We Can Be Beacons of Light

“Therefore, we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us…”

Hebrews 12:1

It is no use denying the reality that the challenges to living a life of faith right now are legion. Gone are the days when faith permeated every aspect of the culture. Those were the times when shrines to Our Lady marked public crossroads, when national holidays coincided with the celebration of great feast days (i.e. holydays), and when the overwhelming social pressure was to go to Mass or Church on Sundays. Shopping on Sundays wasn’t even an option, and practically everyone was at least familiar with the basic outlines of key Scriptural stories, etc. 

We, instead, live in a steadfastly secular culture. 

As Cardinal Robert Sarah writes in The Day is Now Far Spent, “A little while ago, young people bathed in the great bath of the undisputed values that resulted from Judeo-Christian civilization. Today, those values are rejected as maladjusted and dilapidated, and they are combated.” 

In a searing passage in the same book, Cardinal Sarah diagnoses the “decadence” of our age. He describes how this has produced a society that is utterly closed off to transcendent values. In our secular age, he writes, 

Man rushes from festivities to vacations, from trips to banquets. Life is one big game. Anything exotic is promising. … Suffering, whether interior or physical, no longer has a legitimate place. It is necessary to hide the handicapped, forget the sick, and warehouse the elderly. … Finally, indifference is the unspoken rule with regard to matters concerning God and religion. … The search for enjoyment, success, and fulfillment leads people ever farther away from God. Life has become a feast without God.  

As the good Cardinal writes in another of his books, the magnificent The Power of Silence, the consequence of this flight from the divine has been the growth of noise. Man, frightened by his own interior dissolution and his inability to find any stable or transcendent values, seeks to distract himself from the temptations towards nihilism by surrounding himself with noise. As he writes, 

From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking. In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost; he is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. 

This noisy nihilism is the bath in which all of us increasingly are immersed, even those of us striving to live a life of faith. It is built into the technologies which now inhabit our pockets. It’s in the common entertainments that we all consume and the frenzy in our workplaces, our schools, and even our churches. 

Tragically, even the Church Herself sometimes seems to be no refuge from this dictatorship of noise. In recent years we have witnessed a litany of diabolical scandals and a growing number of public dissensions and controversies. In the past, the moral failings of certain Church ministers, or the political intrigues of certain Church representatives, were generally far removed from the common person in the pews. Now, these are now beamed at lightning speed into our cellphones or e-mail inboxes, which are often the first things we check in the morning, long before we have had a chance to sit in silence and read the Scriptures or engage in mental prayer (if we ever do these things at all). The result is spiritual fatigue, or even burnout.

In a time such as this, and against such powerful forces, it can seem difficult even for committed believers to hear the voice of God.  

How—a believer may ask—can we remain sufficiently convicted of the soul-saving power of faith to invest ourselves in living a rich, transformative Christian life? The forces opposing holiness, sanctity, prayer, peace, and silence seem too powerful. The temptations to pessimism, doubt, and despair can seem too overwhelming.

The Cloud of Witnesses

This is where the “cloud of witnesses” spoken of by St. Paul in his Letter to the Hebrews comes in. 

In every age, there have been heroes of the faith. Despite suffering all the same limitations and temptations as anyone else, these holy men and women found the courage to persevere heroically in faith. And in so doing, not only did they demonstrate that overcoming the forces of the world is possible, but that doing so is the only way to live a life that is filled with the deep meaning and authentic joy for which we are all searching. 

This is why many spiritual masters have often recommended the frequent reading of the lives of the saints. In immersing ourselves in the biographies of the heroes of the faith who have gone before us, we can find courage and inspiration to make the same level of commitment that they made, with the conviction that doing so is the only sure way to satisfy the deep longings of our heart. 

With that said, one challenge is that at times, the lives of the great saints can seem so remote from ours. Saints who levitate or who go to their martyrdoms singing jubilant songs and who smile in the face of their torturers can seem to offer little to us who are just ordinary, weak, sinful humans. Sometimes the pious books about the great saints can inspire little more than a sense of despair that the saints are too other to be imitated.  

The reality, however, is far, far different. In recent decades, thousands of modern men and women have been raised to the altar. In many cases, we possess journals, numerous credible, contemporaneous eye-witness accounts, and even photographs and videos of these saints. What comes through, more often than not, is their utter humanity. It is not that they were a different breed from the rest of us; it is simply that, amidst all their doubts, fears, distractions, sufferings, and temptations, they persevered.   

Many of these stories can be found in a lovely book published in 2021 by Ave Maria Press called Pray for Us. As the subtitle of the book recounts, the book sets out to tell the stories of 75 saints who “sinned, suffered, and struggled on their way to holiness.” Many of the saints featured in the book are close enough to us in time that their many struggles feel entirely familiar, and thus their victory is all the more inspiring. 

For example, in the book we find the story of Blessed Carlo Acutis, who will be the Church’s first millennial saint. Acutis died at the age of 15 from leukemia. In facing this lethal disease with a spirit of fortitude, trust, and even joy, Blessed Carlo certainly demonstrated the depths of his holiness. Equally importantly, through his daily life he demonstrated for all of us how life of a perfectly “normal” modern teen could be transformed and elevated by the fearless embrace of a life of faith in Jesus Christ. 

For those whose exposure to the lives of the saints has largely been of medieval hagiographies, it can be almost jarring to read the life of a saint who owned and played PlayStation, who was a skilled computer programmer, and who admitted that he was inspired by the words of Apple founder Steve Jobs. And yet, in reading his biography, one recognizes all the hallmarks of sanctity, living amidst the same social milieu and challenges that we face today. 

One is moved to read of how, at a young age, Blessed Carlo sought to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, or of how he comforted the downtrodden and marginalized. And then, of course, there was his devotion to the Eucharist. This devotion famously took the form of designing a website that listed over 100 Eucharistic miracles. More importantly, his devotion was expressed in the time that he spent before the Blessed Sacrament in contemplative prayer. 

Despite the fact that Blessed Carlo spent a considerable amount of time with computers and the Internet, his mother testified that he never wasted any time. In the final days of his life, he told his mother, “I can die happy, because I haven’t wasted even a minute on things that aren’t pleasing to God.”  

What an inspiration to those of us who find ourselves battling all the temptations towards distraction of the modern world! A young teenager, like us in every way, found the strength to conquer these distractions by devoting himself whole-heartedly to using these technologies solely for the glory of God and by dedicating himself to contemplative prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. 

Yes, Blessed Carlo’s life confirms, it is entirely possible to become a saint in our modern, technocratic, distracted age! All that is necessary is a single-minded focus on the one thing that matters the most—God.

The Saints Were Just Like Us

Blessed Carlo is one of 75 saints profiled by Hunter-Kilmer in Pray for Us. Among the saints featured in the book are saints who suffered from mental illnesses (Ven. Rutilio Grande), who struggled with drug addiction (St. Mark Ji Tianxiang), who were converted after living lives of dissolution and worldly pleasure (Blessed Charles de Foucault), whose marriages failed (Ven. Cornelia Connelly), who suffered almost unimaginable physical sufferings (Blessed Benedetta Bianchi Porro) or heartbreaks (St. Magdalena Son So-Byok).

Living so close to us in time, they are reachable at the human level. Gazing at photos of Blessed Benedetta Porro, who died in 1964, one is struck by her entirely modern beauty. It is easy to imagine her going to parties of the sort we attend now and being admired. And yet, somehow, she found the strength to persevere in faith and hope even as she suffered the loss of her sight, her hearing, and eventually her mobility and sense of touch. This was not always easy (“There are times that I would like to throw myself out the window,” she confessed to a friend of her sufferings). And yet, in the end, she could say, shortly before her death: “I do not lack hope. I know that at the end of the road, Jesus is waiting for me …. I have discovered that God exists, that He is love, faithfulness, joy, certitude, to the end of the ages.”

Despite severe physical and mental limitations, poor choices, opposition from others, setbacks, heartbreaks, and temptations, these heroic men and women stood firm, putting all their trust in God. In the end, many of these saints transformed society around them, starting orphanages and schools or converting thousands away from faithlessness or sinful lifestyles. Where others simply turned a blind eye to injustice, poverty and suffering, they poured their attention into serving the abandoned and marginalized. Many of them stood up to dictators and murderous regimes, sometimes saving the lives of hundreds, or even thousands, of people. 

Reading their lives, it is possible to imagine that we, too, might achieve a heroic level of sanctity by simply trusting in the grace of God as they did. In this way, we might serve as a light to a dark and decadent age that has lost sight of the transcendent values and the meaning of life. While the lives of these saints were rarely “easy,” the reality is that few, if any, lives are without suffering. The difference between these saints and the rest of us is that they discovered deep meaning in their sufferings and trials and brought light, joy, and peace to a world riven by the deep suffering of sin. 

If you find yourself struggling with lukewarmness, doubt, or despair, or simply the sense of pervasive distraction that is so common now, I recommend setting some time aside to read the lives of the saints. 

Deep down, all of us have a desire to strive for authentic greatness, for the heroism of a life poured out for a meaningful cause. The lives of the saints show us that there are as many paths towards sanctity as there are lives being lived. The important thing is simply to say “yes” to God in all circumstances. The challenges we face today are no different than those faced by thousands of saints. We, like them, can overcome by trusting in God’s grace. And in this way, we will serve as a beacon of light to others, bringing light, joy, and hope into the midst of our distracted, secular age.