The Lure of the Saints

    And here we come to another observance of “All Saints Sunday.”  Or is that “All Souls”?  Or both?  For many of us, confusion reigns.  A few definitions first, a bit of history, and then we shall trace a trajectory within which we might find ourselves.

    First, let’s define a key term:  “saints.”  For many of us, that word dredges up sepia images of anemic holy over-achievers, hands piously folded, eternally floating just about an inch off the ground – or ossified museum pieces stuck on a pillar, displayed as an example to roll out annually to hold over the heads of the rest of us ordinary slobs.  Why on earth would anybody in their right mind want to create a day like “All Saints”?  Every few hundred years, the Catholic Church must clean out the rolls, clear away the accumulated underbrush of saints days on the calendar, as this or that Famous Christian Hero acquires his or her own special memorial day.  Sainthood is always in danger of becoming merely a kind of holy merit-badge.  And then the phenomenon itself leaps into the realm of cult mysticism.  I remember in the 1990s, a bakery discovered that one of its rolls, when viewed from a certain angle, bore an uncanny resemblance to Mother Teresa.  Made the newspapers, the evening news.  Hundreds came to venerate, or at least to check it out, the half-baked image of a saint.  Which is where all too many of them remain – an oddity, packaged up for public consumption.  Dorothy Day is reported to have once growled, “Don’t call me a saint.  I don’t want to be dismissed so easily!” (quoted in Joan Chittister, The Liturgical Year [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009], p. 191).

    When the Church created a commemoration of “saints,” it’s just possible that it may have had something else in mind.  What is a “saint”?  Delve into the New Testament, and you will find Paul tossing that word about with gleeful abandon when he’s talking about – ordinary Christians (see, e.g., Romans 1:7; I Corinthians 1:2; Philippians 1:1).  “Called to be saints,” he says, by which he means each and every one who follows Christ.  We didn’t just up and decide one day to follow Christ – we were summoned by God to live into the new reality created by Christ’s life, death, and new raised life, and in that reality we are made holy – formed into a new people to exhibit to the world the new “way” of Christ.  Animated by the spirit of the crucified-and-risen Jesus, we now live toward the new social reality of God (which some call the “kingdom of God”).  Made “holy” by the living spirit of Jesus – we did not achieve such on our own; indeed, we cannot do so by our own devices.  “Sainthood” is not an accomplishment, but rather a new orientation which grips us like a powerful magnetic field.  You could say that “saints” are ordinary people grabbed by God, ignited and now burning with a holy passion to become everything God calls them to be – and to reorient human society itself to God’s New Way of love.

    It wasn’t too long before such a single-minded devotion to God’s New Way got them in trouble.  Those who refused to renounce their faith were executed, of course, in spectacular ways.  But each went to her or his death intending for it to be a public witness serving notice that God’s Way was the best way for all.  The very word, “martyr,” means “witness” – as in, my death = my final act of evangelism.  Each congregation kept a roll of those who died, on “diptychs,” two tablets hooked together by leather straps, which they pulled out and read aloud every week at Eucharist.  By so doing, they declared:  “these ‘witnesses’ shared their Lord’s witness to the love of God.  We will remember them and their witness.”  As in, “gone but (most definitely) not forgotten.”  Their “witness” lives on to inspire our own.  In fact, a martyr’s death was called their “baptism by blood,” and viewed as their “birthday” into life eternal.  And so the Church began to remember those whose passion for Jesus and his way led them to join the Passion of Jesus.  By reading aloud the roll of  martyred “saints,” the Church offered role-models to show the rest of us how it can be done.  As in, “now go and do likewise, in your own idiom.”

    After a millennium, the Church formalized this remembering of saints, and then adding a second date for the rest of us second-stringers whose lamps of faith may not have burned quite as brightly.  Despite the inherent hierarchy of “All Saints” followed by “All Souls,” one fact remains:  you will not be forgotten.  Just as God has promised, “I will not forget you.  See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah  49:15-16), so the community of God will not forget those in Christ who have died.  The “communion of saints” extends beyond death; those who have died are “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).  They are kept safe.

    And so we gratefully remember those who have died, who are gone from our midst, all “saints” and all “souls,” in the confidence that the final breach of death will be healed.  We remember them in hope, as gifts from God.  “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1).  The presence of the “saints” challenges us to imitate them.  On one level, of course, they offer their holy flame to ignite our own.  We can dare to believe ever more deeply in the Way of Christ, because they did.  Every year’s commemoration spurs us onward in our own faith-journey.  More deeply, though, their faith confronts us with a stark choice.  We, too, are “called to be saints” in this time and place.  As they did in their day, we today can resist the cascading “society of spectacle” (Guy Debord) in which the media seduce us into an attention span of a strobe light; we can protest the reduction of human beings made in the image of God to either commodities or enemies.  Their faith in God propels us toward our own faith that the future is not closed, but rather open in God: un-finished, un-managed, possessed of multiple options.  We declare with them that every last human being is precious, a beloved child of God’s heart.  And that the love of God has already occupied Wall Street, and every other street.  We remember in order to rehearse for our own faith-filled activity.  The pressure of their bestowal urges us to labor toward making real in this world the New Reality of God proclaimed by Christ.  With poet Nelly Sachs, they announce:  “Someone/ will take the ball/ from the hands that play/ the game of terror” (O the Chimneys [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967], p. 153).  And they are looking at us.  We honor them best not by warming our hands in the fire of their faith, but by burning afresh.  The memory of their contribution presses us to ask ourselves, “what is my own contribution?”

    It is, after all, the same God we worship, the same Christ we follow, with the same agenda for all of Creation.  The annual commemoration of “All Saints,” of “All Souls,” can be, of course, a time to dust off those museum-piece relics another year.  We’ve heard those sermons time and again.

    But . . . what if, to swipe an image from Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić (Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, [N.p.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003], p. 220.), what if those “saints”  we remember are “not a message in a bottle, but bait,” dangled by the hand of God?