This past week we have celebrated some great saints and feasts in the liturgical calendar: St. Clare on August 11, St. Maximilian Kolbe on August 14, and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15. The saints have always been a great source of inspiration to me. They give me hope that I too can be holy and attain the glory and joy of heaven to be with Jesus and them for all eternity. In his homily on the Feast of the Assumption, Pope Benedict XVI said that Our Lady helps us grow in exactly that, in hope, during our life on earth. He said Mary’s intercession can “help us to live well and with hope the time that God gives to us” on earth (Catholic News Agency). He went on to say that “the virtue of Christian hope ‘is not just nostalgia for Heaven,’ but a ‘living and active desire for God here in the world.’ That desire ‘makes us indefatigable pilgrims,’ providing ‘the courage and strength of faith’ through ‘the power of love’” (Catholic News Agency)
The YouCat tells us that “hope is the power by which we firmly and constantly long for what we were placed on earth to do: to praise God and to serve him; and for our true happiness, which is finding our fulfillment in God; and for our final home: in God” (YouCat, 308). St. Clare and St. Maximilian Kolbe certainly exemplified this virtue in their lives on earth. Clare came from a noble family, but she did not find her fulfillment in riches or nobility. She found her fulfillment in Christ and in Lady Poverty, longing for heaven, but never shirking her mission here on earth. As the Pope said, she “lived well and with hope” the time God gave to her on earth. St. Maximilian Kolbe gave his life in a concentration camp in Auschwitz so that another man might live. He volunteered his life to save the life of a man who was a father and husband. “This is my commandment,” Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel, “that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12, 13). St. Maximilian Kolbe exercised “the courage and strength of faith” through “the power of love,” following the generosity of Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross by giving up his own life. The saints longed for heaven, but they didn’t run away from the trials and sorrows of life on earth. They brought hope to these situations, and thereby became ‘indefatigable pilgrims’ filled with joy. It is through this virtue of hope that St. Paul was able to say in his letter to the Corinthians, “With all our affliction, I am overjoyed” (2 Corinthians 7:4).
A saint is someone who practiced heroic virtue and placed their hope in Christ. Having hope in this world is no small act of heroism, but it is something we are called to everyday. We can look to the saints to be our examples when we feel that all hope is lost, particularly looking to our Blessed Mother and her Assumption into heaven. “Because she committed herself, body and soul, to a divine yet dangerous undertaking, Mary was taken up body and soul into heaven. Anyone who lives and believes as Mary did will get to heaven” (You Cat, 147). At the Angelus on the Feast of the Assumption, Pope Benedict XVI reflected that “’…the Assumption is a reality that touches us too,’ pointing out that it shows ‘the reality of the glory’ to which God calls ‘each of us and the whole Church.’ Under her protection, believers on earth may hope to ‘rejoice with her in the glory of the Resurrection and the fulfillment of her Son’s promises’” (Catholic News Agency).
Queen Assumed Into Heaven, pray for us!
Written by Kristen
