Good day to you all.

When you think of a saint, what do you envision? I would dare say that when I was younger, I would think of a saint as one who walked around with a rosary or prayer book or the bible in hand. There eyes would be looking heaven ward, and they would tend to be oblivious to what was going on around them. One would see them in church as one in some sort of trance. Yet, it is not until we begin to read about their lives of the saints, that we see that they were really no different than you or I.

The Irish author and poet Oscar Wilde wrote, “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”

The word we use to embellish a person’s life is called HAGIOGRAPHY. This means to “ . . . treat a person as if they were a flawless hero.” Wilde’s statement puts the lives of most saints into focus. We begin to see that these women and men who we call “Saint” were humans very much like ourselves.

G.K. Chesterton picks up this them as he tells us about our Holy Father Francis. “St. Francis is not a proper person to be patronized wth merely “petty” stories. There are any number of them;  but they are too often used so as to be a sort of sentimental sediment of the medieval world, instead of being, as the saint emphatically is a challenge to the modern world.”

What does this do for ourselves? Well, I would say that one does not have to walk on water or heal the sick of some horrible desires with the touch of one’s hand. But it does mean that being a saint means living the life that Jesus asked of us, that is “Love one another as I have love you.”

Peace and All Good,

Fr. Vinnie, osf and the

Bros and Srs of the

Franciscan House of Prayer.