Forging new paths: the heterogeneity of the Saints of God
All Saints' Day, Friday 1st November, 2002
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Despite the fact that the way classic Christian artists depict groups of saints makes them look a remarkably harmonious and homgenous lot – doubtless for the sake of the unity of their compositions – we could hardly imagine a less uniform or more extraordinary group than the range of people whom Christians have designated as saints if we tried. Neither the gaunt, doom laden figure of John the Baptist with his odd dress code and natural diet, nor the Syrian St Ephraem, with his preaching of an angry Jesus who never smiled and frequently wept, sounds particularly balanced, let alone an ideal counsellor for the timid or depressed. Joan of Arc certainly provided effective leadership that inspired a range of her contemporaries – from ordinary foot soldiers to sophisticated courtiers – but this is hardly an average teenage girl, and there may have been something odd about one of her hormones. There are people who are virtually opposites: the great linguist, St Jerome, a man of both breath-taking scholarship and, at the same time, of spiteful vindictiveness in his private correspondence, and the French priest John Baptise Vianney, who couldn't pass his exams, but who had extraordinary perception of a subliminal kind into what was going on in the penitents who came to him, and didn't have a malicious bone in his body. And there is the extraordinary character, Mamas of Morphou, the Greek island saint and patron of tax evaders, who went to face Venetian bureaucrats in Nicosia riding on a lion. In their variety and oddity, saints are much better described by the title of a novel many would recall from the 1960s, They're a Weird Mob, than by the harmonising vision of painters.
Anglicanism, for much of its time in English history a religion that praised law and order, needs to reflect on how few of the saints have a record for being docile and law abiding. It is not just a matter of refusing to abide by the imperial law of Rome – without some defiance of that, there would be no continuing church. Perhaps Anglicanism needs to think seriously about encouraging some harder edged criticism of the state, and there are those who believe right now that this response is appropriate in connection with the current legislation in respect to asylum seekers. Anglo-Catholics need to recall that what they now take for granted was partly made possible for them in England when six priests suffered gaol sentences, ranging from a few weeks to over a year in length, between 1876 and 1883, because they defied the Public Worship Regulation Act, which made the performance of a number of normal Catholic ceremonies in Anglican churches a breach of civil law – what some regard as the last religious persecution in England. Law breakers have been our saints and makers.
For some time we have been reminded by social commentators, counsellors and psychologists of the importance of role models, often in the context of explaining various kinds of unsatisfactory behaviour in adult life as a consequence of an absence of suitable models in formative years. Parents and other providers of such models are castigated for failing to perform their role efficiently. In trying to form succeeding generations of people into the holy people of God, in one sense, we can at least say that the church has not failed to offer models – according to the kind of theorists I have already mentioned, it is possibly starting off in the right direction. Also, like may parents in traditional family units, it has often presented the models in a far from credible way. Yet despite all kinds of awkwardness in presenting them, successive generations have been challenged. Many of us have been stirred by examples from among those who have in some way moved towards God ahead of us. Sometimes we have been recipients of wise teaching from within the community of faith about how we can treat some of the saints as models; and sometimes it has been because of a blessed, if unintentional, failure in the teaching method that we have missed out on becoming clone-like reproductions of some of the less appropriate features. I certainly would avoid those earnest souls who don't show any signs of encouraging some sense of joyousness, trust and confidence in life, but who see the calling to be part of God's people only in terms of negatives and denials.
This extraordinary company points us to a long-term future as God's redeemed people: a future caught up permanently in a clear and uninterrupted vision of God's presence in another world, a parallel reality to this one. But in their great diversity over a period of two thousand years, they invite us to a calling which involves taking quite different paths, as people identify the presence of God in radically different and changing circumstances, and seek to respond to that presence. We have to respond differently now, and make choices appropriate for us. We have a different awareness to most generations before us of our closeness across the whole world, as we speak of the global village. We have a depth of awareness of the delicate balance between ourselves and the environment around us that they did not have. We have new possibilities for sharing, or being short sighted and irresponsible, across whole cultures and international groupings in ways unforseen in the past. These issues alone, as well as many others, mean that we have to apply physical and mental effort, and offer our minds and wills to find new ways of expressing our calling to be God's people, and forge some paths that will be new and different from those taken by those before us. But they, no less than we, were challenged in a similar way, though by different specific circumstances. That they now rejoice in having attained that goal which is held out to all of us, encourages us to confidence as we too pursue the same quest, ultimately undeterred by false starts, obstacles, and dead ends.
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