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 Today we are celebrating a great feast. We are united, with our hearts filled with faith and joy, to an infinite assembly of men and women that have left a trail of light and love in the Church and in history. Who are saints? If I had to define them, I would say that saints are the freest people: free from long faces, from laziness, from "indifference" and from doing things with agitation.
Saints are models of freedom in forgiveness, in Love, in always starting over, in believing, in living free from every kind of slavery. From what kind of slavery? From the heaviness of having to obey, for example. If like saints, we learned to do things not out of obligation, but for love, we would no longer be slaves. Everyone looses patience, peace, or has some kind of mishap. These are occasions for getting to know ourselves, becoming saints and overcoming our small or large forms of slavery.
Saints have shown their extraordinary interior liberty above all in front of tests and tribulation. Jesus has concretely shown us the sainthood of God: in His life, He only loved, consoled, healed, and freed from evil. Without doing anything wrong, in the hour of Gethsemane, He too wanted to do a great act of freedom and trust and abandoned himself in His Father's arms. Now we can also become saints abandoning ourselves to the Father, answering His will like Jesus did and choose the school of sainthood: we can all learn to live well and with love in our daily lives, to do our work well making our hands concrete instruments for gestures of sainthood.
Sainthood is conquered with what we do, it is not something abstract.
If you are cleaning, if you are driving a car your heart must lead your hands: there is nothing, not even a heartbeat that cannot become a concrete act of sainthood. The Lord is truly pleased by small things. Sainthood is not something extraordinary, exceptional, but something ordinary: it is doing small things in the liberty of Love. Saints are always our models: I am moved by John Paul II's example of sainthood, the courage and dignity with which he faced his illness in the last years of his life.
I think of Saint Teresina when she was very tired, sick with tuberculosis and walking was almost like martyrdom: yet she walked down the corridor of the convent thinking to herself "Jesus I offer this step to You for some missionary that lives in a hut and is certainly more tired than I am". In pain and tribulation, also she sought a motivation. When we think "I cannot go on” and we freely decide to overcome moments of fatigue, haste, nervousness we educate ourselves in sainthood.
These small, great things will be our daily sainthood: if we sacrifice even just one minute of our time to welcome someone with a word, a gesture, even only with a smile, we will have grown in sainthood and this will make us infinitely happy. Sainthood is truly on everyone's doorstep if before we react, we connect our minds with our hearts.
Jesus said: "If you do not become like children you will not enter the Kingdom of God"; therefore, let us put ourselves in the school of the little ones to become saints, let’s learn from them the wisdom of Sainthood. At one time we thought that Saints were those who were put on the altars, now we believe that the true saints are children and if we are capable of returning children… we will be saints!
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