Saints Aren't Saints While They're Alive
a few thoughts on how to live with the fact that we're not yet sanctified
I’ve not been posting much over the last couple of weeks (for reasons explained in the update), and what I am sharing here is not quite finished, but I don’t know when I will have the opportunity to finish it, so I’ve decided to share it now and invite your feedback.
These paintings (from a cycle of panels made after her canonization) depict events from the life of St Catherine of Siena. There is an otherworldly glory to them and to the stories they represent.
St. Catherine’s teachings, as well as her story, reveals that holiness lies in the widening of the soul through acts of charity and kindness towards those in need. This process involves bearing some responsibility for the promise of the world. But St Catherine would be the first to say that that process will play out in ways onerous and obscure, unsightly and undramatic. So, why does the Church give us icons and hagiographies? How does the Spirit use them for our good?
It's important to note that the saints weren't sainted because they were especially good at being good or even because they were just good at being. Many of them were deeply flawed and troubled, in fact. They were sainted because some aspect of their lives when imaged and narrated wisely and beautifully embodies a goodness that the Church, led by the Spirit, knew we needed.
Seen as saints, these sisters and brothers of ours appear holy in ways we cannot be. But that is exactly as it ought to be. We need their lives to come to us as stories and images. We need to see them as figures, because our spirits cannot absorb the sanctity of their lives unless it is shared with us figuratively. Their holiness, beautifully represented for us, teaches us to recognize the ugly inconsistencies in our own lives and the disjointedness of our loves. Seeing their exploits awakens us to possibilities we would otherwise miss or dismiss.
If that is what we need from the saints, what do our neighbors need from us? They need us to come alongside them not as saints, not as figures, but as our real unsainted selves—weak, wounded, weary as we may be. Specifically, they need our never-entirely-good works in order to open them to the perfect and perfecting works of God, which always come with and through the intercession of the saints. “God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does,” as Luther said.
So, you may ask, is it dangerous to venerate the saints? Only if we forget the difference between the necessarily glorious retelling of their lives and the actual experience of living them. Only if we fail to bear in mind that the saints were not saints while they were alive. Only if we fail to let their humanity draw us toward God’s, which is our own.
Amen. Mar Catherine (I've given myself towards that Eastern label of "mar" in place of "saint") is one of my wife's saint friends; she is special in our home. ...Mar Catherine tends the nursing students.
If I remember right, Jenson has a section in his systematic theology on whether or not prayer to saints is possible. His conclusion is that if we can indeed pray to the saints it is only because of the mediation of Christ. We do not reach Christ through the saints, but we reach the saints through Christ. To say that the saints “were sainted because some aspect of their lives when imaged and narrated wisely” was something the Spirit knew we needed, makes me wonder if the way the Spirit has helped us tell the stories of the lives of the saints is an anticipation or foretaste of the way all of our lives will be wisely narrated when Christ comes again. Hagiography? Too good to be true? Of course.