On All Saints’ Day it seems appropriate to ask what a saint really is? A variety of off the cuff answers might include: someone in an old picture with a gold circle round her head; someone who lived a long time ago who was impossibly and therefore suspiciously good; someone who might not have existed but about whom lots of stories have been made up; someone liked by the last Pope John Paul II having canonised more saints than any of his predecessors; though perhaps he did so in order to provide the faithful with some more recent and therefore more real models of holiness.
But what is a real saint? More helpful answers might define a saint as an exemplary Christian, a mirror of Christ, a creator of a new style of Christianity. But these definitions depend on our having a deep understanding of Christ and Christianity. So perhaps a more open definition might suggest that a saint discovers what is true and real through love.
One of the characteristics of being human is an admittedly rather shaky ability to distinguish between things that are phoney, fake, unreal, illusory and deceptive on the one hand and on the other things that are genuine, honest, truthful, authentic and real. Of course it takes time, experience, patience and attentiveness to develop this ability. Assumptions, prejudices, instant reactions, past mistakes and wounds of the heart can all get in the way of our seeing the truth.
You see someone in jeans and a tea shirt running down the road, clutching a hand bag and glancing over his shoulder. You conclude that he’s a thief being chased; or possibly George Michael running away from a reporter. A few moments later he arrives at a bus stop and all out of breath hands the bag to an old lady just as her bus pulls in. We didn’t consider the possibility of an alternative scenario, a bigger picture. And the main reason for that is a failure in love.
For love above all is what we need to be open to the truth. Of course love is another of those big words that is hard to define another of those words the understanding of which we have to grow into. The understanding of love is derived from examples examples like the beatitudes. The people who are truly loving are un-self-regarding or meek, passionate for the good, merciful, undivided in heart, reconcilers, capable of bearing their own and others’ grief and aware of their own limitations. All these things make up love.
But above all love tries to look at the world and love it because underneath all the damage we have done to it and to ourselves, it is God’s world and it is good. The saint sees the world as loveable and so the saint gets on with loving it, you and herself. Only in this way do we find the truth of the world as God intended it.
I recently came across a translation of a poem written by a 20th c. German poet Erich Fried who’s buried in Kensall Green. It’s the sort of poem the saints would understand:
it is nonsense, says reason
it is what it is, says love
it is unhappiness, says reflection
it is nothing but pain, says fear
it is hopeless, says insight
it is what it is, says love
it is ridiculous, says pride
it is frivolous, says caution
it is impossible, says experience
it is what it is, says love
Stephen Tucker