The Episcopal Church publishes a reference tool called A Great Cloud of Witnesses (a title that recalls a particularly evocative verse taken from Hebrews 12:1) which provides a “calendar of optional commemorations” intended to suggest “the breadth of witness to the transforming work of God in Christ Jesus.” The church has no formal criteria for defining saints but has an interest in illuminating “different facets of Christian maturity to spur us on to an adult faith.”
When I first came into the Episcopal Church in 1980, I found this volume particularly interesting because I came out of a non-liturgical tradition in which the whole idea of sainthood was regarded with suspicion. Thus, for example, if as a seminarian I witnessed the rite of Holy Baptism in an Anglo-Catholic parish in which the saints are featured in a formal way (sometimes accompanied by chanting the individual names as a procession approaches the font), I continued to find the whole experience rather foreign though of more than passing interest. It was something which Baptists (my original church home) regarded as not only inappropriate but useless as a component of worship. Despite this built-in bias, the more I examined the “cloud of witnesses” text in greater depth (reading many of the nearly 300 individual entries in their entirety), the more useful it all began to appear, and I developed the habit of selecting examples from the book for praying the daily office and even for private reflection.
All of this suggests to me that there can be a range of personal reactions to the idea of a roster of saints of the church depending upon how we were introduced to the idea in childhood. However, as is suggested in a recent reflection (Jim O’Grady[1], “Saints,” September 15, 2024) in the Sunday NYT magazine, even non-practicing Catholics (or Episcopalians) can come to “appreciate the lessons the saints can teach.”
Of course, this particular take on sainthood assumes that the word applies to people who have “rejected a life of maximal self-interest in favor of radical service, someone whose commitment to the rigors and contradictions of doing good in the world” can show us how to live in it. This is a definition that can embrace a world of readers, those of faith or those who have concluded they don’t require a specific belief system that resembles Christian practice. It is, I would suggest, rather hard to argue with “radical service” and “doing good in the world.”
Robert Ellsberg in The Saints’ Guide to Happiness has argued that we should set aside the ordinary view of the saints as “flawless people from long ago who performed miracles” or sought martyrdom. For example, if we consider that there are 10,000 recognized saints in the Catholic Church, it makes sense that this enormous crowd includes not only “irreproachable clerics and martyrs” but also everyday barbers, dentists, and pharmacists. All of them were human beings like us who suffered in the same way we do but “did not wallow in misery.” What distinguishes this group from the bulk of us is “exuberance and compassion, inner balance and commitment to a meaningful vocation.” He cites as the perfect example St. Teresa of Avila in the 16th century who was certainly of this world but was also an “exuberant mystic.” She was so aware of the power of God’s love that she would “command bystanders to sit on her and hold her down” out of fear that she was about to be lifted up off the ground. In fact, though, she was “shrewdly histrionic and ready for a fight, with enough power that even the pope didn’t want to mess with her.”
Another good example is Brother Lawrence, a French peasant who signed up for army duty to escape poverty and found that he had wound up in the middle of a major war. As a result, he was captured and suffered an injury that left him disabled for the rest of his life. He later found safety and salvation of a sort at a monastery in Paris “in a community replete with learned souls.” Because of his reputation and temperament, he was assigned to menial work in the kitchen and in repairing sandals. He was remarkable in that he appears to have turned his life of toil into “a long, unbroken prayer in honor of God’s world.” He believed we can do little things in life in thanksgiving for His gifts to us which can deepen our own understanding of labor. Ellsberg concludes by saying that Brother Lawrence’s example reminds him not to feel so anxious when the world seems overwhelming and offers relief from constant worrying over deadlines or money. Following the example of Lawrence, Ellsberg writes that “there is no work – as long as it is not harmful or dishonest – that cannot be hallowed, that cannot serve as a path to happiness.” I find that kind of thinking calming and reassuring when the alternative is to continue pursuing anxiety and worry at the expense of a healthy assessment of the reality of the world we occupy (Lawrence, in performing the simplest task, was “flooded with the truth” that in a little while a bare tree along his pathway would come to bear fruit). Perhaps that is the very definition of the term “adult faith” as one among many other “facets of Christian maturity” as referenced in my opening paragraph.
Greg+
[1] The writer is a podcaster and host and has co-authored a book on Daniel and Philip Berrigan.