November 1st All Saints Day

Many people have a false idea about what a saint is.They think saints are people who never committed a sin in their entire lives, people who were always shining with virtue. But this is a fallacy. It implies that the saints were saints from the cradle onwards. In  other words, they were born saints. We shouldn’t draw a rigid line between saints and sinners. There is something of the sinner in every saint and something of the saint in every sinner. It has been said that saints are sinners who go on trying.
The saints were made of the same flawed material as us. They faced the same temptations as we do. They did not have things easier than us. They just struggled harder. They were not born saints; they became saints through the choices they made. Every saint underwent a conversion. We see this in the lives of some greatest names in the churches list of saints: Saint Francis of Assisi; Ignatius of Loyola; Augustine of Hippo; Paul of Tarsus…Each of these at a certain moment in their lives heard and obeyed the words of Christ, ‘repent and believe the good news.’
All the saints were converted from darkness to light, from selfishness to generosity, from sin to virtue, a conversion is not something that could be achieved overnight rather it is the result of a long and painful struggle. This is why the saints, even the little ones, are such a challenge to us. We cannot think about them without experiencing a call to conversion, a call to rethink our basic attitude to life, to redefine our goals, to confront our sinfulness, and our need to open ourselves to God’s love and mercy. The saints show us what we could be if we were willing to take the risk of total surrender to the love of God.
The saints serve as models for us precisely because they were sinners like us. But they were not overwhelmed by their sins or crippled by their feelings of guilt and shame. They rejoiced in God‘s forgiveness, and with the help of God’s grace succeeding in putting their sins behind them. In them we see the triumph of grace over every weakness and sinfulness. 
Today people can’t relate to the plastic saints of perfectionism. We have to respect the dark side of human nature. To deny is to drive it underground where it works hiddenly. Today we extol people who have tried to live fully rather than those who have withdrawn from life.
Today’s feast is a celebration of the capabilities of human beings, and of what God’s grace can achieve when human cooperation is forthcoming. It is good to be reminded that human beings have such a side, especially in these days when it seems that only the most brutish side of human beings is displayed in the newspapers and on television. Holiness has been described as loveliness of spirit. In each saint we get a glimpse of our capabilities, our failings, and our need of grace and unconditional love. Cardinal Newman said, ‘The lives of the saints is the only true evidence for the existence of God.’