You're at your parish coffee social, and someone mentions - oh so casually - their recent donation to the food bank. Then another person chimes in about their daily hour of Eucharistic adoration. Meanwhile, a third parishioner looks positively gaunt and mentions they're "offering up" their fast for an ill family member. Sound familiar? Jesus saw this coming from two thousand years away! In today's Gospel, our Lord isn't trying to discourage generosity, prayer, or fasting - quite the opposite. He's inviting us into something far more thrilling: the secret life of authentic discipleship. Jesus is calling us to sincere devotion to God over outward displays of religious practice, where our acts of righteousness flow from a deep desire to please God alone rather than to impress others. Think of it as spiritual espionage, where our good deeds become covert operations carried out under the radar of human applause, known only to our heavenly Father.
The beauty of Jesus' teaching here lies in His understanding of the human heart and the eternal stakes we're all facing. We all crave recognition - it's perfectly natural! But Christ is essentially saying, "Why settle for the fleeting applause of people when you could have the eternal recognition of God Himself?" Each of us is on an individual journey to eternity, and that eternity will be pretty much branded and etched in stone once we die. When we give to charity in secret, establish a consistent practice of private daily prayer behind closed doors, or fast without letting anyone know we're fasting, we're not hiding our light under a bushel; we're letting it shine directly toward Heaven. It's like having a private audience with the King of the Universe every time we show an act of love motivated purely by devotion to Him. The Catholic tradition has always understood this deeply, from the Desert Fathers who fled to caves not to escape the world but to find God more purely, to Mother Teresa, who served the poorest of the poor not for cameras but for Christ Himself.
Today's gospel also reveals something profound about what truly matters in the light of eternity versus what the world values. All the accolades, all the countless millions of dollars in the bank, all the ways we can show off to people and take pride in everything we do - it really amounts to nothing in eternity. There's no redeemed value whatsoever in eternity for those temporary earthly rewards. But God's mercy and love for us exceed anything we can imagine, overriding all of our own interpretations and conclusions that we come up with. We'll never know on this side of Heaven who or why God said "yes" to someone, but what we will know is our own eternity. In God's accounting system, the hidden acts of love carry the highest spiritual interest rates! When we fast in private without announcing it, we're storing up treasures in Heaven's vault. When we slip money into the poor box without fanfare, we're making deposits in an eternal savings account. When we sneak away to our rooms for private daily prayer, we're having face-to-face meetings with our Lord and Savior. The Catholic understanding of merit - that our good works, united with Christ's perfect sacrifice, actually contribute to our salvation and the salvation of others - makes these secret acts of devotion incredibly powerful.
So, how do we live this out practically while we have the opportunity to do the right thing here on earth? Start small and start secret. Maybe it's leaving an anonymous gift card for a struggling family, or establishing that daily private prayer time in your room with the door closed, or giving up your morning coffee during for someone suffering without mentioning it to anyone. The goal isn't to become spiritual ninjas hiding in the shadows, but rather to cultivate that beautiful intimacy with God that flows from sincere devotion rather than performance. When our righteousness springs from genuine love and a deep desire to please God alone, people will notice something different about us, not because we're trying to impress them, but because we're being transformed by the One who sees all our hidden acts of love. This is the path to authentic sainthood: not the kind that seeks earthly recognition, but the kind that finds its reward in the secret smile of our heavenly Father. And here's the beautiful paradox - when we stop trying to be noticed for our holiness, our holiness becomes genuinely noticeable to those who need to see God's love most. We have this precious opportunity right here, right now, in this life, to build an eternity that praises and loves God Himself first and foremost in our lives, through these hidden acts of sincere devotion. Never doubt the Power of Prayer.
Authentic Sainthood
True sainthood requires qualities that are completely foreign to our world's way of thinking. The saints understood that worldly absorption - that constant chase after money, status, recognition, and material things - creates a dangerous illusion that these temporary treasures are what life is truly about. But authentic sainthood calls us to see through this mirage and recognize that surrendering our lives completely, 100 percent, over to the Lord in all things is the only path to real fulfillment. This isn't about becoming "holier than thou" or looking down on others from some spiritual pedestal. Rather, it's about cultivating a very quiet, private, humble life that operates at levels of humility so deep that the world simply cannot comprehend them. The saints lived in this beautiful paradox: they were the most powerful people on earth precisely because they had given up all earthly power.
The worldly mind sees humility as weakness, but authentic sainthood reveals it as the greatest strength. When we surrender everything to God - our plans, our reputation, our financial security, our need to be right, our desire to be noticed - we discover a freedom that no amount of money or acclaim could ever provide. This is why the saints could face martyrdom with joy, poverty with gratitude, and obscurity with peace. They had found the pearl of great price and gladly sold everything else to possess it. The world's requirements for success - wealth, fame, power, constant self-promotion - become not just irrelevant but actually obstacles to the life God calls us to live. Authentic sainthood is about becoming so small in our own eyes that God can become infinitely large in our hearts, so quiet in our self-promotion that His voice can be heard clearly through our lives.
Prayer: Lord Jesus, help us to see through the world's illusions and find our true treasure in You alone. Grant us the grace to surrender completely to Your will, to embrace the hidden life of humility, and to seek Your approval above all earthly recognition. May our secret acts of love be known to You alone, and may our lives reflect Your light not through our own efforts to shine, but through our willingness to decrease so that You might increase. Give us the courage to live as authentic saints in a world that doesn't understand true holiness. Amen.
©2025 James Dacey Jr.
