The Wisdom of the Saints You can look to the stories of the saints for ways to live compassionate, faith-filled lives. By Mary Ann Getty, STD
At St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, 140 sculptures of saints stand atop the Colonnades. The history of our faith is rich with stories of saintly men and women whose love of wisdom empowered them to pursue righteousness, live lives of virtue, and grow in holiness.
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great distrust for all things Greek. But the Book of Wisdom, written in Greek, demonstrates an intellectual, cultural, and spiritual openness to both Jews and gentiles, showing what they held in common, how their legacies were compatible, what values they could offer one another. Wisdom thus represents a model for us who may want to draw on, defend, and advance our Catholic faith while also adapting to our traditional religious values, the best of our culture, and scientific curiosity about truth. WISDOM IN NOVEMBER
It is entirely fitting that in November we commemorate All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day as if to summarize toward the end of the liturgical year reasons we seek to live our lives, in the words of St. Paul, “worthy of the gospel” (Phil 1:27). As believing people, it is especially fitting that we celebrate our collective memory of those who are examples to us and whose virtues we try to imitate. The first two weeks of November give us a special opportunity to focus on what makes a saint, to be motivated by the liturgy, and to draw inspiration from the Book of Wisdom.
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atholics have sometimes been accused of worshipping saints. In overcorrecting, we seem to have lost something worthwhile in the honor we have always given to the saints’ role in our lives as guides, inspiration, and encouragement. There was and still is value to appreciating and invoking the examples of saints. Since Christianity is fundamentally incarnational, it helps us to know that we stand on the shoulders of holy ones, our spiritual ancestors, who have gone before us. In this regard, the Book of Wisdom is one of our treasured resources, illustrating a way of holiness. Consistent with the rest of the Old Testament, the Book of Wisdom does not use the term saints or holy ones as the New Testament does. Rather, the Old Testament refers to just ones as those who pursue righteousness. Jews sought justice while Greeks sought wisdom, which might include knowledge and understanding but was so much more. Yet for more than two centuries before Christ, Jews suffered persecution particularly in the great cities outside of Israel where Hellenism prospered. In Alexandria, Egypt, for instance, where the Book of Wisdom was composed, this was particularly true. Among Jews, there developed a
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