By Father Casey
In addition to being “candy hangover day” and “throw out the rotted jack-o’-lantern day,” today is also All Saints Day, one of the major feasts in the life of the Church. The word saint comes from the Latin sanctus and its Greek equivalent in the New Testament is the word hagios, or “holy.” So on this day each year, and by tradition also the subsequent Sunday, we honor the saints, all the holy ones who are gathered near to the presence of God.
We know some of the saints from history. These are the women and men whose lives were so virtuous and exemplary that the Church could recognize in them the holiness of God. They were like windows to the life of the Kingdom, or reflections of Christ that helped those around them glimpse his love. Many of us have favorite saints, people whose lives spark our imaginations and kindle our faith. I wonder who yours are?
It is our custom at Transfiguration to honor some of the lesser known saints in our weekday Eucharists. In this way, those who attend weekday Mass get to learn from the lives of people who were vessels of grace and lights of the world in their generation, but who may not be household names. For example, we know about saints like Mary, the mother of our Lord, or the apostles, or even Francis of Assisi. But there are so many others, several hundred in our calendar alone, who are far less known, but who, to use an expression we’ve played a lot with in recent weeks, sprinkled a lot of salt all around them.[1]
CS Lewis, whose feast is coming up in a few weeks on November 22, once wrote, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.” And the more I read of the lives of saints, the more I understand what he means. They do not all follow the same template, other than their commitment to Christ. They do not reach their virtue by following some formula, nor model it identically. Quite the opposite. They are both examples of righteousness, but Hildegard of Bingen is very different from Vida Dutton Scudder. Anyone who’s played Lent Madness knows all about the beautiful diversity of saints.
But they do have things in common, of course. To be Jesus’ disciple is to share the central aspect of your life with all other disciples, and following his way does summon certain things from us. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about one characteristic of saints in particular: courage. Saints are courageous. Of course I have in mind the faithful who bravely refused to recant their faith before the Romans, even when it meant martyrdom. Or saints who were courageous enough to sail for some distant land to spread the gospel. But the courage of saints is made manifest in many ways, and we shouldn’t think that the only way to become a saint is by doing something life-threatening.
Brave faith isn’t limited to the lions’ den, and you don’t have to live with lepers to be saintly. Much more often, we need the same courage modeled by the saints to do what is ours to do in the ordinary lives we lead. We need that same holy bravery to do the right thing with what is in front of us, which may very well seem incredibly hard at the time. Because when we turn the saints into Hollywood heroes, we flatten them into something unreal. They become monotonously alike, when they are actually so wonderfully different.
I’m thinking today about the lives of the saints, and in particular their courage, and how I need to be praying for it as we head into next week. We need that selfsame bravery to not succumb to anxiety, to resist lighting fires with our tongues, to hold fast to hope even when despair swirls, to keep on praying and loving our neighbor and putting our trust in God. Holding onto the ways of the Kingdom of God in an election season can take a saintly amount of courage, for sure.
So join us this weekend and help us praise God for the cloud of saintly witnesses. But don’t neglect to pray that the same grace that welled up in their courageously holy lives will well up in us, too.
Fr. Casey +
[1] Here is a link to the Episcopal Church’s “sanctoral calendar,” which is approved by General Convention and featured in a supplement to The Book of Common Prayer called Lesser Feasts and Fasts.