Thoughts from the Cathedra

Dear Friends in Christ, 
 
The Danish philosopher from the early 1800s, Søren Kierkegaard, once wrote that the saint is the person who wills the one thing.  As we approach All Saints Day and All Souls Day, this is what I am considering in my daily prayer and devotion.  There is no doubt that our time in history can be so multi-faceted with demands pulling us from all directions that to have one single focus is almost impossible.  But that’s in fact what the Christian journey is all about; it is what spiritual formation is all about; it is what sainthood is all about – willing the one thing.
 
St. Matthew’s Beatitudes help us to understand this even further as he quotes Jesus’ saying, “Blessed are the pure of heart.”   Down the years this famous line has been rendered, blessed are the single hearted.  This is how Kierkegaard and so many other theologians throughout the centuries have described sainthood.  St. Thomas Aquinas, maybe the most important theologian in our 2000-year Catholic theological tradition, considered every yes as a series of no’s.  In other words, for Aquinas, choosing something means setting aside many other options.   Choosing God must then result in setting aside so much of what the world offers.   
 
Sometime back in my own journey of prayer I began the practice of going to bed early and getting up early.  This may have been the product of some jet lag I had experienced.   When coming back from Europe our bodies struggle to return to a regular schedule and we wake up very early.   Since then, I’ve embraced this because the early hours of the morning, for me, are the most fruitful time for prayer.   And one of the ways I explain this is that early in the morning, God gets the first part of my day - he gets the first James.  If you really think about it, the saint is the person for whom God is his or her first love and all other things in life come second.  This is the blessed are the single-hearted quality of a saint.   
 
Our hearts are often divided into many pieces.  One part of our heart goes to God, certainly.   But then other things grab on to our hearts – our work, our hobbies, our exercise regimen, our travels, our television programs, our opinions, and even our grudges and resentments.  The person who wills the one thing; the saint who says yes to God and no to so many other things precisely because of that love for God, the one who has an undivided heart and becomes a person of integrity.   
 
Integrity comes from the word integration.  An undivided heart, the heart of a saint, is a heart that integrates all things into the love of God.  An undivided heart is a heart that pulls into a oneness our entire life: our profession, our hobbies, our exercise regimen, our travels, our television programs, our opinions, and of course even our sad grudges and resentments.  Maybe more accurately, the integrated heart resolves the grudges and resentments of life because it is focused solely on God and grudges and resentments cannot exist in God.  In this way, the saint with an undivided heart is seen by others as a person of integrity.
 
As we approach All Saints Day on Sunday, I think this would be a fruitful reflection for all of us.  We all want to be saints, for sure.  But how can we do this in a very complicated and hurting world?  We do this by striving to be single-hearted.  We do this by giving God the first of our hearts each day.  We do this by recognizing that, amid so many wonderful things this world has to offer, God is the most wonderful – He is our first love and all other loves must be secondary to this first love. This is how we can will the one thing, how we can say yes to God and no to so many other things, how we can be pure of heart with an integrated, single heart.   
 
Fr. Henry Nouwen once asked maybe the most important question that one could ever ask; the question of all questions.  The question that gives meaning to all answers to the questions of life.  He asked, “to whom do you belong, God, or the world?”  A saint is someone who answers immediately and definitively, “I belong to God!”
 
I’ll see you all this weekend in the Eucharist!
 Bp. Misko