Graham Greene used not to be at all popular in Brighton. His novel Brighton Rock was felt to have given the town a bad name. Now I believe Greene devotees can actually go on a literary tour of all the places in Brighton mentioned in the novel. I suspect that there aren’t any similar tours associated with his most famous novel The Power and the Glory because that is set in the southern states of Mexico. It concerns a so-called whisky priest – an alcoholic catholic priest hunted down during an anti-clerical purge by a left wing government. In the end the priest gets captured because, although he has been a failure in so many ways, he can’t quite rid himself of the bad conscience which forces him to go on doing what priests are supposed to do.
As he wakes up in a crowded cell on the morning of his execution these thoughts occur to him;
‘He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty handed … It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self restraint, a little courage. He felt like someone who had missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted – to be a saint.’
How do we react to that? The month of November begins with the celebration of All Saints but as Anglicans we are not supposed to be very interested in saints. In the New Testament St Paul addresses all the Christians in the churches he writes to as saints – even the Corinthians whom he then proceeds to castigate for particularly unsaintly behaviour. Paul calls all Christians ‘saints’ because they are set apart as God’s people through baptism. Though the early and medieval periods of the church created a lot of special saints, when Cranmer wrote the Book of Common Prayer he kept only the biblical saints – the apostles and evangelists – because he believed that the medieval church had gone overboard in its veneration of saints and their relics. Because of this huge additional cast the central significance of Jesus had been obscured – or so Cranmer thought. The one additional feast he held on to was the feast of All Saints to remind us of the mystical body of all faithful people of which we too are members. And he kept the traditional gospel for the day – the beatitudes as a guide to saintliness.
But what sort of saints? Meekness for example is not the kind of virtue most people would want to own up to. In fact in our modern translation ‘How blessed are the meek,’ becomes ‘How blessed are those of a gentle spirit,’ o make it more user friendly. What is really being talked about here is the kind of humility which claims nothing for itself. The playwright Tom Stoppard put it rather well when he said ‘When I’ve achieved something I don’t feel clever I feel lucky.’ We can see even more clearly what is meant, from the answering phrase – the meek will inherit the earth. Only those who don’t think of anything as their right or reward could be trusted with the sort of power that inheriting the earth might imply.
Similarly only those who know how to be merciful are themselves able to receive mercy. Or again you can only really be satisfied if you’ve really wanted something – hungered and thirsted after righteousness as the fourth beatitude says. And then there’s the pure in heart – not an easy one for an age obsessed by sex. What does it mean to be pure in heart? It has I think something to do with singleness of vision, a freedom from distraction. So many things clutter up our minds demanding attention. ‘Seeing God’ is about seeing the one thing needful in any given situation and not being distracted by anxiety or self concern. It is in that way that the peacemakers act as the sons and daughters of God – knowing and wanting God with undivided hearts, what they want in the world is the building up of God’s peace through reconciliation and justice.
The more we look at the beatitudes the more we can see how they are all interconnected. The blessed, which is another way of referring to saints, have undivided hearts, hungering after what is right, being merciful, building peace, not expecting anything for themselves. But why are they also described as poor in spirit and in mourning? Poverty is something you can’t help being aware of most of the time – you know that you are in need – being poor in spirit means knowing how much you lack spiritually – how bereft you are of meekness, mercy, purity, righteousness and so on. Mourning means any kind of bereavement – a sense of loss or absence. And yet, says the gospel, to be like that – to know what you lack and to be grieved by it – brings you very close to the kingdom.
Which brings us back to the whisky priest waiting to be executed. Here is a man who was mourning his failure in the belief that he was going to God empty handed. And yet reading his whole story you become aware of a kind of saintliness of which he himself is completely unaware. The power and the glory is there in the midst of his muddle and failure and mixed motives and lost opportunities. His life has had an effect for good which he cannot see.
Which leaves us with a very paradoxical truth about being human. A lot of the time we may regret not being as clever or as attractive or as influential as we would like, but such regret gets us nowhere. Wishing I was more like someone else doesn’t make me more like him or her. Regretting that you are not a saint on the other hand leads to real saintliness, only you will never know it. The power and the glory of God works anonymously and in secret, when you know that in the end just one thing counts – to be a saint.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker