saints

 

I wonder what comes to your mind if I say the word ‘saints’?

I wonder who comes to your mind when I say the word ‘saints’?

If you live in the north of England, the ‘northern saints’ might come to mind—Columba, Aidan, Hilda, Bede.

Perhaps you have a favourite saint, or even a patron saint. Perhaps, when you lose your keys, you enlist the help of St Anthony. Perhaps you wear a St Christopher medallion, petitioning for aid in all your travels.

Perhaps you think of Mother Teresa. Or, this week of all weeks, the incomparable Dolly Parton, patron saint of Appalachia.

Before they were called Christians—itself a term coined by outsiders, and converting a sense of pity: these ‘little Christs,’ these fools who model their lives after a man executed by the State—Christians referred to themselves as saints.

The root of the word is ‘difference’ and the idea is that they were different from those around them, in that they had been given a different purpose by God. Becoming saints was something done to them—all of them—by God.

Sometimes, in letters written to churches, saint Paul describes his recipients as ‘saints, called to be saints.’ That is, something already done to them, and something ongoing happening within them.

Because the difference was also about a different way of seeing—an awareness of the presence of God.

Somewhere along the line, we lost confidence in this. We redesignated sainthood as something possessed by a special few. People whose lives were (at least, as they were retold, in carefully edited highlights) especially inspirational. People who never lost their temper with those around about them. People whose faces shone. The incomparable Dolly. Not the likes of us. ‘I’m no saint,’ we are quick to say, ‘I’m just trying to do my best.’

But being a saint has little to do with what we do at all. It is about something done to us; and about learning to recognise that.

If you have ever been aware of God’s forgiveness, when you have said or thought or done what you ought not to have done, or failed to do what you ought to have done, then you are a saint.

If you have ever been aware of God’s grace—the sheer gift of life—perhaps standing on your doorstep watching the sunrise or sunset, and had your breath taken away—then you are a saint.

If you have ever been aware of the comfort of the Holy Spirit in bereavement, or of the peace of the Holy Spirit when everything around you is in free fall, then you are a saint.

If you have lost sight of these things, then you are still a saint. You’ve just forgotten who you are. Perhaps, had your precious identity stolen from you by a thief in the night. Jesus comes to claim it back for you.

If you have never been aware of the presence of God, then you are not—yet—a saint; but there is still time for that to change.

Jesus comes to lift us out of our grave—not only beyond this life, but in it—and set us on our feet, with a different purpose and to grow into a different way of seeing, of seeing something of the presence of God in every person who has ever lived.

Yes, Dolly was and is a saint. But many of the 80-somethings and 90-somethings I know have been shaped by a lifetime of being told that ‘saints’ does not include the likes of them. And, almost certainly, that it would be presumptuous to believe any such thing about yourself.

It isn’t presumptuous. It is the defining mark of belonging to God. It is what God calls you, and what the church once knew to be true of you.

May the saints who have died rest in peace and rise in glory.

May the saints who are yet here on earth do likewise.