Oh When the Saints...

Since the earliest days of the Church, Christians have venerated those people who showed heroic devotion to the faith, to the truth, to the life and the way that Jesus taught and embodied.  Perhaps our very first hagiography, or saint-story, is told in chapters six and seven of the Acts of the Apostles where we read about Stephen, one of the first deacons and first martyrs for the faith.

Remembering and venerating the saints is an important part of many Christians' traditions and an important part of our spiritual growth.  The saints' lives are edifying - they show us how different people in different places and different times, sinners just like us, followed Christ and found themselves with Christ in everlasting glory.

Some, though, have argued that a cult of saints is unnecessary, perhaps even sacrilegious.  For these people, the only model is Jesus himself.  WWJD is their watchword.  Simply consider “what would Jesus do”, act accordingly, and all will be right in the world.  Of course, Jesus is the perfect model, and WWJD can certainly be a useful discipline.  But if we ignore the saints, or pretend that they are irrelevant, are we then to suppose that nobody, in the two thousand years since Christ walked this earth, has ever followed His way?  Would't it be the ultimate hubris to believe that we will be the first successful disciples, simply because we've adopted WWJD as our way of life?

We are mere mortals.  We discourage easily.  The saints offer us hope that even when we fail, even when we sin, the Spirit is stronger than us.  The Holy Spirit has worked through countless millions of people just like you and me, helping to bring God’s kingdom to light.  These people are part of the Church to this very day, part of the “communion of saints” that we proclaim in the Apostles' Creed.  And the Church has officially recognized some of these people as “big S” saints.  To ignore their stories, to ignore their friendship, is to walk Jesus’ way with legs shackled, arms tied to our side, and dark glasses clouding our sight.  I guess it’s possible to do this, but I’d rather not.

There are thousands of saints that the Church recognizes by name.  Of course, the Church doesn't “make” saints - only God can do that.  However, for the past thousand years or so, the Church has “canonized” certain people who it believes led holy and virtuous lives.  Before then, saints were declared by acclamation, generally by those people around whom the saint lived out his or her life here on earth.  Of course, these named saints are only a tiny fraction of those who presumably are in heaven.

The fascinating thing about saints is that they come from all walks of life and from all parts of the world.  There are saints from privileged backgrounds like St. Katherine Drexel and St. Thomas More, chancellor to King Henry VIII.  There are saints from very humble backgrounds like St. Isidore the Farmer and many of Jesus’ first disciples, poor fishermen from the dusty backwater of Galilee.  There are saints from Africa like St. Charles Lwanga and St. Augustine of Hippo, saints from North America like St. Kateri Tekakwitha and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, saints from South America like St. Rose of Lima and St. Martin de Porres, and saints from Asia like St. Paul Miki and St. Lorenzo Ruiz.

The thousands of saints all have their unique stories and there is bound to be a saint who experiences may match quite closely with your own.  And this leads us to a second benefit we gain from our veneration of the saints.  In addition to modelling Christian living for us, the saints are potential prayer partners in our times of need.  Again, some have claimed that Catholics, in praying to saints, are blaspheming God.  But we don’t pray to the saints in the sense that they are replacements for God, we pray with the saints just as we pray with our friends and our neighbors at Mass.  We pray with the saints just as St. Paul prayed for and with his disciples, and as he asked them to pray for and with him.

Some saints are patrons of certain causes, perhaps due to some characteristic in their own lives, the manner in which they died, some trouble they may have endured, or some feat they may have accomplished.  That patron saint may be a particularly apt prayer partner when faced with particular situations or challenges.

For example, St. Anthony of Padua was once teaching about the Psalms at a monastery.  Now, Anthony had a hand-copied Book of the Psalms that he used in his teaching.  Since Anthony lived in the early twelfth century, long before the printing press, books like this were very scarce and almost impossible to replace.  One of the monks in the monastery recognized the value in this book and stole it and ran off.  There was much consternation but Anthony seemed rather sanguine about the affair.  He simply prayed for the wayward monk.  Soon after, the monk came to his senses and returned to the monastery, restoring Anthony’s precious book to him and seeking his forgiveness.  Today, we call on St. Anthony to pray with us that we might find some lost object as dear to us as Anthony’s psalter was to him, or failing to find it, we might receive the grace to accept our loss as with St. Anthony's equanimity and love.

So where do we find out more about our friends, the saints?  Since each saint has a feast day (and each day has at least a few saints who share that day as their feast day), “saint-of-the-day” books are a natural.  Two favorites of mine are 365 Saints, by Woodeene Koenig-Bricker, and All Saints, by Robert Ellsberg.  

Ms. Koenig-Bricker’s book has just a paragraph or two on a particular saint each day, but also includes how that saint may relate to our lives today and a closing affirmation or prayer for the day tied in somehow to that day’s saint.  Mr. Ellsberg gives us a much more detailed story of a saint for each day, but no more than we can easily read in just a few minutes.  The twist is that his stories of the saints often cross-reference other saints in the book.  It's hard to just read about the saint for that day without jumping around in the book to read about the connection one saint may have had with another.   Both books contain mostly “big S” saints, some more well known than others.  However, both also contain some stories of other holy people who may not have been canonized by the Church, but who may have some enlightening aspect of their lives.  Mr. Ellsberg even includes a few non-Catholic Christians and even a handful of non-Christians, so we can see how others may have led holy, that is, God-centered, lives. 

While not organized on a day-by-day basis, My Life With the Saints, by James Martin, S.J., is an often humorous memoir of how the saints, including St. Jude of the sock drawer, have influenced his life.  

The Internet is also a gold mine of information about the saints.  An example that is fairly reliable, interesting, and easy-to-use is from Catholic Online (www.catholic.org/saints).  It includes search capabilities that allow you to find basic information on thousands of saints.

Study the saints, pray with the saints, for each of us is called to be a saint, too.  What better way to learn what we are called to be than to know the stories of those who have already been there, done that.  What better friends can we have to help us on the way than those who have tread the path ahead of us.

Happy studying, happy praying.