All Saints Sunday, (26B), November 4, 2018; The Rev. Susan Ackley
Hebrews 9:11-14 But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things that have come.
Mark 12:28-34 One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another.
When I was a little Catholic girl I was invited by some church friends to meet a saint. We met on a rainy Saturday at church and walked a mile or so to the saint’s house. She was lying in bed. I remember she was plumpish and very pale and that the room smelled odd.
Why did people call her a saint? She supposedly had the stigmata, the wounds of Christ ‘s passion in her hands and feet. They were bandaged, but either she didn’t offer to unbandage them or I have repressed seeing the bloody wounds. I remember being hugely relieved when we left the room behind and walked into fresh air. The saint had turned out to be fascinating, but also more than a little bit repellent.
The experience reinforced the image of saints on the holy cards we traded back and forth in school. I was particularly fond of St. Rose of Lima, who wore a circlet of thorns which she’d woven around her head. A little blood was ok but I tended not to like the martyr cards—too much blood. My sense as a child was that holy people—saints– were weird and suffered a lot. I was not interested in becoming one.
So… When my spiritual director announced at the beginning of my last extended retreat last April that he want to explore with me the idea of holiness, of sainthood, I balked.
He reminded me that Paul in his letters to the new Christians referred to them all as saints. How could that be, I wondered? They were far from perfect, as, for example, the first letter to the Corinthians made clear.
My spiritual director began by asking me to write down any saints that were important or helpful to me. I immediately listed John the Evangelist, Francis of Assisi, and Teresa of Avila. All of these have been important to me and I go back to their stories and their writings over and over. The Orthodox writer Michael Plekon has a word for these paradigmatic saints. He calls them “celebrity saints.” They have such big spiritual profiles it’s easy to think of them as if they’re a different species.
Plekon argues that in certain religious circles there is a “celebrity cult” of sainthood, that removes the idea of holiness, of saintly living, out of everyday life and reserves it for extraordinary people and deeds. He talks about the “hidden holiness” we discover in certain people we encounter in our lives. These people are saints for us.
On my retreat I listed some of my own hidden saints. One of mine was my high school chaplain, Fr. Sean. While the nuns wanted him to warn us about sin, he never did. Instead he taught us over and over that God is Love, and that we became more human the more we loved. At that age I had a suspicion that religion was foisted on children by adults to keep them under control, but he showed us that relationship with God was a living reality into which we could go deeper and deeper. In a literal way that formed and continues to form my life.
On a trip to India in seminary I met a woman from a rural village near Bangalore. She was catching a ride from an Institute where I was staying to her village. After she got out my host told me that she was an Untouchable—now by their choice called Dalits. When the water in the Dalit section of the village ran out, she went in the middle of the night to take water from the caste well. She continued until she was discovered. She was persecuted by the people and the police. But the other Dalits persisted-“nevertheless they persisted” and finally the people in the caste part of the village were forced to share their water. I’d ridden with a saint and I didn’t know it.
Another hidden saint was a former parishioner of mine, Elvira Pickering. By the time I came to know her she was quite elderly and in assisted living an hour and a half from where she’d lived all her life. Every time I visited her, she was so gracious and appreciative that I always came away feeling that she had visited me! Another hidden saint.
What does it mean to be a saint whether of celebrity or hidden variety?
Towards the end of my retreat I came upon a provisional definition:
A saint is someone who by the way they live their life is a center of blessing for others. A saint is someone who is a center of blessing for others.
It works for me. “Blessings” are free gifts to us, from God, from others. Sometimes a blessing bestows joy or peace that passes all understanding. At other times a blessing is an inspiration or a nudge or a kick in the pants to do what you need to do.
I suspect that for most of us, our primary contact with saints as centers of blessing consists of encounters with the ordinary, everyday “hidden saints” in our lives, the Fr. Sean’s, the Elvira Pickerings, the courageous Dalit woman at the well. Although, in my own life, St. John the Evangelist in his love for God, St. Francis in his utter disregard for convention, and St. Teresa in her combination of passionate and utterly sensible spirituality continue to inspire me.
St. Paul’s voice intrudes—and reminds us that we here this morning are “saints” — the “saints of the church on Newbury Street.
How do we live into our holiness, our sainthood? Three points from Michael Plekon:
Sainthood has nothing to do with perfection. St. Peter, terrified for his life, abandoned Jesus. St. Francis had serious physical and mental health issues and had to be lovingly cared for by his followers and friends. Thomas Merton who has been a center of blessing for many since the 1950’s was not a perfect monastic even though he had written so beautifully about monastic life—he could be self-righteous, he drank a lot of beer and at one point fell deeply in love with a nurse assigned to care for him—not what monks are supposed to do!
Saints, celebrity or hidden, need to be approachable if they are to be centers of blessing, and often they are approachable precisely because of their weaknesses. It reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s famous lines: “Ring your bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Saints are not people who are aloof from life, they embrace life in its fullness. The Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement, emphasizes that holiness is not even a matter of religion per se but of living life in its fullness: “There is holiness in each human being who participates vigorously in life. There is holiness not only in the great ascetic but in the creator of beauty [I think of Don Wilkinson whom we’re especially remembering today and so many other people in the Emmanuel community], in the seeker after truth .., in the deep love of [two persons] for one another, in the mother who knows how to console her child….”
Finally, “sainthood” is not a cookie-cutter; one size fits all kind of thing. Elvira Pickering was not in the least like Teresa of Avila who wasn’t at all like the Dalit heroine I met in Bangalore.
This is what I most came to see in my week of retreat pondering sainthood and holiness. How one becomes center of blessing for others is different for each individual. It differs because of historical, cultural, class, religious, ethnic/racial/gender contexts and because of our own individual passions, talents, flaws and wounds.
That’s why one of our main tasks in life is becoming the person we were made to be. Thomas Merton called this the “true self”: “It is true to say that for me sanctity consists in being myself, and for you in being your self, and that, in the last analysis, your sanctity will never be mine and mine will never be yours, except in the communion of charity and grace…. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”
Questions to ponder:
For whom or in what context am I a center of blessing for others?
When and where am I not that?
How can I change to become a center of blessing in all aspects of my life?