Many years ago, in a homily, I heard that the Saints were like stained glass windows. The same analogy was used by Pope Francis in 2017. Saints did not produce or project their own light, rather, they became so transparent to the Divine Light within that they allowed it to shine through them in their own unique colours to beautify and heal the world.
Many Saints are canonised and well known. Many others, called The Souls, may never be canonised, but together with the Saints and ourselves, form an enormous community, within which we can help each other on the journey of life. We do not have to travel alone.
But who were the Saints? In very many ways they were people just like us. Like us they experienced joys and sorrows, had challenges to face and difficulties to overcome, both within and without, and in many cases, lived in a traumatised and traumatising world.
What may have been different about them was that once they had a moment of awakening to a reality beyond the world of the senses, they devoted themselves totally to seeking to live from that deeper place of soul, even in the midst of their ordinary human lives. It was as if a curtain parted momentarily and they caught a glimpse of the Divine Light, the Pearl of Great Price (Mt 13:45), the Kingdom of God within (Luke 17:21) which so captivated them that they realised only complete union with this Divine Light could ever fully satisfy them.
St Augustine expressed it beautifully:
Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient, so new… You were within me and I sought you outside… You called and cried to me… I tasted you, and now hunger and thirst for you. You touched me and I have burned for your peace.
And what of us? We too may have had moments of awakening, moments that touched us deeply and left us speechless with wonder and awe; moments such as holding a newborn for the first time, an extraordinarily beautiful experience in nature, hearing an exquisite piece of music, reading a line of a poem, the truth of which resonated deeply within.
We may have skimmed over such moments at the time, in the busyness of our lives, but we can recall them. And if we choose to revisit them, we may again feel their power to touch us, and, as it were, blow our hearts open once more.
And if by grace, we feel drawn to live from that deeper awareness, we might, like the Saints, commit ourselves to spending some time each day inhabiting that place. We might sit quietly, and lowering our shoulders, begin to drop down into our core, as if into a wonderful armchair inside the body, which is the perfect fit for us. We might allow ourselves, our whole selves, to ease down until we feel ourselves held in this spacious inner place of ease and safety, a place of peace and total acceptance, just as we are, until we realise that this inner armchair is made of love. We are being held by Love.
And if we are willing to rest in this Divine Love day by day, as did the Saints, we too might begin to allow it to transform us. We might find our hearts expand so that they have more room in them for all, until bit by tiny bit, we might experience, as did the Saints, the peace beyond understanding (Phil 4:7), the complete joy that no one can take away (Jn 15:11, 16:22), and the life to the full (Jn, 10:10) that Jesus offered, until in however small and imperfect a way, perhaps without even realising it, we might, in our everyday, ordinary lives, begin to allow the Divine Light to shine through us too, to help illuminate and heal our beautiful, bruised and broken world.
Briege Buckley rsj