"Act Naturally" - Sermon for All Saints' Sunday, 11-2-25

“To be a saint means to be myself,” wrote the twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton. He didn’t always think so. Years before, while wondering what to do with his life, a fellow monk astonished this doubting-Thomas by saying that if he really wanted a vocation, he should aspire to sainthood.

It’s not such an astonishing idea, sainthood. Some eighteen centuries before Merton, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon wrote that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.” And before Irenaeus, Saint Paul wrote to members of the early church, addressing them as saints.

Sainthood, as we celebrate it on All Saints’ Day, is understood to be the recollection of the members of the Church’s Hall-of-Fame – women and men deemed holy by consensus and held up as role models, heroes of the faith. Soon we will name several of these “Capital-S” saints in the Eucharistic Prayer.

One wonders if any of them aspired to Capital-S sainthood. Likely not. It is more likely that they were just being themselves, as Merton wrote; selves fully alive, as Irenaeus wrote; members of the Church, as Paul wrote.

I suppose I’m a third of the way to sainthood, since I’m a member of the Church. That’s the easy part. But to be myself, and a human being fully alive – those are hard things to do.

To be one’s self and to be fully alive suggests knowing one’s self, and I know that I haven’t fully explored the depths of my psyche, let alone mapped it out well enough to give me easy-to-follow routes to get from my surface-self to those hard-to-find, seldom-visited, hidden-away corners. For some it takes years of therapy; or years of journaling; or years of meditation; or, as some of my most interesting friends tell me, a mere psychedelic trip or three.

“Know thyself,” advised the ancient Greeks. “To thine own self be true,” counseled William Shakespeare. If it were only that easy! – But then, maybe I’m thinking about it too hard.

A few weeks ago, I was out walking in my usual priestly habit, when another interesting friend I hadn’t met yet stopped me and asked “Who are you?” He didn’t want to know my name or where I work. He wanted to know if I knew myself, at my core.

I quickly worked through the layers: husband, father, grandfather, priest. But my friend’s eyes only lit up when I said, “I am a beloved child of God, made in God’s image, and there’s nothing I can do that will change that.”

“There you go!” he said, making his way down Haight Street. “Don’t you ever forget it!”

Who knew I’d meet Thomas Merton and Irenaeus of Lyon, rolled jointly into one old hippie, a man I haven’t seen since.

So, for Christians, at least – we who are the Pauline “lower-case s” saints of the Church – our living selves, and our eventual sainthood begin at our baptism. Our vocation as the baptized is exactly the same as the monk told Merton: sainthood. Aspire to it!

It's entirely likely that, centuries from now, your name or mine won’t be listed in the Litany of the Saints. Don’t worry about it. I’ll wager that none of the saints in that litany lived as they did just so they could end up there or on a stained-glass window. They attained Capital-S sainthood because, at their core, they knew who they really were – God’s own, warts and all – and their lives and their ministries respected and reflected that.  

If you know little else about yourself, know this, and hear me well: You are a beloved child of God, made in God’s image, and there is nothing you can do that will change that.

And don’t you ever forget it!

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

All Saints’ Sunday – November 2, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“All I’ve Got to Do is Act Naturally”