ALL SAINTS’ EVE (31st October) 2021
Readings:
Wisdom 3:1-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6
John 11: 32-44
We could be all terribly highbrow about the doctrine of
sanctification, or perhaps analytical about the readings, except I think we are treading deeply inside the language of
the heart. If there is an occasion on which I set aside my tendency to hanker
after matters Roman Catholic (and I apologize in advance for this can be
offensive to my Roman Catholic friends – but hey, let’s offend in love!) it is
when it comes to the doctrine of sainthood. I find on the other hand the hard-line
Protestant approach to sainthood equally ridiculous: the fierce refusal to name
saints, to name churches after saints, to use the world “saint" at all unless it
is applied to all the baptised, is at least as offensive as the rather rigorous
hoops that candidates for sainthood have to pass through in the Roman Catholic
communion before they graduate to such status. Yes, all the baptised are
saints. No, not all are outstanding in their Christlikeness – and it’s to the
exemplary Christ-bearers I want to turn.
Though I will just divert for a moment to all the souls who may
not thank us for calling them saints. The exemplary and the unexemplary, the
stumblers and the fallers, the succeeders and the fail-lers: all, I believe,
are captured in the outpouring of divine love that is creation and redemption.
Some l think may take a little extra time before they encounter the fullness of
divine love, but what is time amidst timelessness, time amidst eternity? And
no, we can never explain that.
But let me introduce you to a few of the saints that have
crossed my path. They won’t have committees of cardinals meeting to decide
whether their bodies have decomposed or not, or whether statues of them weep or
not, and they won’t be in the Books of Saints, but saints they are.
I think of Saint Molly of Orange who I mention every All Saints’
Day. Saint Molly was a parishioner of mine in Orange, New South Wales. Every
time I encountered Molly she was doing something for someone else, caring more
for them than she would ever dream of doing for herself. Year after year at
this time I remember the day the town was hit by a massive storm, parks were
trashed, houses un-roofed, trees scattered. I knew Molly lived alone and tried
to track her down after the storm passed, I was worried for her – until I
learned that mid-80s year old Molly had beaten me to it and was out and about
in the town making sure the old people were alright.
Then there was Saint Leopold – I’ll call him Leopold of
Parkville, because that’s where I met him and I barely knew him. He was a
priest so I’m able to track down a few details but they tell us very little –
he trained at the same theological college that I did, sixty years earlier –
that’s sort of why I half met him. He served in two or three rural Victorian
parishes, a couple of military chaplaincy posts, some administrative posts, a
tutorship in the Caribbean. I barely met him, but I know that those details
meant nothing to him. I think I only had one conversation with him. But in that
conversation he made it clear that all the details of his years of ministry
mattered little to him. In the last years of his life though he had found what
he described as the pearl of great price. He was slipping I think into a touch
of dementia, so he forgot to make clear what the pearl was, but it was clear
that it was some total renewal of his faith. It was either an encounter with
the charismatic movement or with a community justice movement that existed in
Melbourne at the time – perhaps it was neither, perhaps it was both. A moment
or two of research suggests it was both, for in the late 1970s St Leopold
bought a terrace house in Melbourne’s Clifton Hill, which he donated to an
Intentional Christian Community experiment called the House of the Gentle
Bunyip. He had experience of intentional Christian communities in both New
Zealand and Australia, though beyond that I know little. But as he spoke of his
pearl of great price his eyes lit up, and this frail old priest became
energised with holy energy. I never saw him again – funnily enough I may have
met him once before when I had dinner at the House of the Gentle Bunyip, but
that matters not at all. What matters is that I saw that afternoon, at a
gathering at my theological college, the fires of holiness enflaming a frail
old man, and the love of God shining through him. The Gentle Bunyip folded some
years later, but Saint Leopold had gone on into the mysteries of God by then.
The assets of the Gentle Bunyip, incidentally, were given over to an agency
working with schizophrenics, amongst those most outcast of western humanity.
Perhaps one more. I’ll disguise a name and place here, for fear
of upsetting anyone. St Ursula of Somewhere remains one of the godliest people I’ve
known. Shy, quiet, utterly devoted to her God, her family, her church. I was a
bit of a waif and stray when I knew her, but her house was always open to me –
and to other waifs and strays. She immersed herself in prayer, in the
scriptures, yet never paraded any sense of holiness, never paraded anything
that would attract attention to herself. She had an impish demeanour, was no
meepy saint because, well, saints aren’t meepy. She brought up six children – I
reckon she carried about 100% of that load because, well, busy husband and all
that. She survived cancer, miraculously and lived for decades after it – living
it seemed to me always for others. In her I saw God, and I know I was far from
alone in that. Hers too is a life that passed through mine, and for that I will
never cease to be thankful.
I could name others – the fine monastic priest, St Alan of
Flemington, who was one of the finest liturgists and preachers I have ever known,
but whose tortured life was cut short by AIDS. St Brian of Casino, another priest,
a bloke’s bloke, who retired from priesthood to brew beer and drive a milk
tanker – keeping the activities separate I hasten to add – and who was simply
there if anyone ever needed him. Or saints Greta and Faye – their names too are
changed – who’d lived on the land all their lives before retiring to a small
country town, and their – both of them like Ursula somewhat impish – living a
life of prayer and cheekiness and care for others, Faye always in the
background (they were not an item by the way but it wouldn’t matter if they
were) … Greta who once when I turned up around half past five in the evening to
get a signature told me with a conspiratorial twinkle “they say you should
never drink alone, but if I didn’t drink alone I’d never get to have a drink”
before offering me a glass of wine.
For all the saints indeed. We’ve probably all known one or two.
For their passage though our lives we give our heartfelt thanks to their God
and ours.
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