There are two dangers that are commonly encountered in our thinking about today’s feast, All Saints Day.
The first is that we think of the Communion of Saints (as we call it in the Creed) as an exclusive club for the church’s superstars. Rather like when we flick through the celebrities in Hello! magazine, we may find them impressive and in various ways attractive personalities, but they’re not really from our world. And since we don’t very much share the Roman Catholic tradition of asking saints to pray for us, they become people with whom we have little real connection – not much more than inspirational historical figures to be studied like Alexander the Great or Churchill.
The second danger is that we simply conflate All Saints Day with tomorrow’s feast, All Souls Day, and see this as a celebration of the fact that good, faithful people who are now dead have not been fully lost to us, but are held in the heart of God for our full reunion in a currently unimaginable future of the kind we heard about in our reading from the book of Revelation. Of course, All Saints Day is partly a celebration of that. But so too is every Eucharist. Every Eucharist celebrates the resurrection of Christ, prefigured in the raising of Lazarus, and through which God has given eternal life to each one of us. That is at the heart of the Christian gospel. So what is special and particular about today?
The answer lies in the origin of the word “saint” which derives from the Latin ‘Sanctus’ meaning “holy”. Saints are holy men and women – women and men who have revealed in the character of their lives something of the holiness of God. And what I think we really need to celebrate on All Saints Day is not merely that certain people have done this, but that it is possible for this to happen at all.
Let’s unpack that a bit. Many forms of religion throughout history, indeed many heretical branches of the Christian faith, have held that the holiness of God cannot possibly be made manifest within the physical, material world in which we live. Holiness has to do with the spiritual things of God which are antithetical to our fallen physical state. Groups such as the Manichaeans in the early centuries after Christ and the Cathars in the Middle Ages believed that they must deny the physical world, even the physicality of their own bodies if they might in some way aspire to attaining a spiritual life with God when they died.
This is what we call a dualist worldview that sees the holiness of God as something entirely other to our day-to-day lives. And one sees this dualism recurring time and again in the life of the church, usually combined with a denial of the divinity of Christ. How could God possibly take on anything as fleshy and physical as a human body? And regrettably these instincts are traceable in a lot of theological thought today. One might argue that the church’s current difficulties around gender and sexuality are not unrelated to these kinds of instincts.
But more than that, the dualist position, which says that the holiness of God is not present in our world of sense-experience, has perhaps increasingly over recent centuries become our society’s default position. That’s been shaped more by rationalist, scientific ideas than by religious ones. As scientific theory since the Enlightenment sought to offer an account of the world as a mechanistic system, claiming not to need to resort to a creating or sustaining God, what once had seemed to be God’s mysterious, magical creation in which the Spirit was moving now seemed to be a disenchanted planet to be measured, observed, and increasingly, as the industrial revolution kicked in, a resource to be exploited for the furthering of mankind’s ends.
Current scientific theory presents a very different view to that kind of closed system, one I believe more favourable to the theological viewpoint. But even in the mid-19th century there was another way of looking at things. I’ve been reminded of that this last week as I’ve been on retreat in the beautiful Clwyd Valley of North Wales, staying in the Jesuit house where the great poet (and former resident of Reddington Road) Gerard Manley Hopkins spent several years. Reflecting on the beauty of the nature around him and lamenting the industrial plundering of the valleys of South Wales for their natural resources, Hopkins saw the holiness of God as very much present in the physical world. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” begins one of Hopkins’ most famous poems. At mass at St Beuno’s College, Hopkins would have sung every day the words from Isaiah’s vision in the temple that we will sing at this Eucharist: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory”. And Hopkins believed that. He saw a distinctive patterning in the natural world which he called “inscape” and an energy that sustains all life which he called in “instress”, both of which he saw as rooted in God and giving nature the ability to show forth God’s glory and holiness.
But as is so often the case, although Hopkins confidently sees the holiness of God in the natural world around him, when it comes to his own everyday life, we find a very different story. Hopkins did not feel holy and did not believe that his body revealed the holiness of God. He suffered acutely from a sense of failure both in his pastoral and educational roles as a Jesuit priest, but more particularly in reconciling his physical, homosexual desires with his faith. We read very tellingly in his notes, “Let all consider this: we are our own tormentors”.
There are all kinds of ways each one of us can believe that we are unholy, that we are of no use to God: we are bad at prayer, we come to church for the wrong reasons, we’re too attracted by other ways of life to take the gospel really seriously. There are any number of reasons why we adopt a dualist position in our own life and faith. Holiness is in a church building, holiness is in a spiritual elite, holiness is in fine music, holiness is in the wafer that I put in my mouth on a Sunday morning. But holiness isn’t in me. Certainly not in the state I’m in at the moment anyway.
Given how Hopkins felt about himself, it’s all the more surprising that over 50 years after he wrote his poems in Wales it was while reading about Hopkins’ life and work that a rather unlikely postgraduate student at Columbia University in New York began a very radical rethinking of the meaning of holiness in his own life. Thomas Merton had left Cambridge University a few years earlier in disgrace after his drinking and womanising led to him fathering a child with one of his college’s cleaners. That would still be pretty shocking today but this was the 1930s! Merton had done a lot of things in his life to be ashamed of – a lot of unholy things – but he soon joined a Trappist monastery in Kentucky where he wrote these words:
“For me to be a saint means to be myself… therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and discovering my true self.”
Thomas Merton took Hopkins’ logic of the all pervasive holiness of God – the logic of Christ’s incarnation – right into the heart of the human self. To be a saint is not to be heroic or unusual. Saintliness is to be found in our very human ordinariness. But let’s be clear, Merton isn’t implying cheap sainthood here. He’s not simply wanting to put the stamp of holiness on our lives whatever state they may currently be in. Merton talks about the saintliness of “being yourself” in terms of “discovering our true selves”. And that requires the stripping away of the false self – the person we present to the world, the self that we think will be pleasing to others: attractive, confident, successful, composed. Merton wrote:
“Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”
We are holy people. We are saints. But not, most likely, in the person we present to the world, but in the person we are before God. The way of holiness consists, not in great spiritual enterprises to make us worthy or huge alterations to who we are, but simply in discovering who we are and striving to do nothing more than become that person. Our Gospel reading today contains the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept”. In my experience, nothing cuts through our pretentions and falsehood to our true selves more powerfully than tears. Tears are holy, because they reveal us as we really are, vulnerable and mortal, but full of love – the love of our loving Creator.
So this is what we celebrate this All Saints Day: that we are not dualists, that the holiness of God fills all things and the world in which we live is not flat and mechanical but glorious and sacramental. But much more than that, we who inhabit that holy world are holy people. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins we are, of course, filled with self doubt and like Thomas Merton many of us have good cause for that! But as we strip away the layers of illusion and fantasy that make up the self we present to the world, we too reveal our ordinary holiness. We too were made for sainthood.
So as we hear the choir sing this morning “Holy, holy, holy, heaven and Earth are full of your glory”, let us allow ourselves to be included in that holiness. And maybe sometimes that will cause us to shed a holy tear.