The execution of the medical aid workers in Afghanistan shocked the world.  Six Americans, one German, two Afghans and a British citizen were ambushed, shot and robbed on August 5 in northern Afghanistan. They had been traveling from village to village in that remote part of the country to provide medical care. Tom Little, an eye doctor originally from Delmar, New York had spent forty year in Afghanistan treating diseases of the eye. He was sixty-one and a grandfather. Thomas Grams, 51, gave up a Colorado dentist practice to make dental health available to impoverished Afghan children. Forty-year-old Glen Lapp from Lancaster, Pennsylvania was a nurse.  Previously, Lapp had worked with the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Dr. Karen Woo, the British subject was a surgeon providing basic medical care to the poor and needy. She was thirty-six and planned to be married in two weeks.

Dan Terry, 64, was Tom Little’s long-time friend and colleague.  He was big-hearted, enthusiastic and caring.  He spoke fluent Dari, the local language and had spent time in Taliban jails where characteristically he made new friends.

Daniela Beyer of Chemnitz, Germany, was a linguist and translator.  She spoke German, English, and Russian.  She also spoke Dari and was learning Pashto, another local language.  She had joined the eye treatment team to translate for women patients.  She was thirty-five.

Cheryl Beckett has spent six year in Afghanistan, where she educated people on nutritional gardening and mother-child health.  She had planted green, lush gardens in the midst of the desert.  Her fluency in local languages was a great asset to the team.  She was thirty-two years old.

The youngest, Brian Carderelli was only twenty-five.  He was a freelance videographer from Harrisonburg, Virginia who had fallen in love with the country and its people.

Six of those killed were members of the International Assistance Mission. Their two Afghan interpreters were not.  IAM Director, Dirk Frans denied the Taliban’s accusation that the murdered workers were missionaries.  IAM had been in Afghanistan since 1966 at the government’s request to provide eye care.  Subsequently, its mission has expanded to physiotherapy, basic mental health care, teaching English and community development. Frans said the medical workers were on a peaceful mission to help people in a remote area of Afghanistan.  “We had no security people,” he said.  “We are a humanitarian agency.  We don’t have armed guards.  We allow no weapons at all.”

These murders made me think long and hard about life and goodness, about holiness and sanctity, about courage and timidity, about what truly counts and what really doesn’t matter.
 
In one of Morris West’s novels, a country pastor disapproved of a canonization pending in Rome. Shaking his head he said, “What the world needs is less saints and more sanctity!”  West’s fictional priest was speaking theological wisdom.
 
What the word needs is more people like Little, Terry, Grams, Lapp, Woo, Beckett, and Beyer. Perhaps in some distant century some future Pope will belatedly recognize sanctity outside his ancient church and canonize the Martyred Aid Workers of Afghanistan. That’s if the distant future will even have canonizations, but the question is moot. It doesn’t matter at all – the Afghan Martyrs are already saints.
 
Rome likes to hold up celibates, ascetics and the founders of religious order as icons of holiness. The Catholic Church has seldom recognized sanctity in ordinary men and women.  A pity, for that leaves non-ascetical, ice cream eating, sexually active, TV-watching, working stiffs like most of us off the hook. We think that sanctity is not possible for diaper-changing, laundry-washing, automobile-tinkering folks -- even if in our best moments, care and compassion have moved us to help the neediest among us.
 
The danger for us is that we become so engrossed in the mundane, daily demands of our lives and families that we ossify spiritually.  Charles Dickens told us, “Charity begins at home and justice begins next door.” The Aid Workers knew exactly what Dickens meant -- even if they crossed the ocean to do it.
 
We, however, don’t need to cross the ocean. We don’t need to travel to the third world. Perhaps we don’t even have to go across town. We can bring Meals on Wheels to shut-ins, work at the local Soup Kitchen, volunteer at hospitals or with hospice. Most of us can’t cure eye diseases or do dentistry in Afghanistan, but perhaps we can coach little league or help someone learn to read. That kind of loving, altruistic caring is the seed of holiness.
 
The spiritual writer William McNamara writes, “The difference between the saints and the rest of us is that they plunge boldly and daringly into the fire of God’s love and come out burned but incandescently and utterly transfigured [Like the Afghan Medical Team].  We put our little finger in, get slightly burned, and spend the rest of our days circling the fire.”
 
Whatever our faith, our belief, or lack thereof, the French poet and essayist Charles Peguy has some life-changing advice for us.  He said that life’s only real failure is not becoming a saint. The Afghan Aid Workers did not fail.
 
Retired from the Administration at State University of New York at Fredonia, Daniel O’Rourke lives in Cassadaga, NY.  His newspaper column appears in the Observer, Dunkirk, New York on the second and fourth Thursday each month.   A grandfather, Dan is a married Catholic priest.  He has published a book of his previous columns, “The Spirit at Your Back.”  To read about that book or send comments on this column visit his website http://www.danielcorourke.com/