Wanted: certain kinds of saints
French philosopher Simone Weil once commented that
it’s not enough today to be merely a saint. Rather, “we must have the
saintliness demanded by the present moment”.
She’s surely right on that second premise: we need
saints whose virtues speak to the times.
What kind of saint is needed today? Someone who can
show us how we can actually forgive an enemy? Someone who can help us come
together across the bitter divide within our communities and churches? Someone
who can show us how to reach out to the poor? Someone who can teach us how to
actually pray? Someone who can show us how to find Sabbath rest amid the
bombardment of 10,000 television channels, a million blogs and a billion
tweets? Someone who can show us how to sustain our childhood faith amid the
sophistication, complexity and agnosticism of our adult lives? Someone who,
like Jesus, can go into singles bars and not sin? Someone who radiates a
full-bodied humanity, even as he or she is, by faith, set apart? Someone who’s
a mystic, but with a robust sense of humour? Someone who can be both chaste and
healthily sexual at the same time? The list could go on. We’re in pioneer
territory. The saints of old didn’t face our issues. They had their own demons
to conquer and aren’t rolling over in their graves, shaking their fingers in
disgust at us. They know the struggle. They know that ours is new territory
with new demons to conquer and new virtues required. The saints of old remain,
of course, as essential templates of Christian discipleship, living gospels,
but they walked in different times.
So what kind of saints do we need today?
We need saints who can honour the goodness of the
world, even as they honour God. We need women and men who can show us how to
walk with a living faith inside a culture which believes that world here is
enough and that the issues of God and the next life are peripheral.
We need saints who can walk with a steady, adult
faith in the face of the world’s sophistication, its pathological restlessness,
its over-stimulated grandiosity, its numbing distractions and its overpowering
temptations. We need saints who can empathise with those who have drifted away
from the Church, even as they themselves, without compromise, hold their own
moral and religious ground.
We need young saints who can romantically reignite
the religious imagination of the world, as once did Francis and Clare. And we
need old saints who have run the gamut and can show us how to meet all the
challenges of today and yet retain our childhood faith.
Also, we need what the English theologian Sarah
Coakley calls “erotic saints”, women and men who can bring chastity and Eros
together in a way that speaks of the importance of both. We need saints who can
model for us the goodness of sexuality, who can delight in its human joys and
honour its God-given place within the spiritual journey, even as they never
denigrate it by setting it against spirituality or cheapen it by making it
simply another form of recreation.
Then too we need saints today who can, with
compassion, help us to see our blind complicity with systems of all kinds which
victimise the vulnerable in order to safeguard our own comfort, security and
historical privilege. We need saints who can speak prophetically for the poor,
for the environment, for women, for refugees, for those with inadequate access
to medical care and education, and for all who are stigmatised because of race,
colour or creed. We need lonely prophets who can stand as “unanimity minus
one”, and who can wage peace and who can point our eyes to a reality beyond our
own short-sightedness.
These saints need not be formally canonised. Their
lives need simply to be lamps for our eyes and leaven for our lives. I don’t
know who your present-day saints are, but I have found mine among a wide range
of persons old, young, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, liberal,
conservative, religious, lay, clerical, secular, faith-filled and agnostic.
Full disclosure: the names I mention here are not persons whose lives I know in
any detail. Mostly, I know what they’ve written, but their writings are a lamp
which lights my path.
Among those of my own generation I’m indebted to
are Raymond E Brown, Charles Taylor, Daniel Berrigan, Jean Vanier, Mary Jo
Leddy, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Keating, Jim Wallis, Richard Rohr, Elizabeth
Johnson, Parker Palmer, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wendy Wright, Gerhard Lohfink,
Kathleen Dowling Singh, Jim Forest, John Shea, James Hillman, Thomas Moore and
Marilynne Robinson.
Among the younger voices whose lives and writings
speak as well to a generation younger than mine, I would mention Shane
Claiborne, Rachel Held Evans, James Martin, Kerry Weber, Trevor Herriot, Macy
Halford, Robert Barron, Bryan Stevenson, Robert Ellsberg, Bieke Vandekerckhove
and Annie Riggs.
Maybe these aren’t your saints. Fair enough. Either
way, lean on whoever does help to light your path.
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