After all, God understands our weaknesses, because God became one of us. God became a human being in the Incarnation, when Jesus took on our flesh and blood, took on a human life - and Jesus taught us that our ordinary human lives can be lived united with our Father in heaven. Both our bodies and our souls are holy and they are a blessed unity. Jesus used both his body and his soul to love people in many relationships. Jesus lived a life of many relationships - with his Heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit, with his parents and relatives, with his friends, with the hundreds of people who followed him around and begged to be taught and healed.
Jesus taught the people in crowds, but he talked with them and listened to them, forgave them and healed them, one-on-one, using his voice, his hands, his smiles, even his spit mixed with mud. He was attentive to people often when he was tired or hungry; he honored these relationships when it was convenient and when it was inconvenient. Even when he grew impatient with his disciples who were always one step behind in understanding him, as our children can so often be with us, he never gave up on them. By his wonderful and consistent example, Jesus showed us how to live in many, many relationships with many, many people, giving our whole selves, our bodies and souls, in love.
Like Jesus, we spend our lives in growing and deepening relationships with many, many people: the people of our families, our schools, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our churches, the special interest groups we belong to. Slowly we get to know one another, through visiting at parties or bars, or going out for coffee, or sharing recipes, or baking cookies together, or painting walls or stripping and staining furniture together, or bowling together. Helping one another move. Bringing over a casserole when someone is sick. Working a bake sale or Bingo together. Attending a wake or funeral when somebody dies, and gathering together to console and hug the crying family. Working on a committee to save the environment, or a Pastoral Council to strengthen the parish. It's all holy work when it's done in love, and it's building up communities of love.
We are created and "brain-wired" to live in relationship, live in community. Any special occasion, for instance, involves people getting "fired up" and setting each other on fire with energetic love. Think of the incredible shared energy of a crowd cheering at a football game, or people singing along and dancing together at a concert, or an auditorium getting to its feet and clapping enthusiastically at the end of your son's or daughter's school play, or a Diocesan Youth Conference crowd of teens screaming together and waving their hands in response to a dynamic speaker. Think of the joyous energy at a First Communion or Confirmation Mass when the loving Presence of God is so warm and palpable that it lights the room. Love and joy and appreciation and commitment are always for life itself, and always are so infectious! Sr. Ilia Delio tells us that what we say and do as a group both spiritually and biologically strengthens our bonds and actually makes us spiritually and psychically one!
"What we do, how we think, how we act, and the choices we make together for the sake of life create energy fields that strengthen the values of community. Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb (d. 1985) said that 'Those who fire together, wire together.' Brain studies today show that working together actually causes the brains of individuals to fire together as if there is one brain among them. The brain is an open system (composed of local systems) that functions in communication with the environment. It both is affected by the environment and affects the environment. A shared environment can give rise to a shared brain, so that becoming 'one in heart and mind' is a reality." ( in Delio's book "Making All Things New.")
Of course, in "holy work," things said and done out of love, the One Who sets us on fire and wires us together is the Holy Spirit of Love, Enthusiasm, Joy, Commitment, and Unity. Through and in the Holy Spirit of Jesus, we become more Christ-like, as individuals and as a community, and our unity in relationships forges us into the One Body of Christ - Christ's hands, feet, mind, heart, kiss and voice for others for all generations and for all time.
We who choose to love our God and love our neighbors are a holy people, a cloud of witnesses, and we are the church, which is the communion, or unity, of all the saints. This communion/unity binds us to all throughout the world, and all who have lived before us, and all who will live in the future. Wonderful stories of the holy men and women of God are passed on from generation to generation, the stories of people who are rich or poor, educated or uneducated, single, married, priests, deacons, or religious, black, brown, red, yellow, or white. The saints' stories inspire us, give us hope, renew our spiritual energy. We are the Communion of Saints: across the centuries, both in heaven and on earth, all men and women of God are thinking together, acting together, making choices together as we seek the Will of God - so our brains are firing and wiring together, and we are becoming one in heart and mind, sharing the very heart and mind of Christ.
Anyone who is in Heaven is a saint. The holy women of God can include the story of a saintly grandmother who raised a large family with very little time to sleep but certainly lots of love. The holy men of God can include the saintly Uncle or Aunt who worked two jobs without complaint to support their family. The Communion of Saints includes janitors and hair dressers and single mothers, Popes and slaves and missionaries, soldiers and conscientious objectors and martyrs. They see us, hear us, pray for us, interact with us as we pray to them as our dearest friends, asking them to pray for us.
The holy men and women declared saints by the church have a living, real connection to us if we allow them into our lives. In her book "My Sisters the Saints," Colleen Carroll Campbell says of the journey of her life,
"I wrestled with the quintessential dilemmas of my generation: confusion over the sexual chaos of the hookup culture, tension between my dueling desires for professional success and committed love, ambivalence about the demands of marriage and parenthood, and anguish over a beloved parent's descent into illness, and my own confrontation with a devastating diagnosis.
"Dissatisfied by pat answers offered by both secular feminists and their antifeminist critics, I found grace and inspiration from an unexpected source: spiritual friendships with six women saints. In the lives and writings of Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Faustina of Poland, Edith Stein of Germany, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Mary of Nazareth, I discovered kindred spirits. These women spoke to my deepest longings, guided me through my most wrenching decisions, and transformed my understanding of love and liberation."
Fr. James Martin, S.J., freely admits that reading the books of Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968), who was a writer, theologian, mystic, and social activist, has changed Martin's life. He says, "Happy birthday Fr. M. Louis Merton, OCSO, aka Thomas Merton. Thanks for writing, among other things, the two sentences that changed my life. They appear in "No Man is an Island":
"'Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if only we knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?'"
Martin then asks us, "Has Merton changed you in any way?"
Whatever we do or say out of love for another is holy. Loving relationships are not only holy, they are what we were created for and spiritually and biologically wired for. Communities that think, speak, and act in love can and must change the world. Loving Christian communities are the living, organic One Body of Christ, meant to grow and penetrate wth love the spiritually and physically needy environments around them.
So - never underestimate the sheer raw and transcendent power of your smallest action, your shortest word, your most difficult but faithful relationship: you are changing the world around you. Your love is showing others that you are a disciple of Christ. Even faithfully feeding and changing a toddler or a senior with dementia is preaching a Gospel that is quietly impacting others. Paul Dirac, Nobel Prize winner in 1933, said famously, "Pick a flower on earth, and you move the farthest star."