Ave Maria Meditations
We are all called to be saints, Saint Paul says, and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us. lnasmuch as we are growing, putting off the old man and putting on Christ, there is some of the saint, the holy, the divine right there.
One of the features of the retreat at Maryfarm is the renewal of the baptismal vows. Most of us do not know that we have taken vows. One of the fellows said jovially, “Let me read them over to see if I want to renew them!” We have renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil; we have already done it, there is no help for it; we are Christians, we have put on Christ, there is the seed of divine life in us. But as to whether we remain idiots, or morons, or feebleminded in this life does not seem to occur to most of us. We have to grow, the egg has to hatch, it has to develop wings, else it becomes a rotten egg, as C. S. Lewis says. Saint Augustine says that a mother delights in nursing her child, but she does not want it to remain a child always. She wants it to grow into a man.
We are called to be saints. Sometimes we don’t see them around us sometimes their sanctity is obscured by the human, but they are there nonetheless.
+Servant of God, Dorothy Day
