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On the Feast of All Saints

by The Rev. Karl Stevens

I was in Middle School the first and only time that I dressed up as a saint. Our social studies teacher had asked us to present a brief report on a person of historical import, and I had chosen John Wesley. There I stood, in my father’s church robes, pretending to be the founder of Methodism. Not that Wesley would have thought of himself as a saint. Not that I thought of him as a saint at the time. Saints were not a part of the Methodist church that I was brought up in. They are part of the Episcopal church that I now serve.

A decade after my Middle School impersonation of Wesley, I read about the Bollandists in one of Robertson Davies’s novels. The Bollandists are an order of Jesuits who have studied hagiography since the 17th century. They’ve collected the lives of the saints, also known as the vitae, into a book of many volumes that is called the Acta Sanctorum. When I first encountered them in Davies’s book, my curiosity was stirred, and I began seeking out and reading the lives of the saints. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. As a young man I had studied Chinese and Japanese religions, and had shamelessly romanticized Buddhism and Taoism. It wasn’t until I met some Buddhist monks that I realized that these faiths weren’t comprised of the exotic other, but of people who were fully and messily human, just like me. But I was still seeking the strange, the exotic, the romantic in my practice of faith, and I began to locate it in my own Christianity. Saints vitae fed my hunger for religious weirdness in a way that nothing else had.

Christina the Astonishing would roll herself into a ball like a hedgehog and lived in trees! St. Brigid was transported by angels who traveled through time, so that she left fifth century Ireland and arrived in first century Judea, just in time to be Christ’s nursemaid! St. Leo the great rode out alone to meet Attila and his hordes, and somehow convinced the huns to turn around and spare Italy from their rampages! Saints Mary and Martha set aside their differences to tame a dragon in southern France! Stories abounded, and the fact that many of them were miracle stories, and demanded a lot from a late 20th century Christian who was immersed in scientific rationalism, only added to their allure.

I thought a lot about saints in those years, and I still do today. Many of them weren’t people who I think I would like very much if I were to meet them in my day to day life. Saint Jerome was notably acerbic, even mean. St. Bernard of Clairvaux could both preach beautiful sermons on the Song of Songs and stump for the second crusade. Saint Martin brought desert asceticism to Europe, but he also had a bad habit of chopping down the sacred trees of his pagan neighbors, not something that some who is interested in interfaith relations can be that proud of. I decided that different people are considered saints for different virtues. Some are scholars, like Jerome, so they don’t have to be lovely self-giving martyrs who die in service to the poor and sickly. Some are mystics, like Teresa of Avila (my favorite), St. John of the Cross, and, yes, Bernard, so they’re not much good to the institution of the church (although Bernard sure tried to be). Some are missionaries who lived exemplary lives and took care of their little communities with great love and grace, but were still part of the colonizing impulses of European nations. It seems that among the saints, there is no one who is totally saintly. And among the Episcopal saints, there are some, like John Wesley, who might quibble with being called a saint at all. A holy man, surely, but not someone who thought of himself as a window to God.

In the Episcopal tradition, saints are not objects of worship, or, to be more fair towards Catholic practice, not the subjects of veneration. They do not intercede with God on our behalf, since we tend to believe that God is perfectly willing to listen to our direct complaints and praises. Probably the best way to think about saints is as exempla, meaning that they are examples that we might follow as we try to follow Christ. The world changes and people must find new ways to be disciples in new contexts. The saints are those believers who have found useful ways to be Christian in the decades in which they lived. They remind us that not all Christians are the same. That there was a way to be a Christian in the early church that was different from the way of being Christian in the Middle Ages, and today. Yet, although they are caught in time, there is also something universal about them. Through their faith, they touch the eternal, and some aspect of the eternal abides with them. As it does with you and me.

Phyllis Tickle wrote that “What is eternal in us is that which studies to be holy, as the early apostles told us. But the holy can all too easily be masked by the falsely holy, by the passing dogma, or by the culturally embedded doctrine. It is time, and the fruit borne in time, that clarify and certify the holy.” In other words, we call someone a saint when we see that their actions and their love transcend the time they lived in. Through this transcendence, they speak to us now, and provide good examples for our own attempts to be holy.