All Saints

A teacher was asking her RE class, "What would I need, in order to be a saint?"  After a pause, a hand went up towards the back of the class.  "Yes, Emily?"  "Please, miss, you'd have to be dead!"

Maybe not the answer expected, but true all the same, I suppose - at least, of those famous men and women whom we remember with the title of 'saint'.  We have looked at their lives as a whole, and decided that there is some quality of holiness, of faithful perseverance, of kindness or courage, that we wish to honour and to remember.  Or, because there needs to be order and consistency in this sort of thing, "The Church" in some shape or form has made such an assessment.

In reality, people have feet of clay, and the airwaves are littered with stories of famous people, celebrities and high achievers, who have fallen from their pedestals like Humpty Dumpty from his wall, and with the same disastrous consequences.  But saints are (or were, I suppose) also real people, and you only have to look at the Gospels to see that even the first apostles, the founders of our Church, were anything but infallible. You might even gain the impression that, as they followed Jesus along the lanes of Galilee and Judaea, they were wrong nearly all the time.

So what is special about the Saints, capital 'S'?  Leaving aside the test of miracles performed and prayers answered, I suppose that, fallible and clay-footed though they undoubtedly were, these are people who provide us with an example of faith worth following.  When Jesus calls us, as he does, we can look at these people and see what it might mean to say 'Yes'. Saints challenge us and inspire us, and I like to think of them also as accompanying us - firstly, as pilgrims who have walked already the roads we now travel, and secondly, surely, as those who now pray for us around the thrones of heaven.

They are like stained glass windows, aglow with a light that is not their own, but which in each saintly life story shines in its own special and distinct way.  Saints are not superhuman, and indeed as we read their stories we become aware of men and women who were deeply aware of their own sin and frailty. They made the effort, though, to give themselves to their Lord, so that, like Paul, they could say that "my life is no longer my own;  it is Christ, living in me."  In reality, though, we give away our life in order to receive it back again, for it is as me, myself, that I can be of service to Christ and allow his love to infect and infuse me.

So what do we need, me and you, to be saints? Maybe our saintly status can't be confirmed until we are dead - but already we are saints,or that is the opportunity set before us: to open ourselves, to make ourselves translucent, transparent to the light of the love of Christ, and within that love and through its recreating power, to become our true selves, what we were made and destined to be. Here and now.