Don’t be a photocopy. Be an original!
This week, the Church has the joy of celebrating the canonization of St. Carlo Acutis and St. Pier Giorgio Frassati.
It is times like these I especially love being a Catholic, because we don’t just celebrate the lives of the saints, we build friendships with them and learn from them on our own journey to Heaven. Now Pope Leo is declaring two new friends in Heaven for all of us to encounter. I certainly invite you to go do some research about each of them, because they’re both incredible saints, despite their short earthly lives.
Saint Carlo has a quote that struck me: “All people are born as originals, but many die as photocopies.” What a profound thing for a child in a Spiderman costume to say! But Carlo is hitting on something that is true for every single one of us: you are radically unrepeatable! God has never made anyone like you before and will not make anyone like you again. God delights in you in a unique way and guides you along the path to Heaven in a personal way. But if we’re not careful, we can find that uniqueness being stripped away from us as we go through life. Maybe we compare ourselves to others or get attached to a label that’s been imposed on us. And before we know it, we’re trying to be anyone other than ourselves, so that others will accept us. We worry about what others say we are. We find our identity in an idea or an action rather than in what God has given us. But God’s first gift to you is yourself.
I offer you this for the coming week: how is God inviting you to be more yourself? How does that look in terms of how you may be called to serve in your local community with your gifts or how you may be called simply to love God and others today? Who does Jesus say that you are? Both Saint Carlo and Saint Pier Giorgio (indeed, all the saints) give witness to the joy of being authentically who God made them to be: themselves. The Church doesn’t need you to be another Saint Carlo or another Saint Catherine or another Saint Francis. We already have them. But who we don’t have yet is Saint You. The saints don’t want you to be copies of them, they want you to be the original gift from God that you are, to add your uniqueness, gifts, and joy to the ranks of Heaven.
-Br. Andrew Olson, OMV
