Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud
of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin
which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the
race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and
perfecter of our faith. — Hebrews 12:1-2
I have spent a good deal of time on Sunday mornings
contemplating the stained glass windows of my parish church.
As in many another Catholic church, these windows present a
gallery of popular saints. They are a reminder that those who
gather to worship God in the name of Jesus are never alone.
There is a wider "communion of saints" that unites
believers across all boundaries of time and space; even
across such a boundary as divides this world from the next.
This communion with those who have "died in the
Lord" was a vivid reality to the early Christians. They
liked to gather at the graves of the martyrs to remember
their heroic witness and to commemorate the anniversaries of
their deaths. It was this devotion that gave rise to the cult
of the saints.
There was a time when martyrdom was virtually the defining
characteristic of sainthood. The men and women who died in
the Roman arena had offered a total witness to Christ, not
only imitating his death on the cross but proclaiming by this
sacrifice their faith in the resurrection. Their blood, as
Tertullian said, was the seed of the church.
But as the era of martyrdom passed, so it became clear
that there were other ways of bearing witness. There were
those whose prayer and self-sacrifice were so intense as to
constitute a kind of living martydom. Such holy men and women
did more than set an edifying example. They assumed an aura
of transcendence and sacred power. This power even extended
beyond their deaths—hence, the miracles associated with
their relics and with the invocation of their names.
Increasingly this miraculous power itself became a certifying
mark of sanctity. But as this became so, the saints served
less as ideals of Christian discipleship and more as miracle
workers or heavenly patrons. The saints, it seemed, were more
to be venerated than imitated.
In the windows in my parish church, I see many of the
greatest of the canonized saints: Teresa of Avila, Jerome,
Augustine, Catherine of Siena, Clare and Francis of
Assisi....I wonder if they are widely noticed, or whether
these windows are not simply part of the
"religious" architecture, easily taken for granted.
For many Christians, the saints are little more than
legendary figures—"perfect
Christians"—who bear little relevance to their own
daily struggles and concerns. It does not help that so many
of these saints seem to be clothed in religious garb. What do
such "special" people have to do with the
challenges of ordinary life in "the world"?
IN THE MINDS OF many people today, the legends of the
saints reflect an all-too stereotypical pattern: They spent
their lives in prayer and performing good works. Some of them
were martyrs. Others founded religious orders. Others had
visions or performed miracles....All this may be true, but it
tends to elide a good many issues.
While there are recognizable patterns in the lives of the
saints, each one was in his or her own way an
"original." They achieved their holiness with the
material at hand—material, in many cases, of apparently
dubious quality. Many of them struggled hard to invent a new
style of Christian witness in response to the needs of their
time—not infrequently needs obvious to themselves alone.
Even among the canonized saints, it is striking how many of
them paid dearly for the originality of their vision. Along
with the many certified martyrs, there are countless stories
of those who suffered persecution or humiliation—not
from ostensible "enemies of the faith" but at the
hands of their fellow Christians. All this is easily
forgotten.
The great Christian apologist Pascal, writing in the 17th
century, observed how easily veneration of the saints can
pass over into a pious trivialization of their challenge. We
tend to regard the saints as "crowned with glory and
years, judged almost divine before our time." That is
how it seems to us, with the passage of time.
But at the time when he was being persecuted, this
great saint was just a man called Athanasius; and St. Teresa
just a woman. Elias was a man, subject to like passion as we
are, as St. Peter says, to rid Christians of the false idea
which makes us reject the example of the saints as bearing no
relation to our state. "They were saints," we say.
"It is not the same for us."
This is one reason, apart from humility, that holy people
are loath to be called saints. As Dorothy Day, founder of the
Catholic Worker movement, used to say, "Don’t call
me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that
easily." By putting saints on a pedestal, we imply that
their example poses no personal challenge. But when this
happens, the Christian imagination is immeasurably weakened.
Describing the function of the saints, Karl Rahner wrote,
"They are the initiators and the creative models of the
holiness which happens to be right for, and is the task of,
their particular age. They create a new style; they prove
that a certain form of life and activity is a really genuine
possibility; they show experimentally that one can be a
Christian even in ‘this’ way; they make such a type
of person believable as a Christian type." The saints
are those who, in some partial way, embody—literally
incarnate—the challenge of faith in their time and
place. In doing so, they open a path that others might
follow.
THE CHURCH MAKES NO pretense that its list or
"canon" exhausts the number of actual saints. There
are countless men and women whose holiness is recognized by
God alone. Along with the "official saints," they
are commemorated by the church on November 1, the feast of
All Saints. The process of "making saints" has
itself undergone considerable evolution in the past 2,000
years. In the early centuries, canonization was largely a
matter of popular acclamation; it was the people of a local
church who proclaimed that a saint had been in their midst.
Over time this was replaced by an intensely organized and
bureaucratic process centralized in the Vatican.
Today, before any persons can be declared
"blessed" (beatified) or officially canonized as
saints, their lives and writings must be examined for
evidence of heroic virture and doctrinal orthodoxy; finally,
they must be credited with the performance of miracles. While
this elaborate process underlines the solemnity of the
church’s declarations, it tends to influence the
selection of candidates for canonization. If the canon of
saints—especially in modern times—is overly
populated by members of religious orders, this reflects in
large part the fact that such congregations have had the time
and resources to invest in the lengthy process of
canonization. The official process has been notoriously weak
on promoting examples of lay holiness. It has tended to
recognize conventional forms of piety and to avoid the
prophetic figures, those who brought discomfort to the
religious authorities of their time. Finally, the weight
attached to miracles tends to reinforce that sense of
"otherness" in the saints that only undermines the
power of their example: "They were saints; it is not the
same for us."
Nevertheless, most people, I am convinced, possess an
instinctive ability to recognize heroic sanctity when they
see it. Quite apart from any official process, they recognize
that there are certain people whose lives, in some
extraordinary fashion, proclaim the mystery of the gospel. Of
those included in the book All Saints, some are
persons who might well be candidates for official
canonization: Archbishop Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton, or
Dorothy Day are a few examples from recent times. But my list
includes others, such as the martyred theologian Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, or Albert Schweitzer, or the Methodist John
Wesley who, as non-Catholics, would never be eligible for
formal canonization. It is not hard to argue that such lives
present a more vivid inspiration for contemporary Christians
than the memory of many long-ago saints.
Then there are non-Christians like Gandhi, or the Jewish
prophet Abraham Heschel, or even non-religious moralists like
Albert Camus, whose impact on Christian spirituality and
ethics has, arguably, equaled that of any orthodox Christian
of our time. By including them in an expanded roster of
"saints," my intent is not to dragoon them
unwillingly into the Christian fold but to point in the
direction of the God who (according to St. John) is
"larger than our hearts."
The more troubling question, for some readers, will be the
inclusion of men and women who do not represent any common
standard of holiness. Insofar as this poses a problem, it may
arise from our tendency to equate holiness with moral
perfection. Such an equation—it is worth noting—was
unfamiliar to the authors of scripture. Most of the biblical
heroes—including Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and
David—are in many ways deeply flawed. The same must be
said for Christ’s closest disciples.
And so the procession of figures in this book is a
somewhat mixed and motley crew. Doubtless St. Augustine or
St. Dominic would be alarmed to find themselves linked with
the likes of Vincent van Gogh or Leo Tolstoy. (The obverse is
just as likely.) In such a work, the selection itself
inevitably makes a certain statement. How to choose? Here I
have been guided by an insight of Simone Weil: "Today it
is not nearly enough merely to be a saint; but we must have
the saintliness demanded by the present moment...." I
believe that many traditional saints, precisely insofar as
they responded to the demands of their own moment, remain a
precious resource. But what are the needs of the present
moment?
PREVIOUS MODELS OF sanctity tended to emphasize a
world-denying asceticism; today we need examples of
discipline and self-denial in service to the world and in
solidarity with a suffering humanity. There are countless
saints who exhibited the virtue of charity; we need saints
who combine charity with a prophetic thirst for justice. Much
of Christian history has been written with male hands; we
need to recall the example and the gifts of holy and
prophetic women. The traditional list of saints has been
dominated by the clergy and those in religious life; we need
to give special attention to the witness of lay
people—those whose vocation is to infuse the
"world" with the spirit of the gospel. Church
history tends to be written in Western terms; in this era of
what Karl Rahner called the "world church," we need
to remember the struggle of saints who translated the gospel
into the idiom of local, non-Western cultures, who engaged
the wisdom of other religious paths, and who tried to
understand their faith in terms of new intellectual and
cultural horizons.
We need examples of holiness beyond the cloister: saints
immersed in the worlds of art, literature, scholarship, in
political struggle, and in everyday life. We need prophets
who challenge the church as well as the world to better
reflect the justice and mercy of God. We need the witness of
the martyrs, ancient and new, who have laid down their lives
for their faith and for their neighbors. We must attend the
vision of the mystics, who see through the shade of
everydayness and so remind us of the God who is ever-greater
than our theologies or our imaginations.
Are there saints who speak to all these concerns? Perhaps
a few. But probably the challenge is to draw on the partial
witness of many holy companions for our journey, a journey
that begins where each of us stands.
We are formed by what we admire. But it is possible to
cultivate one’s taste in this regard as in any other
pursuit. It is important to learn how to recognize what is
good, to train our ears to discern the truth, to pay honor to
what is truly honorable, to choose a moral standard that lies
beyond our easy grasp. It is especially important to convey
such lessons to our children, who are otherwise too easily
beguiled by our culture to admire what is merely glib or
successful, to honor power, superficial beauty, and the
illusion of celebrity.
How are we to learn these things? Did anyone ever become
better from reading a handbook on ethics? Yet most of us, at
one time or another, have felt our hearts respond to an
example of courage, goodness, or spiritual nobility, that
inspired us to a higher path. It was thus for the saints
themselves. One of the recurring motifs in their stories is
the importance of an encounter with another
saint—sometimes in person, but often through reading a
story or hearing a legend. I can truthfully say of my own
life that I have learned far less about the gospel from
studying theology than I have from the lives of holy people.
In part this reflects the narrative structure of the
Christian gospel. The truths of Christianity are verified in
living witness rather than in logical syllogisms.
But the saints do more than offer an edifying example.
There is indeed an aura of transcendence and sacred power
that surrounds their lives. This has little to do with the
display of miracles, in the traditional sense. It has more to
do with a quality of mystery that is only reinforced by their
human idiosyncrasies. Like the figures in the stained glass
windows, they are illuminated by a source beyond themselves.
Thus, they help to awaken us to the realization, if we allow
it, that our own lives are illuminated by the same source. As
Cardinal Suhard observed, to be a saint means "to live
in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if
God did not exist."
IT IS EASIER TO explain the logic for combining
traditional and unconventional "saints" in this
work than it is to explain what all these lives have in
common. Readers may discern their own patterns. But I have
been struck by the uncompromising character of their
commitment, by their willingness to sacrifice everything for
the sake of their vocation. Sometimes what now makes them
seem heroic or admirable made them, in the eyes of their
contemporaries, rather difficult to tolerate. This too must
be recognized. Holiness is not the same as
"niceness" or even "goodness" in the
usual sense.
No, the saints are not perfect humans. But in their own
individual fashion they became authentic human beings,
endowed with the capacity to awaken that vocation in others.
ROBERT ELLSBERG is senior editor at Orbis Books in
Maryknoll, New York, and the author of the forthcoming book,
All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses
for Our Time, from which this article is excerpted. Copyright
©1997 by Robert Ellsberg. Used with permission of The Crossroad
Publishing Co., New York.
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