We believe that Jesus is the Son of the Father, the true Word of God. He claims that everything he said and did was given to him by his Father. So there is nothing in him that is alien to the Father. If we want to know about God, we should look to Jesus, who is the best human expression of God.
If we see
other good people, then we also catch glimpses of the Father’s goodness. Of course, nobody is like Jesus, or approaching Jesus’ virtue. He is unique among human beings, like us in all things but sin. But the saints are recognised by the church and recorded in the canon as genuinely inspired by the Spirit of Jesus. The church instructs us to look to them as a good guide for our own behaviour. We recognise their heroic virtues and their lives lived for God, sometimes even to the point of giving up
their lives for God. We also acknowledge their all-too-human limitations and foibles, which did not separate them from God.
Canonised saints are not just people in books of liturgy, spirituality and history. To their contemporaries, they were alive and kicking. Sanctity is not confined to past eras. We often don’t know who the invisible saints are in our midst, people with heroic virtue and faith. They do not all need to be
Catholic or Christian. But we should open our eyes to see how they are also pointing us to the Father. We should be grateful for their example and try to follow the sometimes difficult path of virtue that they mark out for us.
Who makes me feel grateful that God is still walking among us?
How do my own faith, skills and convictions provide an example for other people to
follow?
