Florets | Firstborn Of The Dead

Five readings on the saints

Fenwick Lawson, The Journey

☩I: THE FIRST SAINT

Herbert McCabe, from Jesus and Sanctity:

So what we hear of Jesus is first of all that he is loved by the Father. And that means that Jesus is a saint. For this is what a saint is: a human being with whom God is in love, with whom God shares his own divine life. What we call grace, or holiness, or godliness is just what it is like to be loved by God, to share in divinity. And Jesus is the first saint - not the first saint in history, of course, but the first in the sense that all other saints have their godliness from him. As John says at the very beginning of his gospel: “the Word became flesh and lived among us...From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (John 1:14-16).

Our grace comes from Christ's grace. We are loved by God because Christ is loved by God. So sanctity is a matter of being loved.

II: THE CRAVING WE KNOW IN OURSELVES

Rosemary Haughton, from On Trying To Be Human:

The Christian revelation gives precision and purpose and assurance to the inchoate striving of all men for a life that is fully human. On the other hand a rigid interpretation of the great metaphors and symbols that have been used from the beginning to embody and express that revelation has succeeded in making the whole Christian idea seem…at best a comforting illusion to be outgrown and at worst a formidable obstacle to the honest and unselfish thinking that leads to real human progress. And in many cases it is those who reject the Christian idea as they know it who can actually do most to make clear the real human meaning of the faith that Christians profess. To become holy is to become human. A fully matured and perfected humanity is capable of the vision of God in the life of the resurrection... This is what Christians are for, and at this time perhaps we are able to see our vocation as part of the universal striving towards a more complete understanding and living of human life.

If the Christian’s part in this is a special one, this ‘specialness’ does not lie in any exclusive claim on the God whom we know only by the love and the need we encounter in others and the craving we know in ourselves. It is ‘special’ in that each Christian is called to attempt, however feebly, to do the work that Christ did: to serve without tiring, to give without limit, and to witness by word and act to the hope that makes sense of the apparently ridiculous aspirations of a race of fear-ridden, security-craving, suspicious, ambitious and doggedly alive animals.

III: HIDDEN LIVES

Henri De Lubac, from Paradoxes of Faith:

In the midst of so many discussions and inquiries about Christianity in our time, about its "lack of adaptability", about its "ineffectiveness", and so on—and properly conducted, such discussions and inquiries may be very useful, and may even be themselves a sign of vitality—there is, however, one very simple consideration which it would be a good thing to remember sometimes. It is that the best Christians, the most genuine and most living, are not necessarily or even generally counted among the learned or the clever; among the intellectuals or the politically-minded; among the custodians of power or wealth; among the "authorities".

Consequently, their voices rarely resound in the squares and in the press, their actions usually make no noise and do not take the public eye. Their lives are hidden from the sight of the world, and if they achieve a measure of fame, it is only rarely, in a restricted circle, or late in life. In the Church even, they often pass unperceived and the church-goer in critical mood will, in all good faith, fail to know them, though they may be by his side. Many saints are not known until after their death, and many, even after their death, remain unknown. Even those among them who had to play an important part in this world, were for the most part unappreciated, and, in their finest undertakings, either attacked or left in the lurch. It is nevertheless they who contribute more than anyone else to the difference that this earth of ours has from hell.

IV: THOSE WHOM THE GODS LOVE

Alain Danielou on his brother Jean, from The Way To The Labyrinth

“His death and the scandal provoked by it, when he had become one of the leading figures of the Church, was a sort of posthumous vendetta, one of those favors that the gods bestow on those whom they love. People often speak of the ironies of fate, and one can hardly help sensing a real intention behind the circumstances of this death, the sort of joke fortune loves to play on the great. He suffered a heart attack right outside the door of a woman of doubtful virtue, in a neighborhood of ill-repute. If he had died a few minutes earlier or later, or had been visiting a wealthy lady in the snobbish XVI Arrondissement — supposedly to discuss her “good works” — instead of a destitute woman to whom he had brought the proceeds from some of his theological books, there would never have been a scandal.

Jean had always dedicated himself to disregarded people. For a certain period he had celebrated a Mass for homosexuals. He tried to help prisoners, delinquents, troubled young people, prostitutes. He had no bourgeois prejudices…I deeply admired the way he died, and could not help thinking of the martyrs, whose spirits rose to Heaven under a cloud of infamy, amid the jeering of the crowd.

He died as true saints die, in ignominy, in mockery, the laughing-stock of an evil-minded and spiteful society; but that was so much more fitting for him than lying in state in the echo of funeral orations amidst the catafalques of Notre-Dame.”

V: RISING AS MUSIC RISES

Elizabeth Jennings, from Death of a Dominican Priest at Easter:

Gone from our senses’ reach but not from our wishes.
You are awareness now and comprehension,
One with the elements. Words are so literal and
So clumsy, falling, lying, rising again.
you have risen as music rises, you died
When all were thinking of Resurrection, when Spring
Was blithe and full and blossoms were everywhere.
Your death was beautiful, all your brothers around you.
O be my hope in your happiness. I have your letter
Full of assurance. I do not pray for you, no,
But to your spirit, one with the other saints.
O teach me how poetry must be selfless, let music
Be new in all that I write, O leave your mark;
Serene encouragement, hope in the purpose of dark.

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I’ve had to move back my planned piece for this week due to the death of my grandmother.

Of your charity, please pray for the repose of her soul.

In paradisum deducant te angeli. ☩