THE VIEW FROM RIZAL
Get ready for the heavy traffic. It’s that time of the year.
In the last days of October, our countrymen carry out one of our country’s most beloved rituals.
Next weekend, we will see provincial highways clog, flower vendors crowd cemetery gates, and families spread mats over the resting places of their dead to share food, stories, and laughter. Yes, “Undas” is part reunion, part picnic, and part prayer. Beneath it lies a feast many of us probably rush past these days: All Saints’ Day, on Nov. 1.
For a growing number of people, it may have become easy to treat the day as a calendar footnote, a holiday before All Souls’. But in a season of exhausting headlines, with public scandals, polarized timelines, and ordinary households stretched thin, the feast poses a question worth stopping for.
While we lean more towards Bible-based Christianity, we believe it is worthwhile to reflect on what it means to be a “saint” in the chaotic world we live in today. What would it look like to be genuinely good, not in theory, but on a Tuesday morning in traffic?
It appears the first obstacle is our idea of “sainthood.”
We imagine plaster statues, hands folded, eyes lifted, serenely above life's mess. Christian churches have long taught otherwise.
The Second Vatican Council, in Lumen Gentium, spoke of a “universal call to holiness,” addressed to every baptized person, not only to priests and nuns. Pope Francis made the point vivid in his 2018 apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exultate, where he wrote of “the saints next door.”
He described holiness in parents who raise their children with immense love, in workers who toil to support their families, in the sick, and in elderly religious who never lose their smile. He called it the “middle class of holiness,” a phrase he must have borrowed from the French novelist Joseph Malègue.
That vision matters because it removes our favorite excuse. If sainthood belongs to the extraordinary, we are off the hook. Many of us are probably thinking, if it belongs to the faithful, patient, unglamorous work of loving the people in front of us, then we are not.
Consider what the modern world does to us. We are tempted to perform rather than to be. Our lives become feeds to be curated, and our opinions become brands.
Here the Trappist monk Thomas Merton offers a correction. “For me to be a saint means to be myself,” he wrote in New Seeds of Contemplation. Holiness, according to him, is not conformity to a pious template but fidelity to the person God actually made, flaws and all.
In today’s age of filters, that is nearly countercultural.
The Catholic Church’s newest saints seem to understand this. In September 2025, Pope Leo XIV canonized Carlo Acutis, a teenager from Milan who died of leukemia in 2006 and is often called the first millennial saint. Acutis loved computers, built websites about Eucharistic miracles, and was, by all accounts, a cheerful and ordinary kid.
He is widely credited with saying that everyone is born an original, yet many die as photocopies. Whether or not we ever meet a saint in a stained-glass window, we all know the temptation to become a copy of whatever is trending.
Secular research points us in a similar direction.
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who studies moral emotions, has described “moral elevation,” the warm, uplifting feeling we get when we witness someone’s unexpected goodness. His work suggests that feeling tends to make observers want to become better themselves.
“Saints,” in other words, are contagious. The cynicism that pervades public life can feel permanent, but so can the quiet example of one decent person.
So how do we become saints in a chaotic world? Our view is not through grand gestures, but through a few stubborn habits. An evangelical pastor gave us some examples of such habits.
First, do ordinary work with integrity. In a country weary of corruption stories, refusing the small shortcut, whether a bribe, a padded receipt, or a lie to a customer, is a form of holiness. Honest work is a public good.
Second, pay attention. Much of our unkindness is simply distraction. Putting the phone down at dinner, looking the jeepney driver or the security guard in the eye, and listening to an aging parent repeat a story are small acts of love. Mother Teresa is often quoted as saying we cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love. It may be the most practical sentence in the spirituality of the last century.
Third, practice mercy in public. Online, that means pausing before the cruel comment, the shared rumor, or the pile-on. Offline, it means treating those who cannot repay us, such as the vendor, the helper, or the stranger, with courtesy.
This Nov. 1, as we weave through the crowds with candles and chrysanthemums, we might ask the saints we knew, the lola who prayed her devotion and the father who worked double shifts, what they would tell us now.
We suspect they would say that “holiness” is not escape from the world’s noise. It is love that stays steady inside it.
(The author is a Doctor of Medicine, an entrepreneur and the mayor of Antipolo City, former Rizal governor, and DENR assistant secretary, LLDA general manager. Email: antipolocitygov@gmail.com)
