Last Saturday we celebrated the Feast of All Saints, honoring the men and women of every age since the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus who have pursued a life of holiness and have been recognized by the Church for their sanctity. So, what if we started inviting young people to be saints? What if we looked for virtuous qualities in teenagers and young adults and encouraged them to pursue genuine holiness, that is, an intentional life of striving to please the Lord? Indeed, this is what our young people most need: sincere encouragement to set about pleasing the Lord in whatever their vocation may be.
The Church has always encouraged us to read the lives of the saints and become familiar with the particular virtues that characterized their lives. In that regard, we should encourage young people to read about the lives of the saints and imitate what they discover. We should also teach them to ask the Lord to show them what he desires for their lives, especially since it is he who gave them the specific gifts that make them uniquely who they are. We should encourage young people to embrace a life that is pleasing to the Lord, asking for the graces they need to grow in holiness.
Young people today are bombarded by a myriad of possibilities for their lives. Often, they can become overwhelmed by the challenge of discerning what might be best for their lives. The underlying assumption is that they will pursue higher education and get a good job so that they can have all the things in life that the culture says would make them happy. Such a route in life can be, for many, a tedious pursuit of activity devoid of meaning. So, I have a good job, a nice house, a golf club membership, regular vacations and early retirement, yet I end up feeling unfulfilled.
I submit that the reason for this lack of fulfillment is that no one ever invited them to make pleasing the Lord the motivation behind their earthly existence. If we don’t invite our children to spend their lives striving to please the Lord, then all they will do is what they see us doing: striving to please ourselves. Again, this is what I call “managing my own happiness.” If holiness of life is how we get to heaven, then our daily goal should be to please the Lord in all that we say and do. This gives meaning to our lives. It gives us purpose and drive and enables us to see some genuine value to life at every moment, not just the exciting times.
Unfortunately, many good and ordinary Catholics have lost their own focus on the pursuit of holiness. Many tend to rule out the possibility of being a saint because of some past sin or shame in their lives. And even if those sins have been confessed, it is all too easy to believe that sainthood is no longer possible. What? Are you kidding me? What about the example of St. Peter who denied the Lord three times yet afterwards professed his love for Christ three times and our Lord made him the head of the apostles. And what about St. Paul? He stridently murdered the followers of Jesus, presiding over the martyrdom of St. Stephen, yet when encountering Christ while on the road to Damascus, Saul repented, was baptized and became the greatest evangelist for Christ as St. Paul.
The best thing we can do for our children and the generations after us is to model the pursuit of sainthood for them. Children will want to be saints and believe it is possible if they are encouraged to strive to please the Lord and have our own example as a model to follow. What does that look like in real terms? I believe it means taking the high road, the narrow road, not the easy and comfortable approach to life. It means teaching my children to have a daily time of prayer by doing that myself. It means getting up for Mass on Sunday when I’d rather skip Mass. It means tithing to the Church and to charities when I would rather put that money away for my own ‘nest egg.’ It means cleaning up my speech and ending my gossip habit. It means seeking first the kingdom of God with greater zeal than seeking to have all the material things this world has to offer.
We need to be witnesses of holiness not only to our children but to our peers, neighbors, co-workers and friends. That means we decide to do some things to please the Lord with greater priority in our lives. It also means we let some things go. We stop doing some things because they are truly obstacles to holiness, even though we might find some enjoyment in them. In the “Call of the King” meditation in his spiritual exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola says that when we place ourselves under the standard of Christ the King, we go where he goes, eat what he eats, sleep where he sleeps and suffers what he suffers because we have chosen Christ and want to follow him in everything.
Thus, to strive for holiness is to make choice after choice after choice that puts God ahead of everything else and strives to please him over seeking to be popular. As we honor the men and women of every time and place who have done this, whether through martyrdom, monastic life, or as husbands and wives or as single people like St. Carlo Acutis, just canonized a saint by Pope Leo XIV a few weeks ago, let us encourage one another to become saints, to pursue holiness of life and to honor the Lord in all that we say and do.
