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Minutes of Meetings with God |
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Saints ... |
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| "All Saints Day" is rapidly approaching and by the time you read this,
that day will have come and gone. Despite our (my) neglect in the observance
of "All Saints," it is an important day. Mostly, the only attention we give
it is "All Hallows Eve," that is, Halloween, the night before "All Saints
Day." We celebrate the ghosts, goblins, witches, and warlocks, but we mostly
just ignore the saints, those heroes of the Christian faith that are the
true occasion of this "Holy Day."
It may be a symptom of the times, not only in the Church, but in most places in our society. We have so much difficulty with heroes these days. We have so few heroes and what heroes we do have seem to be either dark, ominous, brooding, fatally flawed (like Batman or Spawn) or buffoons (like George of the Jungle) or "sports heroes" (I guess I really don't understand how "sports" and "hero" go together, "sports heroes" seem to have too much to do with marketing). I will admit that I am a child of my time. I have trouble with heroes, too. All too often, rather than learning the good from those who have been towering heroes and saints of the past, we seem intent on tearing apart those who, for however brief a moment, managed to transcend their human limits and embody love, truth, beauty, mercy, peace, justice, selflessness or devotion in a way that stretches who we are as human beings so that we become more like God. For reasons that no one seems to be able to figure out , jealousy, self-doubt, unwillingness to change our comfortable but mostly self-defeating lives, arrogance in regard to our "new" and "modern" ways, we moderns discount or ignore those of the past who have achieved something important, especially in the realm of the spiritual. Our tendency has been to write-off saints as all together too human or as too perfect, too transcendent, too holy, too miraculous to be believed as "real." Sadly, the saints have been put in the role of those whose lives cause us trouble rather than in the role of examples that guide and motivate us to the embrace of greater good in our lives. On the whole, we moderns have next to no knowledge of who the saints have been or who our contemporary saints are. And there are some pretty serious consequences to our ignorance. The most serious consequence is that, when we run into spiritual crises, we have no patterns, maps or other helps to get us through them because we don't know how others of faith (saints) have dealt with similar potentially overwhelming situations. Our ignorance makes it too easy for us to feel like "the Lone Ranger" and to succumb to despair. Our ignorance is terrible. Too many of us know nothing of the Biblical saints. We don't read our Bibles. We have trouble knowing who a saint is. A saint himself, the Apostle Paul makes it clear who a saint is: anyone who consciously gets involved with God; anyone whom God strengthens with power through his Spirit in their inner being, so that Christ dwells in their hearts through faith; anyone whom God roots and establishes in love; anyone who grasps, together with all the saints, how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ; anyone who knows this love that surpasses knowledge-- that is filled to the measure of all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:16-19). Saints are saints, not because of miracles or because of flawless lives, but because of their being very human and being loved of God and loving God in return. Being a saint is understanding something of God's love and something of how to love God in return and somehow living that understanding so others can see it and understand, too. It is as simple and as hard as that. Another saint, one named John, helps us understand just how simple and hard loving God in return can to be: If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates [has ill-will toward] his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. ( I Jn 4:20) And: This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God to be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. (I Jn 3:16-18) Saints, almost always did not start out being saints. Some were unreliable and failures (like Peter), some were murderous (like Paul), some were wastrels and cads (like Augustine), but it was by being loved of God and by returning God's love that they became "Saints", the heroes of faith. There is another serious consequence to our ignorance about the saints. In our ignorance, we often come to feel that we have to "reinvent the wheel" when it comes to sorting out and living "being loved of God and loving God in return." We do not allow ourselves the benefit of almost 4,000 years of experience in "being loved of God and loving God in return." Sadly, that means we spend a great deal of time repeating the mistakes other saints have already made, going down the unhelpful paths that other saints have already tried and found "wanting," and wandering around hoping that our journey will take us deeper into the Kingdom of God. Our ignorance keeps us from building on the work of saints of the past. We lay the foundation over and over and over again. The Bible and other records of the lives of the saints can help us to further our own spiritual lives and the life of the Church. But we have to get acquainted with all these able teachers, these saints, or they will do us no good. There are numerous saints in the Bible: Peter, James, Timothy, Jude, for example. And through the centuries, there have been countless saints who through "bright moments" in their way of living, of thinking, of feeling, or of writing have broadened the limits of our understanding of how to to be loved of God and how to love God in return. Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement,Origen, Jerome, Augustine, Francis, John Hus, John Wycliffe, Juliana of Norwich, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Brother Lawrence, George Fox, John Wesley, Hannah Smith, Leo Tolstoy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Kelly, Dorothy Day, E. Stanley Jones, Thomas Merton, Mother Teresa, Mother Waddles, and so many others have done so much, not merely by doing "big" or impressive things to show how to be loved of God and how to love God in return, but by doing the little things, doing the simple things, day in and day out to show how to to be loved of God and how to love God in return. |