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Today the Holy Catholic Church remembers and celebrates a wonderful son of hers: St. Thomas Aquinas. Now, that’s quite a big deal for us Dominicans, since he was one of us. But more importantly, he was a humble and saintly man, whose life reflected the essence of today’s Gospel.
My dear brothers and sisters, let’s be honest. Many of us generally tend to think of St. Thomas Aquinas as just an intellectual man, a man who is set apart only for the intellectuals. We forget that he is, primarily, a saint. And trust me, one does not become a saint because of intellectual capacities, no matter how great they are, but rather because of humility and holiness of life.
Now, you might say, “Alright, that’s all well and good! But how could I ever attain that humility and holiness?! How could someone like St. Thomas teach me how to become a saint?” Well, the good news is that we don’t actually have to attain it, simply because this has already been given to us in a seed form just as it was given to St. Thomas. It is nothing but the kingdom of Heaven within us, the life of grace which we receive at Baptism. This is the mustard seed of today’s Gospel, something that we can barely see with our eyes, and yet has the potential to grow into a mighty shrub, such that birds build their nests in it.
You see, St. Thomas understood the value of this tiny mustard seed, of this life of grace. And he treasured it above all else and united himself so beautifully to it, that we could say that he became so small, so humble. In other words, he became so child-like. G. K. Chesterton captures the child-like innocence of St. Thomas when he writes of the last confession of the saint. He says: “…the confessor, who had been with him in the inner chamber, ran forth as if in fear, and whispered that his confession had been that of a child of five.” Now, how grave do you think would be the sins of a five-year-old, that is, if at all a child of that age can actually commit sins?! Anyways, when we come to think of it, we realize that this would have been the precise reason as to why he was able to write so well (and so much!) about God. After all, Our Blessed Lord Himself said that it is to the little ones that God revealed the mysteries of the Kingdom - beautiful and comforting words that we hear in today’s Gospel Acclamation!
And so to those of us who wonder how someone like St. Thomas, the “intellectual man”, could show us “simple people” how to become saints, he would repeat the same simple words he told his sister when she asked him how to become a saint: will it. He would ask us to have the desire to become a saint; to realize the infinite worth of the life of grace which has been purchased with the Precious Blood of our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; that life which has been infused into us at Baptism. Because once we realize this, then we would try our best to protect it from anything that would harm it; we would try our best to allow this tiny mustard seed to grow into the mighty shrub it was destined to be.
My dear brothers and sisters, there is one particular incident in the life of St. Thomas which serves to show us his holiness which flowed from this life of grace which he treasured: Our Blessed Lord once spoke to him from the Crucifix, saying, ”Thomas, you have written well of me. What will you have as your reward?” And to this, the child-like saint, who could have asked for the whole world, cried out with all child-like simplicity one could possibly imagine, “Nothing but You, Lord! Nothing but You!”
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