The Good We Receive
During middle and high school, I volunteered every summer through an internship at the local hospital. The Olivetan Benedictine Sisters ran the hospital and staffed its pastoral care team. They showed me the value of being present and working hard. In their care for people who were sick or in need, they helped me learn to see Christ in the person before me.
I have had many benefactors along the way, and the Sisters remain among the people whose example I draw on. Those summers still shape my response to others, from my commitments as a volunteer EMT to my service as a hospitality minister at the Cathedral Basilica. The needs are different in those settings. Someone may need urgent help, or simply to be welcomed and noticed. In either case, care begins with attending to the person before us.
We often learn from people’s habits before we can describe their influence. A generous person makes generosity easier to imagine. Someone who admits a mistake gives us a way to admit our own. We carry their example into situations they may never see.
As All Saints approaches, the Sisters’ example helps me think about holiness as something lived among people. The saints whose names fill the calendar can seem far removed from the lives we know. We encounter them through a painting, a brief account of suffering, or a sentence polished by centuries of repetition. Their lives appear complete. Ours still contain the unanswered message and the apology we keep postponing.
The Church gives us a fuller understanding of our relationship with them. The Catechism, which sets out Catholic belief, describes the communion of saints as a shared life in Christ. The saints in heaven remain joined to the Church and pray for us. Their place in Christian life reaches beyond the example they left behind. We can ask for their prayers as we try to live faithfully ourselves.
That means we can turn to the saints for help in the ordinary difficulties of trying to live well. We are accustomed to thinking about improvement as something we must arrange for ourselves. We look for a better method and resolve to stick with it. Our effort matters, and so does our willingness to receive help. Prayer makes room for the admission that we cannot supply everything we need.
Saint Benedict understood that a life with God would involve other people. Near the end of his Rule, a guide for monastic life, he asks the community to bear one another’s weaknesses patiently and to attend to another person’s good. We can consider how those instructions might apply in our own households and friendships. Someone moves more slowly than we would like. Someone needs a kindness we feel we have already offered too often.
We may admire patience in a saint while resisting the person who gives us occasion to practice it. Reading about holiness is more comfortable than making room for somebody else at the end of a tiring day. The distance between those experiences gives us something honest to bring to prayer.
It also helps to remember the good we have received. Think of someone whose faithfulness made a difference in your life. You need not make them flawless to be grateful. There may have been difficulties between you that remain unresolved. You can acknowledge a particular kindness without settling every part of the relationship.
Then consider where that kindness might go next. There may be somebody who needs the time another person once gave you. A word of encouragement you remember receiving might help you recognize when to offer one. What was given to you can become part of another person’s day.
For All Saints, we can ask the saints to pray for us and give some attention to the people beside us. The next occasion for patience may arrive before we finish the prayer.
Whose example helps me recognize the good I can offer today?
Sources: Catechism 953 and 955–957 · Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter 72