St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church :. Homilies

Fr. Tom Boyer

When I was in about the 7th or 8th grade, we lived in a parish on the north side of Indianapolis with a tough old Irish pastor. I was a regular altar server not much different from these young people here. I never paid much attention to the sermons, probably much like these young people here. I think I was usually busy looking around to see where my friends were sitting and trying to get their attention or hoping they were not looking if I messed up something. Father “Mac” as he was called thought it was cool and thought he was giving a gift to the parish by never preaching on this holy day. And the end of the Gospel, he would just look up, smile, and say: “Happy New Year”! and off we’d go to the Creed and Collection. I’m thinking of him today and tempted to follow his example, but not quite all the way. I am working on four talks I will give later this month at a Seminary in Missouri, so there are some very specific things in my mind right now as I prepare that I thought I would simply share with you by way of a pastor’s wish for you as we begin a new year. Mary speaks four times in the Gospels: three times in Luke’s Gospel and one time in John. Her words recorded for us and all faithful Christian people are the wonderful advise of a mother God chose for us all, and the mother God chose to form, shape, and nurture the human nature of God’s only Son. In Luke she speaks two times to an angel. She says: How can this be? Let it be done according to your word. Then she speak during her visit to Elizabeth and says: My soul magnifies the Lord My Spirit rejoices in God my Savior. Finally, in John’s Gospel she says to her Son. “They have no wine.” Then turning to the wedding servants she says: “Do whatever he tells you.” Today I simply want to remind you of those words and of the wisdom they contain. Perhaps because she speaks so simply and rarely, what she says can stick with us and become for us in this new year a great source of peace. When something goes wrong or not as planned; it is just fine to repeat her wisdom and wonder, “How can this be?”  Not suspecting that God is picking on you or punishing you; but because somehow in that change of plans God’s plan for you might be revealed. When you discover that will of God in the mess of your plans, I would suggest you remember her second and wise says: “Let it be done according to your will.” and then get on with it. When you run out of steam, get tired, or all the joy seems to be slipping out of your life, look to her, and remember that she is the first to notice when the wine runs out. Then without any hesitation, follow her sage and wise motherly counsel:  “Do whatever he tells you.” I suggest to you that if you can remember those four times and four spoken phrases, you are certainly going to have a Happy New Year.

Dcn. Brian Buettner

Dcn. Brian Buettner

It was a little church on Christmas Eve. The tradition in that country parish had gone on for two, maybe three generations. Parents and grandparents were seated. Joseph and Mary and all the charaters were in place and ready. They did their parts with seriousness and commitiment, looking as pious as they possibly could. And then it was time for the Shepherds to enter.Dressed in flannel bathrobes and towels for head gear, they proceeded to the altar steps where Mary and Joseph looked earnestly at the straw which contained a single naked light bulb that was playing the part of the glowing newborn Jesus.With his back to the congretation, one of the shepherds said to the person playing Joseph in a very loud whisper for all the cast to hear, “Well, Joe, when you gonna pass out cigars?”The solmen spell was not simply broken by his remark, it was exploded. Mary and Joseph’s cover was completely destroyed as it became impossible to hold back the laughter. The chief angel, standing on a chair behind them was the worst of all. She shook so hard in laughter that she fell off her chair and took the curtained back drop and all the rest of the props down with her. She just kept rolling around on the floor because she was laughing so hard. The whole set was a shambles.But you know what? The only thing that did not go to pieces was that light bulb in the manger.....it never stopped shining.When you leave this church today all I want you to remember is that light . It never stops shining. No matter how things may fall apart, no matter how bady things may go, the Light shines. In a Connecticut town, in the war-torn Bethlehem of today, in the midst of the greatest family and personal pain,  and in any life that doesn’t go as planned the light shines.We know that because the story of that shining light is Luke’s Gospel which some who know it best call a “Love Story.”This is the night when the great Love Letter of God begins. The night when our paths cross with God’s. It is the night when God and humanity were joined like a bride and groom. This is the night when each of you ought to recall the moment when you first met the love of your life and imagine once again what it was like, because this is the night of our first best meeting with the God who has desired us from the very beginning. I would even suggest that had it not been for this night when love was born you would never have love to give or love to receive. This night is not really about the birth of Jesus Christ. This night is about the birth of love itself. Were it not for the first Christmas, we might never have know the intensity of the love that God has for us which stirs and awakens our love for each other.True love like this accepts the beloved for who they  really are. God chooses to love us because we are God’s human creation. Like Joseph and Mary, we have nothing to recommend ourselves nor do we have any claim on God’s love other than that we are God’s own creation.  So we can’t do anything to earn God’s love. It is already there because God made us.This is the first love story that gets told again in your own love. Like all love stories there is that first meeting, then infatuation, pursuit, risk and finally relationship and commitment. It’s all there in Luke’s Gospel, in flesh and blood, or shall we say here, in body and blood, in the Loving Word made Flesh. Mary and Joseph, far from home, strangers without a bed, a peasant mother giving birth in unsanitary and substandard housing..... no fanfare, no royal delegation....visited by the lowest of the low; dirty, outcast sheperds doing the work no one else wanted to do. This is where we find the Christ of God, the anointed one intersecting wtih humanity! It is our first and best meeting with the God who has desired us from the very beginning of creation. We tell the story again tonight to remember and remind each other that no matter what, the Light will not go out. It is there in our Easter Candle. It is there in the hearts of all who at Baptism have been enlightened by Christ. It is there when all the great plans we have made tumble down in laughter or in tears. It is a light we pass on to each other and to our children. It is light full of promise and hope. It is a light that can keep us off the rocks of sin and from sinking into the depths. It is light that warms and leads; a light whose reflection lets us see the tender loving face of our God reflected in the faces of those around us.Keep shining my friends. Peace be with you.

We end this season just about as we began: waiting. We are waiting now to hear once again the story we know so well: Mary with child, Joseph with dreams, Elizabeth humbled, Zachariah silent, angels in full chorus, inns that are occupied, and animals looking on. The story holds up for us a model of community strong and courageous, frightened and awed, waiting for Messiah to come.Mary waits for birth. Joseph waits for divine permission. Elizabeth waits for John. Zachariah waits for voice. The angels wait to sing. Good people, godly people walking in darkness wait for the light to come.Waiting as I said at the beginning of this season is simply something we do not do well, especially in our culture. At all costs we try to avoid it. So, can’t wait for payday? Take out a payday loan. Can’t take time for a meal? Grab an energy drink, especially one loaded with caffeine. We text so we don’t have to talk, tweet so we don’t have to explain too much. We shop on line to avoid stores and parking, engaging  people or having a conversation with the stranger in the line. Waiting in our culture is a disease!But the story we will tell again soon is a story of waiting The prophet Micah had a vision years before Jesus came on the scene. He saw an alternative future, one where righteousness and goodness would prevail. He saw a good leader who would shepherd the people with compassion and hope. He imagined a man of peace. We are like Micah, dreaming and waiting, hopeful and expectant, faithful and grounded. The restlessness that we feel, the ongoing search for meaningful lives..... it is all about waiting for something grander that what is.We are waiting for Christ, the fulfillment of all time to rescue us from the chaos of our messy lives. We are waiting for the Christ-light to draw back the curtain of darkness and for a baby to become a man, and for the man to rise from a tomb. The Christmas story makes no sense, and it is little more than a feel-good, no-involvement celebration which only invites us to look and be entertained always leaving us to feel that something is lacking come December 26th.We may not be spectators of the Christmas story. We must even be more than the ones who tell the story unless it has become our story; unless we know what it means to to told there is no room, to wonder “How can this be?” in the face of some unexpected change of plans in our lives. Unless we know what it means for our soul to magnify the Lord, or to wonder how it is that the Lord should visit us? We are still spectators waiting for what? another Christmas?The truth is, there is only one Christmas, one time when the Word of God takes flesh in us, a Bethlehem kind of people. The story we tell today is impossible historically. A fourteen year old Jewish virgin making a four day trip by herself is unbelievable and beyond reality. Luke’s gospel is theology, not history. This wonderful imatinative story gives Mary an occasion to sing her great hymn. It gives John the Baptist his first opportunity to recognize the superiority of Jesus. It all suggests, as Luke intends that something big is about to happen, but not in Bethlehem. It will happen in Jerusalem, in Norman, Oklahoma, in anyplace where people like Elizabth and Mary open themselves to the will of God and are willing to serve the will of God in obedience.There is something greater than this, and it is about to happen. I love the balance of Luke’s Gospel images. At the end of Luke’s Gospel, disciples in Emmaus rush back to Jerusalem to be with those who have shared their experience of the Lord.  Their they ponder what it all means and how their lives suddenly have meaning and purose. Now there is for them a mission. At the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, two women who have experienced the Lord come together to share their experience and ponder what it all means and how their lives suddenly have meaning and purpose. Now there is for them a mission.Here we are pondering again what it all means and hopefully how our lives have meaning and purpose, because for those of us who know and live, remember and retell the story there is a mission. Those people in Emmaus and Jerusalem, in Bethlehm and in the Hill Country of Judea, as well as in Norman, Oklahoma have a mission and their lives have a purpose and there is reason to rejoice and jump for joy for not only has a child been born to us; that child has risen from the tomb with the promise and as evidence that we shall do the same. That is worth the wait.

Luke’s central character emerges today and takes “center stage” so to speak. His message is loud and clear. His character is uncompromising and unmistakable. His diet and wardrobe make it obvious that this is a prophetic figure not to be dismissed easily. He will not go away, quite down, nor be ignored. Herod knew that only too well.As artists often use strong contrasts of light and darkness or contrasting colors to draw one eye to the subject of a painting, writers will sometimes strongly contrast characters to tease the reader into the story. Luke is such a writer. John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth could not be in greater contrast. It isn’t that one is right and one is wrong, that one is bad or one is good; it is simply that they are very different in personality and in message, in expectation and in hope. It seems to me they have the same message, but simply different ways to present it.John shouts. Jesus speaks gently. John threatens. Jesus persuades. John expects wrath. Jesus expects mercy. It is no wonder that there is no hint in any of the Gospels that they were friends. There is some sence that perhaps for awhile Jesus was a disciple of John, but after his thrity day retreat in John’s territory, the desert, Jesus emerges on his own. There is also no reason to think that John became a disciple of Jesus. John sent his disciples to Jesus with questions that reveal how puzzeled he was that this “Lamb or God”, the Messianic figure was so unlike what he expected. He must have wondered while sitting in Herod’s jail where the fire had gone, the wrath, the power, the force. John never thought of himself as the messiah. John wanted fire!What he got, and what we got was Jesus: one who baptizes with the Spirit, whose fire is the passion of love more than the heat of anger. This Spirit revealed in the Messiah, this Spirit that burned within the Messiah was the fire of mercy and justice not wrath and revenge. This Spirit is not a contradiciton of John’s expectation, but a refinement and a revelation that there is a power greater than wrath, and motive more appealing and effective than fear. It is Love.John used the images and language of some of the prophets before him, and we must guard against being too literal, becasue the words are biblical and nuanced. The “wrath” John speaks of need not interpreted as “anger”; but is better understood in terms of God as “passion”: the deep, lasting, personal desire that burns in ones very being. The “cleansing” John speaks of is really about a purification which can mean a gentle washing just as easily as violent purgation.Both Jesus and John reveal to us a God who is passionate for us, and wants us to be free, and pure, clean, and holy. This is a God revealed through His Son that waits, and longs for us to hear the Word spoken by his Word Made Flesh.When we begin to understand and listen, like those who gathered around John is there is more than just curiosity, we ought to begin to asking: “What Shall we Do?” If it is the desperate question of frightened people, it’s too late to ask and too late to care. If, however, it is a question that comes from love then the Spirit of Baptism has begun to burn in us.  The image of a merciful God  that comes to us in Jesus cannot allow us to live complacent and shallow lives believing that God will wave the merciful hand and ignore all that has been done or all we have failed to do. The justice of this God will will expect an accounting and look for repentance and conversion which both Jesus and John called for. The mercy of God waits for us to finally ask the question: “What shall I do?” John gives the only answer that matters: “Do the work of Justice.” And what will that look like we might ask, and there begins a life of conversion and shortly thereafter will come peace.

Dcn. Byron Jacobson

A few weeks ago I bought my casket. I was looking ahead in the Lectionary at this week’s Gospel, and I thought: “It’s time to do that and spare someone else the trouble of picking one out and paying for it.” It seemed at the time to be one more way of being “ready.” Hamlet lived (in Shakespear’s play) with an unfortunate inner conflict over his inability to accept his situation in life. As a result he was consumed with hesitation, grief and self pity. But gradually, which in some ways is the point of the play, he comes to accept the realiaty of his life and the belief that God has a hand in every detail of life. He claims that whatever is destined to happen will happen soon enough, and that for those on earth, “The readiness is all.” Sounds rather scriptural doesn’t it?Now there is a sad and undeniable fact in all of creation that nothing lasts. Things break and wear out. Styles come and they go. The cosmos is changing all the time, and astronomers watch and tell us of the collapse of stars and gallazies. Political theories come and go. Economies come and go. Friends do the same. Marriages collapse. Towns and cities disappear. People die, young and old. It seems to me that this Gospel is good science. Stars have always fallen, burned up, collapsed, and meteriotes crash together and fall out orbit. The Gospel is good history too, because the truth is, nations have always been in tumult and war. Peace on this earth is always short, and most of the time, it is simply a puase that allows the combatants to rearm and reposition themselves for another go at it.As Luke was writing this Gospel, Jerusalem had just been destroyed. For the people he was writing for, the whole world they knew was finished. More than moralize and console, he writes to encourage and to remind them and anyone else whose life and immediate world collapses that there is only one “end” and that “end” will be ushered in by the Son of Man. For those first to receive Luke’s Gospel it was a reminder that Titus and his Roman army who destroyed Jerusalem was nothing. The fall and burning of Jerusalem was of no lasting significance because for them it was the beginning of something new, not the end. We often for get that every end is nothing more than a beginning.Why is it, I wonder, that so many people, perhaps some of you, live in fear and anxiety always expecting the worst, a disaster, a time of trial and tribulation. How is it that the message of Jesus Christ gets so displaced by the silliness of predictions that terrible things will happen and all will be destroyed. Another one of those is coming around again causing all sorts of anxiety and fear. All this talk about the end of the Myan Calendar is just the end of the Myan Calendar, and the beginnning of another. There is a prediction that everything will end on December 21, 2012. What will happen at the end of December 21, 2012 is the beginning of December 22, 2012. Things will end. This world will end. The earth will go, the Sun will burn out. Of course it will. Nothing lasts. We will die. I will need that coffin, but I don’t know when. Everything changes and everything goes away. Yet something new always takes its place. Endings are always beginnings, and that is exactly what Jesus Christ came to proclaim: that the old order passes away and a new one is awaited. Of course if you have your every hope, and your life invested in the old order, that’s going to be a problem.Crises can mean a breathrough just as much as it can mean a breakdown. Every age lives in that kind of crises when something new is breaking through, and it is this way of looking at a crises that replaces fear and anxiety with Hope.Hope is how we live. Optomism is the only attitude of a Christian. We are hopeful and optomistic by our spiritual nature given to us in baptism. It is who we are, a people always expecting the best, the new, the glory. Hope is the spirit of this season. Hope is the unmistakable virtue of the Christian’s life. The point of this Gospel today is not to freighten us, but to give us hope and tell us where to look. We will not find our fulfillment in the cosmos. We will not find it in the political order through some perfect leader. There isn’t one nor is there a perfect political or economic system. All of that passes. Nothing lasts. We will not find our fulfillment in having the perfect body and in clinging to youthfulness. We just get fat, wrinkle, and falls apart, trust me on that. Do not look to this passing world. The future, what God has in store for us is not found in anything here, but only in Jesus Christ. Only in Jesus Christ do we find and have our link to the power of God.We must watch for him by living with our eyes wide open for the slightest hint of his presence in a smile, an expression of thanks, a plea for help, a touch, or word of comfort.We must wait for him but not in idleness and anxiety, but by a readiness tested by trials overcome with hope.We must find our peace in him by forgiveness given and asked, by patience and understanding, tolerance strengtheend by a willingness to watch and wait.While too much of this world is occupied these days with a celebation of the first coming of Christ, we must see through all of that, remembering that the gifts we give and the gifts we receive from others will wear out, break, and disappear. It is the second coming of Christ that matters now, not the first, and this Season and it’s readings, this time, and our lives are looking for that coming with Joy, not with sadness, with Hope, not with fear.This message and this truth is what can not only direct how we live, but why we live.

Fr. Sami Chaaya

Fr. Jim Dougherty

Ordinary Time 32 - November 10, 2012

There is a deep and offensive wound that infects our faith and our lives in this age of the world. It is split between the faith that many Catholics profess and their daily lives. This deserves to be counted among the most serious troubles of our age, and at the heart of this incident in Mark's Gospel this trouble is being addressed by Jesus. Perhaps it is the frantic pace of life today in our culture that allows us to deny or avoid healing this wound and acknowledging what it is doing to us, but for this moments we sit with this Gospel, it will be undeniable. "Many think that religion consists in acts of worship alone, and they plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from religious life." I am quoting here the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church In The Modern World. The document is almost fifty years old, and it is as though it were written last week. You would have thought in 1965 that the Council would have named Communism, materialism, individualism or a host of other ideologies as candidates for the most serious error, but it does not. Instead it names the divide that we maintain between the faith we profess and our daily lives in this world: between what we do here for an hour each week and what we do the rest of the time. A compartmentalized life style is one of the first and clearest symptoms of narcissism, and you do not have to be around long in this life to recognize that we are living in an age of narcissism. It is an un-integrated life-style that puts events and issues into separate little categories that often separates people into little groups in order to keep them apart, manage, or control their interaction so that the fragile "self" can be protected, admired, and content. This is a self-justifying kind of life free of challenge, free of change, protected from critique, and ultimately very lonely. It is not a life-style compatible with Jesus Christ proclaimed in this Gospel. The excuse that keeping things separate, dealing with them one at a time, and never mixing religion and life or bringing our faith to bear on our lives between Sundays is lame and useless. It is not acceptable, and it will not reconcile with what is happening in these verses of Mark's Gospel. Failing to address poverty and the violence it breeds from frustrated unemployed young people who see great wealth in the rest of the world while concentrating on the horrible violence of abortion is a compartmentalized life. These issues cannot be separated. Not connecting the moral issue of capital punishment or war and abortion to a disregard for human life so obvious among us reveals the split that has wounded us. While leaders tempt us to argue about which issue is more important, nothing gets done. The argument itself continues to divide us, and of course, divide and conquer has long been a tool of those in power to secure their ideology. We will make no progress as long as we compartmentalize these issues and fail to see that they connect and then recognize how the immoral gap between poverty and wealth breeds violence, hatred, and war. We will make no progress toward peace as long as we do nothing about respecting all human life. We have no persuasive voice as long as we choose who lives and who dies or tolerate "collateral damage" which really means dead women and children. We will have no credible voice as long as we have money for weapons nothing for the poor. When Jesus and this scribe talk about being close to the Kingdom of God and the commandments that once kept will secure our place in that Kingdom, they are talking about an integrated whole life free of compartments and healed of that split that has infected us and this whole world. The body and the soul are together, and the health of one depends on the health of the other. Sickness of soul inevitably infects the well-being of the body. Body, Mind, Soul, and Heart are interdependent. We are a whole being in this life, and effective care for one part of this body demands effective care for the other. In the same way, love of God demands love of neighbor - if they are not together, the love of God is nothing more than a charade; an effort to look good in the eyes of others while remaining empty and broken, disconnected, and separated from our neighbor. In the reverse, even those who do not know and may not confess Jesus Christ as their savior are close to God when they love and care for their neighbor. These Gospel verses speak to the demand for an integrated life, for a life that brings faith to bear on everything happens and every decision and every judgment. The very Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God taking on human flesh puts an end once and for ever a separation between heaven and earth, and breaks up the categories that might allow us to live a secular life distinct from a spiritual life. Consequently we cannot look at violence and war and not cry out that this is wrong. We cannot look at poverty and push it aside as if it were someone else's problem or something we might eventually get around to thinking about. Our faith will not allow us to prioritize the evils of our age and shove them into categories to be sorted out when we have the money or the time. We will never have either as long as we keep them apart and argue among ourselves about which one is most important. This translation of these verses uses the word "all" where other translations prefer "whole". I prefer the word "whole". In either case, the word is repeated seven times in seven verses. If nothing else clicks, the repetition ought to say something. Wholeness is the issue, an integration of faith and life, of God and neighbor, of body, mind, and soul is what it will take to get close to the Kingdom of God. Many of in this church spend more hours in the gym than in the church, more time at physical exercise than at spiritual exercise, more time at play than at prayer......with such an un-integrated life style, it is not wonder that the human community is so divided when we live like that from the inside.

Every time we gather around this altar I say on your behalf: “Remember also our brothers and sisters who have fallen asleep in the hope of the resurrection, and all who have died in your mercy: welcome them into the light of your face.”In some ways this makes every Mass a Mass for the dead, a time for remembering or restoring what has been separated. For those of us who believe and express ourselves in this Catholic tradition, death does not separate us from one another. As the Invitation to Prayer so beautifully says in the Rite of Christian Burial:  “We believe that the ties of friendship and affection which knit us as one throughout our lives do not unravel with death.” Each time we gather before this altar we do so in the communion of saints. Prayers for the dead in our tradition began at the very beginning in the earliest Christian communities who cared so lovingly for the bodies of those martyrs whose blood bore witness to their common hope in the resurrection. Those early Christians did so because the recognized the unbreakable bond that joins us all together in Christ, the living and the dead like. “Nothing can separate us from Christ” says Saint Paul. Not even death.Thirteen hundred years ago a famous English Benedictine priest gave us some beautiful thoughts about this. He wrote: We seem to give them back to you, O God, who gave them first to us. Yet as you did not lose them in giving, so we do not lose them by their return. Not as the world gives do you give. What you give you do not take away. For what is yours is also ours. We are yours and life is eternal. And love is immortal, and death is only a horizon, and a horizon is but the limit of our sight. (The Venerable Bede, 673-735) The Venerable Bede gives us much to think about tonight, and his words propose a faithful and profoundly comforting way of living and celebrating All Souls Day.We are resurrection people, Easter people who live in and through our oneness with Christ living now in us when we are one as church. This is a day of Thanksgiving, of day for gratitude for what God has given us in those we remember. As Bede says, God gave them first, and God lost nothing in giving them to us. We lose nothing in giving them back to God because God’s gifts are never taken away since what is God’s is also ours for God has given us everything God has: God’s Life, God’s only Son, God’s very Spirit.It is this faith that tempers our sadness and our loss. It is this faith that calls us here every Easter to light a fire in the darkness, to bring a new candle into this dark church, to take light from this candle that never dims no matter how much light is taken from it. See the symbol. Understand the mystery. The life of God poured out for us is never lost and never less. One day death will claim us all. There is no escape, but for those of us who gather at the foot of the cross week after week, there is the constant reminder that death has been defeated, and Life claims the victory. The one who called Lazarus from the tomb has himself burst the bonds of death and scattered the darkness. Why not believe that he will call us from our tombs as well to be remembered among those already gone before us. Perhaps if we, like Martha and Mary at the time Lazarus died call upon him and profess our faith as did Mary we shall find courage, comfort, and joy in this autumn season when all nature seems to take its rest for one reason only, to rise, to bloom, to bear fruit in the morning.

Shortly after he converted to Catholicism in the late 1930s, Thomas Merton was walking the streets of New York with his friend, Robert Lax. Lax was Jewish, and he asked Merton what he wanted to be, now that he was Catholic. “I don’t know,” Merton replied, adding simply that he wanted to be a good Catholic. Lax stopped him in his tracks. “What you should say,” he told him, “is that you want to be a saint!” Merton was dumbfounded. “How do you expect me to become a saint?,” Merton asked him.Lax said: “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let him do it? All you have to do is desire it.” Thomas Merton knew his friend was right. Merton, of course, would go on to become one of the great spiritual thinkers and writers of the last century. His friend Bob Lax would later convert to Catholicism himself — and begin his own journey to try and be a saint. But the words Lax spoke ring down through the decades to all of us today. Because they speak so simply and profoundly to our calling as Catholic Christians.You should want to be a saint. And to be one, all you need is to want to be one.Of course, if you only want to be a run-of-the-mill, average Christian, that’s probably all you’ll ever be. Every one can do just enough to get by. It’s not hard. But the message Christ sends to all of us is an invitation to be something more. In the words of the old Army recruiting ad: be all that you can be. Be a saint.If anyone has any doubts how to do that, Matthew’s gospel today is a helpful how-to guide.You might call it “Becoming a Saint for Dummies.” We know it better as The Beatitudes.“Blessed are…” With those two words Jesus begins a beautiful instruction in how to live the life of a saint. Pope Benedict has taken that a step further: in his remarkable book “Jesus of Nazareth,” he suggests that the beatitudes are nothing less than a self-portrait of Christ.It is a portrait of what all of us should aspire to. To be poor in spirit…to be meek…to be merciful. To hunger and thirst for righteousness. To be clean of heart and to make peace. Taken as a whole, the Beatitudes also sum up the beautiful refrain of today’s psalm. Because “Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.” This is the people that want to be saints.Most of us are familiar with the phenomenal saintly stories of the Church. We grew up hearing of how John was beheaded, and Stephen was stoned; how Francis got the stigmata, or how Therese suffered humiliations and disease to die an early death. You hear stories like that and you can’t blame Thomas Merton for not really being eager to be a saint. It’s not only hard work, it often doesn’t have a happy ending. But those are the stories we hear about. There are countless stories – millions, throughout the centuries – that we don’t. They are the anonymous saints who go about their daily lives quietly, peacefully, joyfully, finally entering into the fullness of grace without doing anything more dramatic than merely living the beatitudes. They are the unsung saints.If you visit the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, you’ll see magnificent tapestries lining the walls. And they really are magnificent, designed and executed by the artist John Nava. They remind me of the work of Norman Rockwell or Andrew Wyeth – dramatic, realistic, and contemporary depictions of ordinary people of extraordinary character. And they adorn the walls of the cathedral the same way that stained glass windows once decorated the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. In the tapestries, you can see all the familiar saints whose names we know, in a row, facing toward the altar, as if in line for communion. It is – literally and figuratively – the communion of the saints. There is St. Nicholas, St. Gregory, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, St. Clare…and on and on, with their names over their heads.But scattered among those saints are people without names – people you won’t find in Butler’s “Lives of the Saints.” A teenage girl. A young man from the barrio. Children in contemporary clothes. They are the saints whose names are known only to God. It is a beautiful and eloquent depiction of the day we celebrate today: All Saints. And the message of those tapestries is the message of this feast day: these unknown saints are just as worthy as the ones who are known. They look like us. They look like people we might pass on the street. If we have any faith at all that motivates our lives, then  the world has every reason to expect that we could be there for as Bob Lax explained, to a man whom some people today consider a saint: All you really need…is to want to. And God will do all the rest.