In what has become a classic of 20th century English literature, the author Graham Greene, toward the climax of his novel, The Power and the Glory, poses the reader an interesting moral dilemma. Facing death by firing squad in the morning, the central character of the novel, “the whiskey priest”, seeks to find meaning in both his life and his death. Greene writes, “It seemed to him at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint … He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted — to be a saint”.

It is a sad fact that too often it is when one is faced with death, either one’s own mortality or that of a loved one, that realities such as those experienced by the “whiskey priest” come to the fore. C.S. Lewis states that “pain is God’s way of rousing a deaf world”. For a short time such moments push aside the steadily increasing set of distractions which, as Blaise Pascal writes in Pensees, take our heart and mind away from the reality that one day we will indeed breathe our last, and then what can be said for our having lived?

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Greene offers us the advice, that the choices we make in life would perhaps have far greater consistency if we lived each of our life situations in the knowledge that the Christian message is actually the call to sainthood, a call to living life to the fullest. Whatever our state in life, teacher, nurse, businessman, student, parent, cleaner, spouse, we should live it as the means to our sainthood. Martin Luther King Jr. described this notion in his text of 1963, Strength to Love: “If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well”.

A 13th century Franciscan saint, Bonaventure, tells us another path to holiness that “When we pray the voice of the heart must be heard more than that proceeding from the mouth”. As a young boy Bonaventure’s life was threatened by grave illness, and after recovery, he sought to journey his soul steadily to the God who had saved him, and the God to whom he would one day eventually return. What Bonaventure teaches us about the road to holiness is that it is based primarily in the relationship of a heart speaking to heart, of the individual being aware in all they do, that their lives are lived in the presence of God, a God who seeks to hear our heartfelt voice reaching up to Him.

The need for spiritual companions

Another point of the road to holiness lies in the need for others to inspire us, to encourage us in our spiritual growth. The greatest saints had the greatest friendships: Augustine and his mother Monica, Basil and his brother Gregory and their sister Macrina, Scholastica and her brother Benedict, the fishermen, James, John, Peter and Andrew, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Thomas More and John Fisher, Andrii Sheptyts’kyi and his brother Klementi.

All these men and women gave truth to the notion that Christianity is more than the singular soul, but a group, a community searching for God, the Church evolving through time. Returning to Bonaventure for a moment — where would this fervent student had been, if not for the presence in the same class of Theology at the University of Paris as another young student, Thomas of Aquinas, and for the added presence of their teacher of Theology, Albert the Great. In years to come the same will be said of the L’viv Theological Academy which provided the Church with scores of saintly martyrs willing to witness to the Church under Communist persecution, men and women who strengthened one another.

So wherein lies our own road to holiness? At what point in our lives has God desired to speak to us, to rouse us away from distractions and search toward the Real? The great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe aptly captures how most of us feel at God’s calling. In 1820 Goethe visited the city of Praha (Prague), and was able to witness the huge celebrations occurring at the feast of that city’s saint, Jan Nepomuk. Nepomuk had been the Queen’s Confessor in the 14th century, a Queen suspected of having an adulterous affair by her husband, King Wenceslaus IV. Refusing to break the seal of the confessional, Nepomuk was taken to the bridge spanning the River Vltava by the King’s soldiers, shackled in irons and cast in. Five centuries later the ageing poet reflected on the scene before him, and posed a similar question to that of Graham Greene, that we venerate the saints as stars in the heavens, but are unsure as to whether we can respond to their call and that of God through them, for setting our star in the heavens, unsure as to our commitment, unsure tragically too often until we as the “whiskey priest” look back with the wisdom of hindsight. Goethe wrote on that day in words indicating that the saints are indeed the signposts by which we daily should take our bearings:

Children sing upon the bridge,
Tapers float upon the stream,
From the dome small bell and big,
Ring for worship and the dream.

Stars and little tapers dwindle;
From our saint who would not say,
What fault to him had been confided,
Thus the soul did flit away.

Tapers float! Play on, you children!
Choir of children, sing but sing!
And reveal, no less, what may
That star to all the others bring.

Children sing upon the bridge,
Tapers float upon the stream,
From the dome small bell and big,
Ring for worship and the dream.

Stars and little tapers dwindle;
From our saint who would not say,
What fault to him had been confided,
Thus the soul did flit away.

Tapers float! Play on, you children!
Choir of children, sing but sing!
And reveal, no less, what may
That star to all the others bring.

By Dr. Andrew Thomas Kania