Reading: 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18 (Ostensibly Paul summing up his life as a servant of God and the community of faith -- in spite of all his faults and mis-directions along the way, he has fought the good fight, finished the race, kept the faith ... thanks to the grace of God shown to us all in Christ.)
Why do
people become saints?
The
question appeared at the head of a little essay in The Spectator this past
Wednesday. It was on the ‘Our Pulse’
page – a weekly feature on local schools.
This week’s page featured news, artwork, and short essays from St.
Teresa of Calcutta Elementary School, and with the recent canonization of
Mother Teresa – on Sept 4 of this year, making her now Saint Teresa of
Calcutta, the students’ submissions naturally focused on Saint Teresa and what
she means to them.
“Why
Do People Become Saints?” was written by a girl in grade six named Chloe, and
the title made me wonder why people do become saints. What motivates them? Do they set out to become saints? Is that a life-goal for some people?
I
imagine if it is, those persons really aren’t and never really will be
saints. To want to be a saint, at least
in the way we imagine them – as objects of veneration and worship, super-human perfect
figures we admire and look up to, maybe even pray to because they are closer to
God than we are – to want to be that seems more self-serving, self-aggrandizing
and self-directed, more ego-driven than real sainthood probably is about.
But as
I read Chloe’s little essay, I realized what she was really asking is more “why
do some people get recognized as saints?” or “how does a person become saintly in their life?”
And I
wonder if the answer – at least one part of the answer, is that we let
ourselves love – let ourselves fall in love with some part of God’s good will
and God’s good purpose in our time.
Clarissa
Estes, who wrote the book Women Who Run
with Wolves, says this, for instance, about creativity and what makes a
creative person. Creativity, she says, “is
not virtuosity [or a certain kind of skill], although
that is very fine in itself. It is [rather]
the love of something, having so much love for something – whether a person, a
word, an image, an idea, the land or humanity – that all that can be done with
the overflow is to create. It is not [even]
a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will; one solely must.”
And I wonder if it’s the same with saints and saintliness – that
it’s a matter of loving, and having so much love for some part of what God is
doing in the world, that you cannot but become part of it, cannot but start to
act and live in harmony with what is being done for good in some little part of
the world.
Isn’t that, for instance, how Saint Teresa started when she was
still just Mother Teresa? She was
teaching in a traditional missionary school, and from inside the walls of the
compound she saw the poor who were uncared for and dying outside the walls, who
would never come in, and her heart was broken by what she saw. Her heart opened in love to those she saw,
and she so fell in love with the dream of reaching out to them, of going out to
them, and of holding them in her own arms, that she could not help but actually
do it.
And she didn’t need to be perfect to do it. She didn’t need to be “like this” with God –
didn’t have to have everything right – either before she started or by the time
she finished.
In my worship blog this week I made mention of two on-line
articles that I finally got around to reading – that I stopped avoiding, that reveal
some of Saint Teresa’s imperfection and flawed humanity. Behind the veil of saintly devotion and perfection
that the Church has helped create around Teresa, she was as deeply flawed as
any human being, and her ministry and organization of the Sisters of Charity,
were also equally human, probably corrupted, and at times sadly mis-guided.
“Wretched soul that I am. I
want to do what is right, but I cannot do it.
I do not do the good I want to do, and the evil I do not want is what I
end up doing. Who will rescue me from my
frustration and imperfection?”
Teresa didn’t write these words but she might have echoed them,
had she seen aspects of her life as others are able to. It was Paul who wrote these words, over two
millennia ago, at the very beginning of the Christian movement and mission as
he looked as honestly as he could at his own life as a leader of the church. Not much has changed in two thousand years,
when it comes to the weakness and imperfection of our saints.
And that’s the point – the real miracle of sainthood – that God is
able to take ordinary, even extraordinarily flawed human beings, and turn them
to some good and holy use. The miracle
of sainthood – like the miracle of incarnation or trans-substantiation, is that
even ordinary, imperfect, struggling human beings like us can find ourselves, part
of something bigger and holier than we can ever understand – when we let
ourselves, when we let the miracle happen.
“Let the love of God enfold you” are the words written on our
narthex wall that we see every Sunday morning as we come to worship. They are comforting words, inviting us into a
safe place of healing and care. They are
also challenging words, encouraging us to let ourselves become so folded into the
love of God for all the world, that we let our own lives be part of how that
love is lived out and made known in the world.
And we need not do it perfectly, or even all our lives. Maybe this is what helped Paul through his own
times of doubt and self-criticism, because for a lot of his life he was kind of
on the wrong road, or at least going in a wrong direction. He was religious enough – very religious, in
fact, but he was trying to be a saint, trying to be a hero for God and for good
in the world, and it was so self-centred, so self-directed and so self-serving,
that he couldn’t help but get it wrong.
Until God stopped him short.
He was knocked off his high horse.
Was forced to see how blind he really was. He had to ask for help. And from that moment on, he was changed. He was no less flawed, no less imperfect, no
less human than before, but now he was going in a better direction. He was letting himself be guided. Instead of living out his own religious agenda
and his own need to be on top, he was happy to be able to act out God’s love
for others – to be a tool, even a rusty and broken one, in the toolbox of God’s
kingdom of love.
There’s a song called “Utilities” by a group from Winnipeg called
The Weakerthans that may just be a prayer for that kind of miracle and that
kind of gift in our lives:
“Got this feeling that today doesn’t like me. The air tastes like flowers and paint. There’s a sink full of bottles and cutlery,
and the car’s got a list of complaints.
I just wish I were a toothbrush or a solder gun. Make me something somebody can use….Got a
face full of ominous weather. Smirking
smile of a high pressure ridge. Got more
faults than the state of California, and the heart is a badly built
bridge. Seems the most I have to offer
doesn’t offer much. Make it something
somebody can use. Make this something
somebody can use.”
This week a woman named Kasia Brieggmann-Samson was interviewed on
the radio. Four years ago her husband
Tom was killed while he was biking to work when he was struck by a van and then
by a second motor vehicle. It was a
terrible accident and a horrific loss.
Four years later she still feels broken and lonely, also deeply anxious
any time she’s out on the street. And in
that brokenness – out of that brokenness, she joined a group called Families
and Friends for Safer Streets. She
joined for support – not to be and to feel alone, and now that she is there she
is doing what she can as part of that group to help change for the better the
way things work on the street, and how life goes for others in the city.
“Seems the most I have to offer doesn’t offer much. But make it something somebody can use.” For the past few years, for the present
moment, and probably for a few years more, Kasia is letting some deep part of
her heart and some current need of the world to come together, and because of
that no matter how jagged or hurtful or broken her little pebble may be, it’s
making holy ripples in the pond of the world.
