Striving for Sainthood, an Option or Our Duty?

I’m going to do two things in this blog entry that I don’t plan to do often; quote the bible and discuss an actual canonized Saint.  This will rarely happen since I don’t know very many bible quotations, just the more famous ones, and canonized Saint examples are so extraordinary that attempting to emulate them can be discouraging.  But for now, let’s take a quick look at one interesting example.

Today is the feast day of St. Maximilian Kolbe.  He was arrested in Poland in 1941 and sent to the Auschwitz death camp.  Following a prisoner escape, ten men from his barracks were picked to suffer death by starvation as both a punishment and deterrent. Fr. Kolbe was not initially chosen, but volunteered to take the place of one of the men who begged for mercy due to family concerns.

The men suffered the pains of dehydration and starvation and after three weeks only four were left alive. It was on this day, August 14 in 1941 that Fr. Kolbe and three fellow prisoners were killed with injections of carbolic acid.  He was 47 years old.

He was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1971 and canonized by his fellow Pole, Pope John Paul II in 1982.  The opening words of the papal decree introducing his beatification were, “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” – John 15:13. He certainly lived that verse.

The reason I am so intrigued by this Saint, and chose to officially publish my book on this date is that he often wrote about our duty to become saints.  He didn’t believe it was an option.  In fact his own personal first rule of life was “I must become a saint, and a great saint.”  He even had a formula for his philosophy, W+w=S, which means, when there is unity between God’s will and our will there is sanctity (saintliness).  Of course the challenge is understanding what God’s will for each of us truly is.

Do you know what God’s will is for you?  If so, is your will in line with His?  If not, do your ever spend time trying to figure it out?  If you are not a “God person,” do you have a personal mission in life that guides what you do?  Tough questions!

Our Saint Builder Foundation overriding philosophy is that if we were all striving to become saints we would be able to solve all the world’s problems by working together.  And it all starts with knowing our individual reason for being.   Our mission.  And then carrying it out diligently.  I believe this is our duty.  But it is at our option.  Free will.  What will you do?

I plan to blog regularly going forward.  My goal is to help us all think about where we are at in life, where we want to go from here, and how we should go about getting from here to there.  It’s then up to each of us to take action based on the results of that thinking.  And praying helps too.  Think of it as TAP (think, act, pray)…as in “tap” your potential.

I welcome your thoughts as we go along.  You will notice that I use the words us and we often.  We are in this together.  I am no expert, but I am older and wiser than I once was…aren’t we all?!  I’ve been doing my research and working hard to at least improve myself.  Let’s figure this saint thing out together.  I look forward to the shared journey.

Tomorrow let’s start playing a game.

Yours in aspiring little “s” sainthood, Scott