All Saints

Georges Bernanos is a French novelist and author who wrote primarily during the 1930s and 40s. He loved the Church, loathed mediocrity, and exalted the saints as "geniuses of love". Here he is on that topic:

"To engage one's whole being: what a prospect! It's no secret that, in our life, most of us engage only a very slender part, a ridiculously small part of our being, like those fabulously wealthy misers who formerly were thought to spend only the profits generated by their income. A saint does not live on the profits generated by his income, or even on his income alone. He lives on his capital, he engages his soul totally. This is what makes the saint different from the merely wise man, who secretes his wisdom as a snail secretes its shell--only in order to find shelter within it...We say to ourselves with horror that countless men are born, live and die without having used their soul one single time, really used their soul, even if only to offend the good Lord..."

and again:

"Who does not long for the strength to set forth on so glorious an adventure? For sanctity is an adventure; it is indeed the only adventure. Those who have once realized this have found their way to the very heart of the Catholic faith; they have felt in their mortal flesh the shuddering of another terror than the terror of death: the shudder of supernatural hope. Our Church is the Church of the saints."