COMMENTARY: As the Church celebrates all her saints, we remember their witness that faith is a love story — one that is true and demands our whole hearts.
“We are all born originals,” St. Carlo Acutis used to say, “but many of us die as photocopies.”
As we celebrate All Saints’ Day, this is the perfect encouragement and mindset for us to have.
The saints were those who truly lived. They were the ones who accepted Jesus as the central focus of their lives. To them, faith was not a matter of blind trust, nor was it the simple following of rules and teachings. The saints accepted the call to be who God made them to be. They knew who Jesus was, and their every movement of mind and action was centered on him.
Ultimately, the saints reveal three critical messages for our life of faith. They insisted that our faith is a love story, that our faith is true, and that our faith must be our first priority.
Everyone loves a good love story. Whether it is a movie about a reckless romantic or a true story about the sacrifice of one person for the sake of others, love resonates with us because we were made for love. The saints knew that to fall in love with God and receive his love was everything. Despite our sinfulness and our frequent rejection of God to pursue our selfishness, he always remains faithful and pursues us.
St. Augustine experienced this firsthand. In his Confessions he wrote, “O thou Omnipotent Good, thou carest for every one of us as if thou didst care for him only, and so for all as if they were but one!”
If we truly could grasp the love that God has for us, it would envelop our souls in such a way that it would bring us to our knees in tears. There are powerful moments in people’s lives — on their wedding day, at the first Mass of a priest, and so forth — where they experience a faint glimmer of this love. However, the grandeur of heaven is so vast that Jesus would have died for your sake even if you were the only one alive.
Experiencing and encountering this divine love is what the saints did in prayer. That meeting with the union of the Trinity sparked their lives to personify God’s love in all the relationships and circumstances of their lives. If we seek to follow in their footsteps, we must also pursue the love story and be rooted in daily and intimate prayer.
The saints also knew that our faith is true. They knew this in their minds and in their hearts. St. Edith Stein once wrote, “Anyone who seeks Truth seeks God, whether or not he realizes it.” To recognize truth is to make contact with God because God is truth itself. St. Thomas Aquinas aided the clarity of the definition of truth in explaining it as “the conformity between one’s mind and reality.”
When our minds align with what actually is, then we are in the knowledge of the truth. This applies to the realms of math and science as well as theology and philosophy. The famous saints of the intellectual life showcased the fact that one’s faith is never in a battle with one’s pursuit of the truth. Nothing that the Catholic Church teaches is irrational or contrary to the truth. In fact, the closer we get to God, the more clearly we see reality for what it truly is.
In his magazine The Knight of the Immaculata, St. Maximilian Kolbe wrote the following words not long before he was arrested and placed in Auschwitz by the Nazis: “No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek Truth and to serve it when we have found it.”
The message of this priest — a saint who gave his life to save another man — shows us that holiness breeds truth, but it also grows our willingness to courageously live the truth. Once we have been captivated by the love story of our faith and come to grips with God as truth itself, we become more willing and desiring to spread that love and truth — no matter the cost.
Finally, the saints reveal that faith must be the all-encompassing aspect of our lives. For many, this sounds harsh or not realistic. Our lives can and should be made up of many facets. We have friendships, careers, hobbies, and free time. Can God really own all of these? Wouldn’t this make us unrelatable to the world? The saints proudly and loudly proclaim that God must reign as the true Lord of our lives.
Among all of the good things that we are a part of and spend our time doing, God must be the clear priority. Otherwise, we risk placing something else in the place of God as our ultimate fulfillment. This leads to a life of sin and sadness. Because without God as our focus, we isolate ourselves from him and become less human. This truth inspired St. Teresa of Ávila to write: “He who possesses God lacks nothing: God alone suffices.”
In a similar vein, Blessed Charles de Foucauld said this about his conversion and vocation: “As soon as I believed there was a God, I understood I could do nothing else but live for him, my religious vocation dates from the same moment as my faith: God is so great. There is such a difference between God and everything that is not.”
Both Teresa and Charles exemplify the need for disciples to place Jesus above everything else in their lives. While the world would claim that handing God one’s life would mean that we are lost to religious enslavement and pious boredom, they exclaim that the surrender of one’s will to God sets us free. Because God is our source and our homeland.
As we celebrate the company of saints today, may we seek to cling to that source and be more committed than ever before to spend eternity with the God who is love and truth — the God who deserves all that we are.
