All Saints Day - November 1, 2009

"The Busy-ness of the Saints"

The Rev. Dr. Richard W. Pfaff

THE BUSY-NESS OF THE SAINTS  

In 1637 the closest friend of the young poet John Milton died in a shipwreck in the Irish Sea.  In his grief Milton, who was not yet thirty, wrote an elegiac poem titled Lycidas; its chief fame now may be the half-line “Look homeward, Angel,” which Thomas Wolfe borrowed as the title for his novel, and which is inscribed in the memorial to him in Polk Place, a couple of hundred yards from here.  I mention this poem today because of where Milton concludes his lamentation for the friend, in heaven: where, in some of the loveliest lines in all of English poetry,

"There entertain him all the saints above,
In solemn troops and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes."

We tend to think of the saints as static: fixed in a Byzantine mosaic, it may be, or standing around the heavenly throne, perhaps striking ethereal pre-Raphaelite attitudes.  Milton’s lines suggest that the opposite is the case, that the saints are full of dynamic activity—singing, moving, comforting.  And that they’re best understood as plural in their activity: teams, we might say, though “Solemn troops and sweet Societies” conveys so much more than mere teamwork.

Keeping both these contentions in mind—that the saints are infinitely active rather than static, and that their activity is likely to be corporate rather than individual—can help us over a major obstacle in understanding the saints and also in dealing with some of the harsh realities of the world we live in.  The obstacle in understanding is getting hung up on attempting precise definition of what a “saint” is and on the temptation to divide humankind into saints, “wannabe” saints, and non-saints.  The simple truth is that God knows who the saints are, and to what degree any individual one can be fittingly spelled with a great big capital S or a very tiny lower-case one or somewhere in between.  God knows that, and there’s no reason why we should expect to.  It is enough for us to know a few saints; indeed, it may be more than enough to have the conviction of knowing with certainty even one.

I have in mind a person who I’m absolutely convinced can be regarded in no other way than as a saint (she lived all her life in England, so no one here need feel nervous that I’m going to talk about them).  I first met her in 1972 and, ridiculous though it may sound to summon a memory that old, in an All Saints sermon in this church the next year I mentioned the feeling that I already had about her as a saint and what I thought were her two most obvious qualifications: that being around her made me feel that I was a better person than I usually find myself to be, and that she seemed to be surrounded by clouds of laughter but no unkindness.  She lived another quarter-century, and at the time of her death it was clear that my feelings were widely shared.  A sort of memoir was published, with excerpts from her diary and letters, and a friend recalled her simple response when asked, in her late sixties, why she was at the Eucharist early each Sunday morning even in the bitter cold: “I don’t think I could keep away.”

It bears repeating that God, and God alone, knows who the saints are.  But if the three characteristics I just mentioned about this old friend are combined—a conveying of grace that made those around her find themselves better persons than they thought, a steady stream of laughter but without unkindness, and a passionate if unarticulated determination to be close to the things of God (above all in the holy Sacrament)—you have, I suspect, a pretty good working definition.  The slightly mawkish refrain-declaration of the hymn “I sing a song of the saints of God”—“And I’m going to be one, too”—is relevant here.  Not that anyone becomes a saint by his or her sheer determination, any more than one coerces God by cheerful repetition of that refrain, slightly reminiscent of The Little Engine that Could.  But the roster of the saints is not fixed; the 144,000 of the Book of Revelation is a symbolic number, not a census count.  Saints are made by God’s grace, but there is no limit to how many saints that grace can create.

If the saints are innumerable, or at least not for us to number, what is it that they do?  Here Milton’s formulation can serve well.  He imagines them as “entertaining”—that is, in the seventeenth-century sense, making welcome, taking care of—his dead friend; as sweeping him into a moving chorus of glory; and as, in the Biblical phrase, wiping the tears for ever from his eyes.  In today’s reading from Revelation [21:1-6] it is God who wipes away the tears, as it was in the passage from Isaiah that the Seer alludes to.  But the saints are nothing if not God’s agents; God’s agents of comfort as the perennial witnesses of the triumph of love over hate, God’s agents of comfort in the community of the faithful that stretches across boundaries of temporality and terrestriality.

All of us who have watched or heard the news this past week, night after night, have sorrowed over the apparently endless tale of death and destruction, in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan and many other places.  The American deaths and maimings are horrible, and well chronicled; every Sunday morning one can read, in the Raleigh New & Observer, the names, ages, and home towns of those who have died the previous week.  The generally unchronicled deaths of the indigenous population, and especially of civilian non-combatants, are far more numerous. 

The saints have an enormous lot of work to do here, starting with a great many tears to be wiped from a great many eyes.  We can’t know what precise form that work may take—certainly not immediate intervention in directing the course of missiles or navigating around explosive devices.  But it is an article of faith, as part of our belief in the Holy Catholic Church, that the Church Triumphant (in the old phrase: in short, the saints) acts with the Church Militant (us) in furthering God’s kingdom on earth.  Clothed in white robes they may (or may not) be, but, as the book of Revelation puts it, “they follow the Lamb wherever he goes”; and where the Lord of all the saints goes is, among an infinity of places, into our world: into the world of Mary and Martha and Lazarus, but no less into the world of Darfur and Somalia and Zimbabwe. 

But, you may reasonably object, we thought the saints were those “who from their labors rest”—indeed, we just sang about it with great gusto.  True, but the eternal rest which the saints are said to enjoy is not a millenial snooze, a heavenly hibernation that goes on until the last trumpet sounds.  Rather, that rest must be akin to the kind of poised action where, in our own limited experience, perfection, or at least as close as we come on earth to encountering perfection, seems to lie: the tennis ball coming off the absolute center of the racket, the dancers at the climax of the pas de deux, the instrumentalists caught up in the sublime play of a Haydn quartet.  The perfect rest and, simultaneously, the perfect action of the Holy Trinity are, of course, the ultimate mystery, one which not even the angels understand fully, let alone the saints.  But the saints, vastly closer than we are to being able to apprehend something of that mystery, form for us the inspiration, and the model, for that combination of heavenly rest and earthly action which we both long for in the future and have to work for now.

The busy-ness of the saints can be summed up in a single formula: that the unemployment rate among them is zero.  Not, I think, that we are to conjure up a picture of individual saints rushing around doing their “things,” Medard solacing sufferers from toothache and Dymphna helping sleepwalkers and Jude finding lost car keys and the like.  Rather, we can suppose something closer to the sense Milton’s lines give us, of this great body of men- and women-made-saints, operating with tremendous energy, like a holy force-field; a flying wedge of sanctity, if you will, pushing the coming of the kingdom of God on earth, as it is in heaven.

And picking up speed, strength, irresistibility, as their numbers swell—swell with people like, hard as this is to believe, us.  When the author of the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the heroes and heroines of the faith and then makes the astonishing statement that they have not yet received all that God has promised for them, his conclusion is blunt: “since God has foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect” [Heb. 11:39]. 

We can extend that: apart from us, their work is not done, in either sense of the word.  Apart from us much of that work on this earth is not accomplished; apart from us, their work is not, is never, finished.  The saints are fully employed, but their labor force needs to be expanded.  The jobs are there, the compensations are unimaginable, the companionship—the companionship of “all the saints above, in solemn troops and sweet Societies”—infinitely desirable. 

In such companionship, that of angels and archangels and all the saints of heaven, we join today in praising and magnifying the name of the eternal Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit—to whom indeed be ascribed all honor and glory, now and for ever.