By Derek Olsen
I believe in good people. Matter of fact, I believe there are quite a lot of them scattered throughout history in various times and various places. We can learn a lot from them about what it means to enact respect and dignity for others, to right the wrongs of society, and to bring people together despite their differences and grievances. Yes, I do indeed believe in good people and in following their examples.
I also believe in saints.
But I don’t believe that the first category is the same as the second.
That is to say, I believe that good people should be both honored and imitated by all—but saints are something different; saints are something more peculiar and more mysterious. I would say that most saints also fall into the first category, being a certain subset of “good people,” but to see them only as good people is a mistake.
My friend Donald Schell has written two (I, II) articles about how the people in the icon on the wall of the parish he founded got to be there. As I read his words I found myself alternately nodding and shaking my head. Yes—and no. But it moved me to think and to consider the difference between the good and the saints. From where I sit, there are two central factors in what it means to be a saint that make them fundamentally different from those who are good. First, the saints force us to consider what it means to live as a result of resurrection power.
Bloggers and Saints
When I need it—and it’s not that uncommon—I ask my wife and my parents to pray for me. People at church—I ask them to pray for me too. Why? ‘Cause we’re a faith community, a spiritual family who are bound together and care for one another and one of the ways that we do that is to pray.
I sometimes ask my bloggy friends to pray for me as well. Now there are several levels of relationships that I share with folks who read my blog. Some are friends who now live in different places. We’ve laughed, cried, and quaffed beer together. Some are lurkers who leave nary a trace and who, in praying for me, do me a good that I will never know and form part of the community that I will never know. But many are people that I have grown to know. I’ve never met them in the flesh, but I know them through their writings. In their writings I see them thinking through their struggles, their doubts, their joys—enacting the never-ending work of embodying our Baptism in the world, wherever that may be and in whatever circumstances we are found. I ask them to pray for me and I do the same for them. They too are part of my faith community, my spiritual family, and have a very real and tangible effect on my life—spiritually and otherwise.
Likewise, when I ask St Benedict, St Bede and St Cuthbert to pray for me, I approach them in just the same way. Call it the blogger model of the communion of the saints. I’ve never met them in the flesh, but I know them through their writings. In their writings I see them thinking through their struggles, their doubts, their joys—enacting the never-ending work of embodying our Baptism in the world, wherever that may be and in whatever circumstances we are found. I ask them to pray for me and I do the same for them. They too are part of my faith community, my spiritual family and have a very real and tangible effect on my life—spiritually and otherwise. (And there are a host of lurkers here as well!)
What’s that? But they’re dead, you say? But—that’s precisely the point, isn’t it. As Christians—particularly as Episcopalians who ground our theology in Baptism—we say that we believe that they live with the very same life that we do. Through our Baptism we have been incorporated into the life of God. The resurrection has rent the veil between life and death making it—while still very real, and shocking, and painful—different. Our common life flows through Christ, He who reminded us that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God of the living and not of the dead. And therefore if God is the God of the living then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, yea though they have died yet they live—and so do Benedict and Bede and Cuthbert, and so do we.
The communion of the saints that we refer to in our creeds is the admission of a mystery. That Christ binds us in Baptism with not only himself but into all who are bound into him. He is the vine and we are the branches and the branches entwine and entangle as we weave and grow and reach for the sun of righteousness and the source of our life. Each time I ask for intercessions from my extended spiritual family it reminds me of barriers broken down, of lives and loves united in Christ.
The Holiness that Shocks
The second aspect of the saints comes from reflection on Donald’s comment about “common law” saints. In the early days, of course, all of the saints were common law. Central control of the canonization process didn’t start until the twelfth century; the idea that only Rome could declare a saint comes from a papal bull issued in 1634. In early medieval England the situation was quite a bit different. Saints were declared sometimes by bishops but more often by local acclamation. The chief criterion, however was not whether the deceased were a “good” person. The question was not one of goodness but of holiness.
Now, when we think of holiness we tend to associate it with holier-than-thou-ness, of a self-righteous piety. That’s not what we’re talking about here. The holiness that received attention in the early medieval world was knock-your-socks-off downright weird holiness. As good Protestant sorts we don’t like to talk about this kind of thing, of course. The problem, however, is that the Bible doesn’t seem to have any problem with it at all. There are passages that we like to ignore or skip over like Acts 5:15 where the people put the sick in the streets so that Peter’s shadow would heal them as he passed by or like Acts 19:12 where the people took away cloths that had touched Paul with which they healed the sick and cast out demons. For these folks, holiness wasn’t about pious moralism—holiness was a tangible power.
Lantfred was a German monk who came to Winchester in the closing years of the 10th century. In his “Life of St Swithun” (yes, there Is a real St Swithun…) ,he describes the sick and injured who used to come to the saint’s shrine, sometimes so many that the monks would have to clear a path for the clergy to move through the nave. But it wasn’t just people coming. Lantfred recounts the issues of monastic disobedience that would arise whenever the bishop left town; they flat refused to get up and sing a solemn Te Deum at each miraculous healing by St Swithun—because they were getting roused out of bed four or five times every night! For them, the saints were the people through whom the eschatological power of God broke loose upon the world. Through their embodiment of Scripture and cultivation of holiness, power flowed from them to literally change the world through God’s love.
As modern people this sort of talk tends to make us uncomfortable. It safer to go and find good people to emulate. It’s safer to celebrate people who founded institutions and organizations we approve of. Surely these earlier stories were somehow just mistaken—does the power of God really work like that in the world? Surely they were just primitive—or perhaps deluded.
Or perhaps we’re not paying attention.
And perhaps ironically—this is another way in which Donald and I agree. When we ponder how change happens in the world, how injustices get reversed, how righteousness takes root in systems of injustice, perhaps seeing it as the result of collective political action simply isn’t enough. Perhaps we need to start looking more for the eschatological power of God—and asking for it.
In short, I’ve got a different understanding of who and what a saint is than what is depicted on St Gregory of Nyssa’s wall. There’s no doubt in my mind that all of the people there are good people and, as good people, eminently worthy of emulation. But that’s not a saint. The saints are our elder siblings in the faith, those who share with us the burdens and blessings of the baptized life and who point in a myriad ways to consciously living Christ in the world. More than that they are those through whom God has touched the world. Some in small ways, others in larger, but all in ways that proclaim the “already” of God’s reign and the defeat of sin, death, and the devil.
Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University. He has taught seminary courses in biblical studies, preaching, and liturgics; he currently resides in Maryland. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X/Y dad appear at Haligweorc.