THE SUNDAY AFTER ALL SAINTS

(Sermon at the 10 am Mass)

Towards the end of his classic work The Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix describes a tomb of one of the saints of God. He writes:

           “There is a little ill-spelled ill-carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor:— ‘Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much’. Not another word [Dix continues] is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in that vanished world of Christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive after sixteen centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbors that saw all one’s life were sure that one must have found Jerusalem!”

Here Dix sums up a large part of the meaning of our annual commemoration of All Saints. Throughout the Christian year, we remember the great heroes and heroines of the faith: apostles, evangelists, missionaries, martyrs, confessors, virgins, visionaries, widows, monks, nuns, kings, queens, and founders of religious orders and houses of charity. Many of them are well known to history, and we can read not only their biographies but also their own words in their own writings.

But then, on All Saints Day, we pause to remember also the countless forgotten holy ones of God, most of whom don’t even have an epitaph. As the collect puts it, today we celebrate all God’s righteous servants, known to us, and unknown.

Sometimes I wonder, though, what Dix’s blessed Chione was really like. Even though she prayed much, I like to imagine Chione having her idiosyncratic quirks and crotchets, her annoying habits, and perhaps even her moral weaknesses. Maybe her family, friends, and neighbors found aspects of her personality irritating. But still, they were sure that she’d found Jerusalem. She’d prayed much, and that was enough.

A common misconception is that a saint is one who has displayed complete moral rectitude and spiritual perfection in this earthly life. After a number of years of cycling through the Church’s calendar of saints at our weekday Masses, one builds up a degree of familiarity with their lives and personalities, and one discovers that many of them were far from perfect.

Consider Saint Nicholas, whose life provides the inspiration for the popular figure of Santa Claus. Nicholas was a bishop in Asia Minor, what is today Turkey, in the fourth century. He was by all accounts a good and kind bishop, who took special care of the poor in his diocese, and was known for giving gifts to their children. He suffered imprisonment and torture in the persecution under the emperor Diocletian, but was released upon the accession of the emperor Constantine.

When Nicholas attended the Council of Nicaea in 325, he became so enraged at the heretical teaching of the presbyter Arius, that he walked across the room and punched Arius in the face – an act for which his fellow bishops suspended him from the exercise of his episcopal ministry for a time, and for which he repented, even though in the end the Council confirmed his view and condemned Arius’s teaching as heresy.

Nicholas was a real saint, but his besetting sin – at least according to this legend – was anger. He was not perfect. The same can be said for many of the saints we commemorate throughout the church year. They were not perfect. They had their share of besetting sins and moral shortcomings.

Why then do we honor them as saints? The designation saint suggests not that they were morally or spiritually perfect, but rather that God’s grace was visibly at work in their lives. After they died, people remembered them as those who had made God’s presence known and manifest to all those around them. I suspect we’ve all encountered at least one or two such people. When we spent time in their presence, we found our own faith strengthened. They made us feel good about being Christians. Their example made us more hopeful about the potentialities of our own life in Christ.

The good news is that sainthood is not some ideal of perfection attainable only by an elite few. We don’t have to be perfect in this life to be saints. When we get to heaven, we shall be made perfect. Otherwise we could not bear the pure brightness of divine glory. But in this life, we’re still in via, on the way, works in progress. Nonetheless, as baptized members of the Body of Christ we’re all called to be saints. That’s why the Mass of All Saints Day is one of the occasions during the Church Year when we renew our baptismal vows.

In his autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton recounts a conversation with a Catholic friend in the months following his conversion and baptism. As they were walking together, his friend turned and demanded to know:

               

           “What do you want to be, anyway?’

                  I could not say [Merton continues], “I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews … or Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman English … so I put the thing on the spiritual plane where it belonged, and said: “I don’t know. I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.”

                  “What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?”

                  The explanation I gave was lame enough, and expressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it all. [He] did not accept it.

                  “What you should say”—he told me—“What you should say, is that you want to be a saint.”

                  A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said: “How do you expect me to become a saint?”

                  “By wanting to,” [he said] simply.

                  “I can’t be a saint.” I said. “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility that which makes [us] say that [we] cannot do the things that [we] must do, cannot reach the level that [we] must reach …

                  But he said, “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what he created you to be, if you will consent to let him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”

What Merton makes clear in this little dialogue is that the first step to becoming a saint is simply consenting to let God make us into the people he has created us to be. The tragedy is that so many people fail to become saints because, deep down, that’s not what they really want.

 Every year, on All Saints Day, I insist on having the hymn “I sing a song of the saints of God.” Behind the surface appearance of a slightly silly children’s Sunday School ditty the lyrics express precisely the same profound spiritual point that Merton makes in The Seven Story Mountain. For the sake of our eternal salvation we need above all to make these words our own: “the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”