecting our attention to the overlooked and often hidden “middle class saints”; “our own mothers, grandmothers or other loved ones” whose lives “may not always have been perfect, yet even amid their faults and failings (have) kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord.” St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross states that these unmentioned souls in fact have helped shape “the most decisive turning points in history.” Pope Francis highlights for example the patients and perseverance of parents who “raise children with immense love”, the hardwork of mothers and fathers to support their families, and elderly religious who never lose their smile. He then reiterates the universal call to holiness of Vatican II and encourages “each in their own way” to unite themselves to the Lord’s death and resurrection “in a unique and personal way, constantly dying and rising anew with him.”
Pope Francis takes the saints down a notch by reminding us that “Not everything a saint says is completely faithful to the Gospel; not everything he or she does is authentic or perfect.” This critique is not meant to diminish the saints but rather is an attempt to restore the full picture of their integral humanity. In doing so, the Pope hopes to fortify us in our own personal weakness, mistakes and missteps, so that we may lift up our eyes to Christ crucified, and say“Lord, I am a poor sinner, but you can work the miracle of making me a little bit better”. Rather than being discouraged by our own imperfections, we must always look to Christ, “who loves in us.”
While most of us concentrate on building our virtues and strengths, Pope Francis emphasizes that the essence of holiness is not about “swooning in mystic rapture” but rather “is an encounter between your weakness and the power of God’s grace.” We can encounter the grace of God powerfully in the most painful moments of despair, or when we “find ourselves completely alone and abandoned”, or through the humiliation of “hitting bottom”; when we meet the real and definitive limitations of our own power and existence. It is precisely in and through the experience of our utter emptiness and powerlessness, which can only come through a struggle with our own brokenness, contradictions, conflicts, inconsistencies, and inner confusion that we, like the Prodigal Son, can decide to return to the Father. Confronting the reality of our own inner poverty and inability to save ourselves can also liberate us from falling into the errors of gnosticism and pelagianism, which tempt us to believe that we can ‘know it all’ and ‘do it all’ by ourselves. These heresies are rooted in an attachment to a distorted self-image and inflated ego that overestimate our abilities, placing too much trust in our own intellect, effort or will power. In an attempt to engineer our own salvation, we can rob God of His mystery and the transformative power of His grace. God revealed the paradox that His strength is made perfect in weakness to St Paul, who heard Jesus promise “My grace is sufficient for you.” Pope Francis rightly points out we often find our true value through our own weakness and failures when he writes confident trust and dependence on God “sets us free from every form of enslavement and leads us to recognize our great dignity.”
Perhaps the best example of this in the gospels is Peter who having denied Jesus three times is asked if he really loves Jesus. This famous dialogue is well known but the real meaning, which reveals the humble lesson of how deeply Peter has learned to understand and embrace his own weakness is hidden in the Greek. The dialogue unfolds as follows. Jesus using the word agapao asks Peter: “Do you love me more than these? We are reminded that agapao is the Greek word that designates the highest form of love which is pure, unconditional, unselfish, gratuitous and self sacrificial. The Greeks in fact reserved this word to describe the perfection of how God alone loves in contrast to the lesser loves, phileo (i.e. love of brother, sister, things) and eros (i.e. sexual love). Peter, having only recently denied Jesus three times, demonstrates the humility he discovered through his betrayal and answers honestly that he has phileo for Jesus, a word that means a fond and tender human affection. This genuine admission of his own shortcoming and inner poverty is a break through moment for Peter who has come to know the truth about himself and his own limitations. Jesus then asks Peter to feed His lambs.
When Jesus again asks Peter a second time if he has agapao for Him, Peter again replies he has phileo for Jesus. Jesus then asks Peter to feed His sheep, or more accurately to “tend, nourish, or keep” His sheep. The third and final time Jesus asks the question, however, He does something that is perhaps the most revealing and filled with compassion. He changes the verb and asks Peter if he has phileo for Him. This monumental shift symbolizes the tender merciful caress of the divine kenosis of the incarnation, in which God is made human and comes down to meet us where we are. Peter is sad that Jesus would question if he loved him in this way, phileo, and says “you know all things, you know I phileo you” Jesus ends by asking Peter to feed His lambs.
Saint Teresa of Calcutta reminds us that each of us, despite our “many human faults and failures, are called to serve as “God bends down and uses us, you and me, to be his love and his compassion in the world; he bears our sins, our troubles and our faults. He depends on us to love the world and to show how much he loves it. If we are too concerned with ourselves, we will have no time left for others”.
The Pope thus states that while “the primacy belongs to our relationship with God”, “we cannot forget that the ultimate criterion on which our lives will be judged is what we have done for others.” He then points to Saint Thomas Aquinas, who when asked which actions of ours are noblest and best show our love for God, unhesitatingly responded that “they are the works of mercy towards our neighbour, even more than our acts of worship.”
This, in the end, is the path of spiritual wisdom proposed by the prophet Isaiah to show what is pleasing to God: “to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” It is of course the ultimate criterion of our judgment found in Matthew 25, which assures us we will be judged by how we loved Christ in others. Pope Francis concludes by recalling St John Paul II’s teaching on the importance of learning to see Jesus “especially in the faces of those with whom He himself wished to be identified” so that we may come to see “the face of God reflected in so many other faces. For in every one of our brothers and sisters, especially the least, the most vulnerable, the defenseless and those in need, God’s very image is found.”
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