This is not, as the list before it was, a list of criteria that gives us that snapshot of Christian maturity; this is very much a process for selecting historical personages for commemoration. Thus, these lists don’t function in the same way, either rhetorically or catechetically.
St. Stephen and the Incarnation’s Misa Alegría congregation was just six months old when I suggested we might celebrate Día de los Muertos – the Day of the Dead – as a way to invite our English-speaking brothers and sisters to join us around the table. After all, most North Americans have some inkling of this strange and colorful holiday that is the Mexican commemoration of All Souls’ Day.
I believe in good people. I also believe in saints. 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.
The Wesley brothers, John Mason Neale, and Li Tim Oi (with her bishop Ronald Hall) broke church law because, facing a pastoral or mission dilemma, they saw no other good choice. They acted on their best, faithful interpretation of the work they believed the Spirit called them to. Their acts were public but they weren’t aiming to make a public statement or even to change the institution (though they did).
The New York Times did a brief photo story on the first eight saints, Sojourner Truth, Bartolome de las Casas, Miriam (Moses’ sister), Origen, Malcolm X, Elizabeth I, Iqbal Masih and Teresa of Avila. People outside church circles are interested in who the church holds up as our guides and examples, and when the list includes unexpected people, the interest grows.
One friend tried for several years to sell her house. Finally in desperation she buried Joseph, upside down as directed, and the house sold in a couple of weeks. You are supposed to dig him up and take him with you – but she could never find him again.
By Greg Jones The concept of God’s wisdom in late Jewish and early Christian Scripture is one with feminine overtones: the female name Sophia actually
We remember King as “moral conscience of his nation,” “teacher of Christ-like non-violence,” “preacher of Christ’s love for neighbor,” and “champion of oppressed humanity.” We dare not let our politicians tame his memory, as he becomes part of the pantheon of civil religion, invoked with ease by leaders who stand against nearly everything he stood for. As hypocrites do when we invoke God, we honor King with our lips but not with changed lives.
The story of St. Matthias’ election as an apostle was one of the biblical stories that intrigued me the most when I was a child. I often asked myself why Jesus had chosen Judas in first place, knowing that he would hurt him so much some years later. If he had called Matthias in the beginning, there would have been no betrayal.
Dreams are a form of chaos … and one would think that Joseph’s dream would reflect in some distorted and frightening way the chaos of his own life—a young woman pregnant, and not by him; the fear of public disgrace; a need to keep everything quiet; the urge to hide his shame in a darkened room, devising paltry mousetraps to ward off the Evil One. And yet, in the midst of chaos comes this startling dream.