How do you become a saint?
2 November 2008
How do you become a saint? The Dean of Westminster Abbey was once asked on the radio "What do you have to do to be buried in Westminster Abbey?" His answer was "You have to die."
To be a saint I don't think you even have to die, but certainly in the Roman Catholic church you have to die and then perform two miracles. Doing it in the wrong order doesn't count, which is why some of the popular "saints" have to wait a bit. In the Church of England, the criteria are vaguer, but the process is more open. You have to get the liturgical committee to propose to the General Synod to put you in the calendar at the beginning of the prayer book. Also I note that, unlike in the Roman Catholic church that ran up against this difficulty in the case of Simone Weil, you don't even have to be "one of us". The most recent person there is Archbishop Oscar Romero who was murdered in El Salvador in 1980. Also Cardinal Newman has made it to the Anglican list, but not yet to the Roman Catholic one. So clearly one way to Anglican sanctity is to leave in your lifetime
Another traditional sufficient, if not necessary,sign of sainthood was that the person’s body was incorruptible. According to Wikipedia, “if a body remains incorruptible after death, this is generally seen to be a sign that the individual is a saint, although not every saint is expected to have an incorruptible corpse”. There are many saints who, traditionally, had incorruptible bodies in this way, from St Alphege to St Thorlac of Iceland (obviously his body did better than the banks of his successors) to the Blessed John XXIII (though he was embalmed in an airtight coffin). In the case of Cardinal Newman, the miracle is perhaps the reverse. You will probably know that, according to his wishes, Newman was buried with his dear friend Fr Ambrose St John. As part of the process leading towards, it is hoped, his beatification and canonisation, it was planned to remove his remains to a grand tomb in Birmingham Oratory, a controversial matter in view of Newman’s wishes. But when the grave was opened last month, it was found that he’d been buried in damp ground in a wooden coffin. So Fr Newman and Fr St John have decomposed together, and nothing was left of Newman but some brass handles and a brass nameplate and a brass engraving of a cardinal’s hat. Relics but no body. Whether the total decomposition of the body was a miracle, I don’t know, but it’s certainly saved a great deal of embarrassment.
What are saints supposed to tell us? Are they just examples of how to live a good life or to have a good death? Many "saints" might not stand up to close examination. Perhaps that is asking too much of them anyway. One book I read put it this way: "the saints are the real men and women of every age in whose lives we can glimpse heaven in our midst."
In our reading from the Gospel, Jesus went up into the mountain, like Moses before him. Then, in characteristic rabbinic style, he sat down with his disciples around him and the crowds almost eavesdropping on the conversation. The verses we heard, the beatitudes, each have two parts. In the first, we hear something about what life is like nowadays; in the second we have the promise of a radical reversal in the kingdom of God. A glimpse of what might be, and indeed what actually is. The Beatitudes are saints in words, ways we can glimpse heaven in our own midst.
Blessed are meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted, and so on.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. . One writer says "the poor in spirit are not the faint-hearted but those whose economic poverty made them dependent solely on God." In most ancient cultures, it was the rich that were thought to be blessed, not the poor. Prosperity was a sign of God's favour. And not just, I suspect, ancient cultures. But some of the psalms see things differently. "Lo, the poor crieth, and the Lord heareth him, and saveth him out of all his troubles." In this tradition within Jewish piety, being "poor" became a religious, not just a social term, and the same phrase "poor in spirit" occurs in the Dead Sea Scrolls.. The spirit of poverty implied an attitude of simplicity and the willingness and necessity of trusting only in God. The New English Bible translates this, with typical lack of poetry, as "How blest are those who know their need of God."
A saint is one who shows us a glimpse of heaven by showing forth that poverty of spirit. A saint is one who is meek, who mourns for their own sadness and for that of the whole world, who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, who is merciful, who is pure in heart, who is a peacemaker.
Jesus calls all of us to sanctity, because aspiring to these qualities is something all of us can do. A first step is to try to avoid the negative. When we are arrogant, or uncaring, or not bothered about righteousness, or sowing dissent rather than peace, it's pretty obvious how far we are from the kingdom of heaven.
Most of the beatitudes are in the third person, blessed are THEY who mourn, etc. But after 8 of these, Jesus imagines we have got the point. We are lulled into the security of sainthood. Indeed the sense of security is heightened when number 8 repeats part of number 1:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And the implication is that the kingdom of heaven also belongs to all the other “blesseds” too. This is certainly something we want to buy into. But Jesus is honest with us. He doesn’t just tell us what is good about the product, but we have the health warning as well, what Bonhoeffer understood when he wrote about the cost of discipleship.
"Blessed are YOU when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account." Not THEY but YOU. Not IF but WHEN. Even in our indifferent culture being one of the saints, living a life of holiness, is likely to lead to trouble, as it did for Oscar Romero who spoke up for the poor and oppressed. The trouble can come from unexpected quarters, even, as we see today and have seen throughout the ages, and of course Jesus continually found himself, from other "religious" people, even within our own community. Indeed many people in the Church of England, on both sides of various arguments, feel this to be so. And whatever happens in England, there are many places in the world today where professing Christianity can get you cast out, imprisoned, raped and killed.
Against this background, there's something rather special about celebrating All Saints. That's All saints, not just the ones we forgot about the rest of the year. Saints are not just those whose bodies are incorruptible, who have been recognised by the Roman Catholic church or the General Synod of the Church of England, but, in the words of our reading from Revelation, the great multitude from every tribe and people and language, crying out together “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb.”
November is a sombre month in which we commemorate All Souls, and Remembrance Sunday, and the days get shorter and winter and death draw in. But we can draw around us the protection and the prayers of all the saints, living and dead. Their lives show forth that we can indeed glimpse heaven in the midst of our dark world. We know we are not alone in trying to listen to God's call to the life of faith and holiness. But we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, real people through whom we can get a glimpse of heaven in our midst.
The Reverend Professor Bernard Silverman Master of St Peter's College