Real saints

That boy wanted to buy a birthday present for his father, but he had no way to get to the mall.

"If you want, I'll give you a ride," the father offered. Once there, the boy didn't know what gift to choose. "How about a pair of racquets to play together," Dad proposed. The boy thought it was a very good idea, but there was a problem: he had no money to buy them. "Don't worry, son, I'll pay for them," his father reassured him gently.

When he got home, the son asked him to wrap the rackets himself in wrapping paper, because he was terrible at it. The father agreed, wrapping them neatly and decorating the package with a beautiful red ribbon.

At the birthday party, just after blowing out the candles, the son handed the father the gift and the father ran to unwrap it with a pounding heart. At the sight of the rackets, a tear of emotion ran down his cheek. His wife, who knew the whole story, asked him: "But how can you be so happy when your son has done nothing? It was you who went to the store, you chose a gift for him, you paid for it, and you even wrapped it yourself. To which the husband replied, with shining eyes and a calm voice: "It's the thought that counts!

Saints and grace

I heard this story a few days ago in a homily in which the priest was explaining how God's grace works on the saints. It is so little that they do and so much that God puts in! And yet, how the Father rejoices when one of His children opens himself to this grace that He gives them freely! What a great gift it is for Him!

– Supernatural holiness is a difficult path to which we are all called, but which very few succeed in reaching. In the face of the gratuitousness of God (gratuitous comes from "gratia" -gratia-), there is the freedom of the human being to accept it. Our weaknesses are many, our sins are many, as were those of the son who is the protagonist of the parable I have just recalled. It was enough for him to have the intention of opening himself to grace for the Father to carry out his work, overcoming his many and evident imperfections.

One of the worst favors that can be done to the saints is to sweeten their biographies, putting the focus on their personal virtues and thus hiding the primordial role of grace. The sins of the saints are tiptoed over, as if with shame, when the opposite is true: "where sin abounded, grace abounded".

Much of the blame is due to the fact that hagiographies are commissioned from like-minded people and supervised by spiritual children who tend to idealize their founders. It would happen to anyone: who would want the faults of their mother, father or someone dear to them to be brought to light? Affection and admiration make us minimize them and, on the contrary, magnify their merits. But the lives of the saints should not be panegyrics for the enjoyment of their faithful followers, but writings that lead readers to want to imitate the lives of those who have allowed themselves to be made by the Lord, because they are just that, earthen vessels.

Truthfulness

Showing the failures of Jesus' followers is, in fact, one of the criteria used by critics to demonstrate the historicity of Jesus, the veracity of the Gospels. It is called the criterion of difficulty or embarrassment and is based on the fact that, if the followers of Jesus had wanted to invent a story, it would not be logical for them to bring up, for example, the abandonment of his disciples in Gethsemane; the denial of his right hand, Peter, or the lack of faith of the apostles at the news that he had risen from the dead. The fact that the Gospel account does not hide the weaknesses of the first followers of Jesus assures us that those who compiled the first writings did not intend to sell us a motorcycle, but to explain how the Son of God becomes incarnate and how he does not really choose the capable, but enables those he chooses.

Patron saints of Malaga

In this sense, I have had the good fortune to follow very closely the birth of ".The mud fish" (Mensajero), a historical novel by Ana Medina and Antonio S. Reina that narrates the life of the patron saints of Malaga, the young St. Ciriaco and St. Paula, martyred in the time of Diocletian. The work transports the reader to the beginnings of Christianity, when the first communities lived the joy of the Good News in the face of the failure of pagan religions. In this fiction (we preserve hardly any data of their lives) Ciriaco and Paula are two normal young people who live their Christian vocation as so many young people live it today, among doubts and blunders, but when the time came, grace gave them the power to change their lives in a heroic way to the point of giving the supreme testimony of martyrdom.

Set at the beginning of the fourth century, "The Mud Fish" reflects on such current problems for the dialogue of faith with today's culture as the changing of the times, abortion, interreligious dialogue, political corruption, the abuse of the powerful, the exploitation of women or the care of the last. It also deals with current ecclesial issues such as the role of women in the communities, the vocation to marriage or consecrated life, synodality or the discernment of the members of the Church who participate in its life in an imperfect way.

In the novel, as in life, the saints live with their feet in the mud, and sometimes they get dirty so that they can say with St. Paul: "I do not do the good that I desire, but I do the evil that I do not desire". Have we not experienced it this way in real life? Will fiction help us to make the real lives of the saints credible?

At the end of their earthly lives, the "martyrs", as the young Ciriaco and Paula were affectionately known in their city, presented to God, as a precious gift, the palm of martyrdom. Do you know what the Father exclaimed to them with his eyes bathed in tears: "It is the intention that counts!