~ All Saints Day ~
It occurs to me that today’s feast is an appropriate response to last week’s pre Halloween question. Whether 3rd graders on the playground or college students in the dorm room or white collar corporates still lucky enough to be able to gather at the water cooler, the operative question is “What are you going to be?” Tellingly, the answers didn’t vary much from the playground to the dorm room to the water cooler: Lady Gaga, an Avatar, a pirate, Justin Bieber, a vampire, Wonder Woman.
My daughter was recounting to me the other day how one year when she was little how all the other trick-or-treaters kept asking her, “What are you?” “An angel,” she’d say then walk away confused, then frustrated, then upset. “Isn’t it obvious?” she thought. Later when we returned home to spill sacks of candy on the living room floor she noticed something on the couch. Her wings. She’d left her wings at home.
The Feast of All Saints is not only a day to remember friends of God but to reframe last week’s question and ponder our way into a response: “What are you going to be?” It’s a soul question really, and thus an ongoing one, not a costume or career choice. And the only sensible response seems to be some version of the preposterously posterous (no it’s not a word) reply: “I am going to be a saint. I am going to be a holy woman. I am going to be a holy man.”
(pause to allow readers time to come to and to pick themselves up off the floor)
Holiness: A Retrieval
Part of the problem is that we have such a poor understanding of what these words ‘saint’ and ‘holy’ mean. It might be worth our while for a few days to try to retrieve them from the trash cans of triviality and caricature or from the altars of sanctimoniousness.
To be holy, to be a saint is not to receive an award for good behavior (always posthumously mind you) or to receive a reward for a service rendered or a hardship suffered. Holiness is neither an achievement nor an entitlement. Nor is it the private, privileged, or exclusive domain of members of institutional religion. It’s a relationship not only with the Divine but also with other humans and other-than-humans. It’s a way of being in the world. It’s a way of responding to the incomprehensible surprise of being itself (to borrow from Rabbi Heschel). It’s a call and a response, a radical response (radix meaning roots), an embodied answer that emerges from the depths of our being as a counterstroke to an equally authentic and imperceptible yearning. It’s a way of wonder. It’s what we do with the wonder. It’s a way of staying home and waiting and a way of going out to greet the world, to meet and be met by others. It’s the cultivation of a deep sympathy for all things, all people, all beings including ourselves. It’s a way of being oneself so that in the end, much to our surprise the costume won’t come off — what we were going to be when we set out without our wings we have become – deeply human, genuinely holy, vibrantly alive, the effulgence of love.
About this Trappist monk Thomas Merton writes,
For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.
Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied.
With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face.[i]
So, first things first. In order to become a saint, vibrantly alive, truly holy, we have to become who we already are in God. As we move toward God who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves the closer we move toward our truest self. The closer we move toward our truest self the nearer we move toward God. It’s one and the same journey.♦
[i] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation.