All Saints 2009

A great multitude, which no one could number, of all nations, peoples, and tongues, stand before the throne and before the Lamb.
Revelation 7:9

Today, All Saints Day, is our feast day.  It is important to emphasize this because, in popular culture, “saint” implies something totally beyond the capabilities of any “ordinary” Christian.

In the Roman Catholic Church canonization is a long, arduous, and expensive process, and only those are declared to be saints who have demonstrated heroic virtue during their lives, and through whose intercession miracles have been worked after their deaths.

This has nothing whatever to do with the New Testament understanding of “saint.”  Paul addresses his letters to “the saints” of whatever community he is writing to.  “The saints” are, quite simply, the members of the Christian church, and they are “saints” not because of anything which they have done but because of God’s action in calling them, through baptism, to be members of the mystical body of his Son, Jesus Christ. 

Today’s feast day reminds us that we, as members of the Church of the Good Shepherd, are “the saints” every bit as much as “the saints at Corinth” or “the saints in Philippi.”  Who we are depends not on what we do but on what God has done for us.  So many of our personal and community problems are the result of our forgetting this simple, basic truth.

Our society persuades us to accept its work ethic, according to which it is only our accomplishments, as acknowledged by society, that entitles us to be respected and loved.  Aware, as we all are, of our personal limitations and insignificance in the context of mass society, we are led to believe that we are undeserving of love and respect, that we are worthless. 

Jean Vanier founded a world-wide network of communities for the care of those with mental disabilities.  These are persons whom our society often regards simply as a burden; they are considered unproductive, useless charges of the state.  The miracle of Vanier’s work is that those who work with these people, not as care-givers but as home makers, discover not only the beauty and loveableness of those with disabilities but their own beauty and loveableness as well. 

Although this movement began in France, under Roman Catholic auspices, the community here in the Toronto area, in Richmond Hill, called “Daybreak,” was founded by an Anglican couple, and an Anglican priest from the diocese of Brandon has lived as a member pf the Daybreak community. 

She told me about the transformative experience of those years, and how, for the first time, she had come to know what Christian community can be.  Life at Daybreak means putting into practice the Beatitudes, which are our gospel for today (Matthew 5:1-12).

Those with mental disabilities  are truly “the poor,” and in sharing a home with them and in tending to their needs, one learns that they are truly blessed by God.  When we open our hearts to the poor, we lay bare our own poverty and brokenness, but we also discover the true source of our blessedness, the infinite love of God, who has called us to be saints. 

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November 1, 2009