WHEN THE SAINTS … Reflections on All Saints Day

It won’t mean much to you if you are not Catholic, but today is All Saints’ Day. It’s a holy day of obligation too, which means the day is very nearly at par with Easter and Christmas and all the main feasts of the Church. And what has that got to do with the price of fuel, you may ask. Not much perhaps; except that some very committed Catholics may feel quite obliged not to open their petrol kiosks today. Yes, my dear, the day is quite heavy on the Catholic calendar. With good reason as well because, sainthood is rather a serious affair in the Church. Indeed, the Catholic faith would be less so, but for the saints-holy men and women-whose exemplary devotion to the gospel of Jesus Christ has led countless souls to the Fountain of Life. Many of them were martyrs for their faith. Their blood and sweat watered the little acorn to become the mighty oak whose roots and branches spread from Rome to every corner of the globe. Many more were humble priests, nuns and lay people who simply showed the Way to a righteous and meaningful life. They preached the gospel by their actions and the Light shone so brightly in them that all could see and glorify their Father in Heaven! However, I make bold to assert that the Christian faith is not alone in the recognition of saintly persons. In the month of Ramadan, faithful Muslims devote much of their meditations to the study of writings and sermons by eminent Islamic priests and zealots. Around the Muslim world there are pilgrimages and festivals in honour of such mystics. Buddhism has one great saint after whom The Path is named. Other monks of consequence tend to lose their importance in the luminance of their incarnated bodies! The sadhus and sanyasi of the Krishna Movement and other Hindu sects are probably as numerous as the lotus blooms on the Yogi trail. You name them- Ekhankar, Grail Message, White Eagle Lodge and all the “ancient sacred orders”- any band of worshippers with the faintest notion of a Hereafter, have to their credit forerunners long gone, in whose “enlightened” steps they are trudging behind. The Church probably differs only by the degree of reverence she accords her saints. “Why do we thus praise and glorify the saints and keep festival for them? Of what use to them are earthly honours, when the Heavenly Father honours them? What is the point of our praises?” These engaging queries were raised by Bernard of Clairvoux way back in the 12th Century. Bernard, a Cistercian monk, was famous all over Europe in his days for his untiring efforts to bring dissenting Catholics back to the fold. He wrote several books on theology and the ascetic life and many years after his death, he too was rewarded with the crown of sainthood. St. Bernard is much distinguished also for having a breed of dogs named after him! The lives of saints, it may seem then, are the stuff of legends: inspiring tales that challenge our own spirituality and mark them out as exemplary folk. Yet, in those days not long ago, when “dialectical materialism” ruled the hearts of men, the saints and their stories were easily dismissed as fables; strong opiates to fool the gullible masses. But Marxism had its ‘saints’-brave men who swayed the 20th century with their vision of reality: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Che, Mao and many others. Okay, none of them was really a saint in that spiritual sense, but each of them held a torch- yes, a temporal one- by which they set certain standards of conduct for their teeming followers. And if, by any stretch of materialist whimsy, there is a dialectical paradise somewhere beyond this plane, can you bet your Bible, Koran or Bhagavad-Gita, that Karl Marx would not be there, too broke as usual to buy a razor blade? The trouble, you may point out, is that oftentimes the ‘saints of dialectics’ fall victims to their own swords: their histories ‘re-written’ in the sweeping cut of the History they tried so hard to rewrite! It’s the same fate largely for all our popular heroes, our politicians and statesmen. Not so the spiritual men and women, whose lives preach to us enduring sermons about timeless truths. History is nobler for paying them their correct dues because, as St Bernard points out: “our commemoration of them aids us, not them”. How? By showing us, in the saints, mirror images of selfless love, charity, piety, chastity and all the virtues that our poor world has always lacked. Even the most admirable of our materialist or political heroes, Che Guevara for example, came up by taking from a few to compensate the many. The saints of the Church give only of themselves. They bear the brunt alone for their convictions and will not take from anyone but may receive from many or none at all. Perhaps, nobody in contemporary times radiated these essential attributes more than Mother Theresa of Calcutta who, in 2003, was venerated by Pope John Paul II, at a ceremony in Rome. The diminutive Albanian nun, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1997, needs no introduction here. Her exertion on behalf of the poor and orphaned of her adopted city, Calcutta, is one of the most heartwarming tales of the century. Plainly, the world is in dire need of many more Mother Theresas to teach that love is the potent weapon of choice in our battles against every imaginable social ill. The necessity for such visionaries has never been much in doubt. What is not too clear, especially to non- Catholics are the criteria for the elevation of persons to saints. I agree, it has the strange feel of putting a mortal stamp on a spiritual attainment. If God makes saints and men crown them, there is then the palpable fear that human prejudices can distort the true judgment of Heaven! That is probably the sum of Protestant arguments against the beatification process, although saints already in existence prior to the schisms of the early Church are recognized by the Episcopal, the Lutheran and Orthodox Christian sects. One might wonder why the Church, which does not preach that only Catholics will go to Heaven, does not elevate people of other faiths and sects to the hallowed ranks. Why, for example, is John Wesley not a saint? Precisely because, Presbyters follow his teachings and will not accept that he be honoured in that way! Naturally, no one could possibly be a saint who, while living, did not subscribe to the veneration and canonization of worthy souls. But Catholics, resting their faith on the authority of the Church, gladly welcome each new addition to the communion of saints. Of course, only one man is fit to make the announcement; His Holiness, the Pope. Our recollection of the saints and commemoration of All Saints is simply for our own benefit. As St. Bernard says, it is “to inflame our desire…And to merit becoming their fellow citizens and companions” in the Eternal Kingdom. Blessed Tansi, our own Cyprian Tansi agrees. Speaking of the saints to a group of school children, who visited the monastery in England in 1964, he described them as “our friends in court”, to plead our case before the Tribunal above. On a day like this therefore, that ageless spiritual strikes a resonating chord for added significance in believing ears. Like me, you may prefer the jazzed up versions. The biting roughness of Satchmo’s scratchy evergreen vocals has a poignant effect. “When the saints…Oh, when the saints Go marching in… Lord I want..” Yeah, count me in, I beg you Lord! *First published in Saturday Champion November 1, 2003