Charles Borromeo, Bishop of Milan, Willibrord, Pope Leo the Great, Martin of Tours, Albert the Great, Margaret of Scotland, Hugh of Lincoln, Hilda of Whitby, Edmund King and Martyr, Cecilia, Clement, and the apostle Andrew, are some of the very diverse characters we celebrate in November and who have come to be regarded as special examples of the work of God’s grace in our human nature and therefore part of the company of heaven. The saints are distinctive members of the blessed company of all faithful people. As Cervantes said, “Tell me what company thou keepest, and I’ll tell thee what thou art.” The fact that we want to keep company with the saints tells the world what we are. But what kind of company are the saints and therefore what do they tell the world about us?
One of my favourite paintings of heaven is to be found in a former Dominican friary in Florence, dedicated to Saint Mark. It is one of a whole series of frescoes painted by Fra Angelico. It shows the results of the final judgement. Down the centre of the painting there is a row of open graves; on the right is hell and on the left is heaven. Heaven is a garden in which a variety of angels are welcoming the new arrivals who are looking round as though rather puzzled to be finding themselves where they are. The angels also look slightly puzzled as though they hadn’t expected certain individuals to be there either. There’s a sort of “Good-heavens-fancy-seeing-you-here,” quality to the picture, which is entirely as it should be.
Opponents of Christianity have often accused us of inventing pie in the sky when you die. As one scientist said, “Probably no invention came more easily to man than heaven.” But such a notion is all wrong. If you think about it heaven would be impossible to invent on the scale with which the Church has described it. For the Church has down the ages peopled heaven with such an extraordinary crowd of saints that no human institution could possibly contain them all without breaking down in total confusion. If we were to invent a heaven, we would of course people it with those whom we admired, respected, and above all agreed with. Our heaven would never contain the possibility of being totally astonished by another person’s presence.
The beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel hint at something of this diversity. Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the rebels with a passion for justice, are hardly likely to be very meek, and probably don’t make very good peace makers. In human terms there may also be some tension between purity and mercy, for to be merciful you have to know your own need for mercy, your own potential for impurity. And yet all these virtues in tension are blessed. So if we find the Church on earth difficult to fit into, our fit in the Church in heaven is going to be even more surprising. The communion of saints will be a shock because sanctity is amazingly diverse and unpredictable.
So how does this kind of shocking goodness manifest itself in the Saints of all ages. That of course is going to be difficult to answer without simply giving a list of the qualities we admire. So perhaps a better way to approach the matter is through the sins of the saints. The more normal human response at being accused of sin is to protest our innocence, and run for cover. The saints on the other hand protest their guilt regularly, and humbly. A group of early monks in the Egyptian desert once came together to put on trial one of their brethren who had been caught in some wrong doing. The monks invited a wise and saintly old man to join them. He arrived carrying a leaking jug filled with water that trickled to the ground. When asked what on earth he was doing, he replied,” My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.” The other monks immediately forgave the monk who had sinned. The saints are always honest. They always find themselves out, long before anyone else does. They know themselves as sinners not because they are hung up on some kind of guilt neurosis but because they always have before them the ideal of goodness, the love of Christ which leads him to the cross. And before that ideal the saints will always know themselves to be falling short; but that is not a cause for depression or crippling guilt. Faced with the love of God in Christ the saints have no fear of admitting their sinfulness because they know the sole purpose of such love is to draw them to itself. Freely admitting their sinfulness, enables the Saints to open up a space in their lives for amazing grace to produce unexpected results .For what makes a saint in this life is not how good he or she is, but the way in which he or she allows God’s grace to work with his or her weaknesses, sins and failures. What makes a saint is not an absence of fear or guilt, of emotional scars and painful memories. What makes a saint is the acceptance of the painfulness and muddle of life so as to be compassionate with those in pain. In the companionship of woundedness the love of God can be made present. The saints are those who have come to terms with their humanity in a divine way, and so have learnt how to be unexpectedly good in a “well-I’ll- be-damned’ sort of way.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker