by Emma Pennington
November 2009
At this time of year as the evenings darken and all around us retreats into the deathliness of winter, our minds turn from this transient world to the heavenly realms and to those who people them. When I asked the children in an assembly recently what was the next major festival we celebrated after harvest it was of course Halloween.
It is so much easier to have fun with pumpkins and witches costumes than it is to dress up as saints and yearn for the life of holiness. Today we have a distinct uneasiness about the cult of saints. As good enlightened and post Reformation Christians we have of course moved away from the dark and ignorant days of the medieval church and now need no help or assistance on our road to holiness, or have we? Last month the Roman Catholic Church did a remarkable thing. They took the relics of St Therese of Lisieux on a tour of over 40 countries and for a night and a day the relics came to the Oratory in Oxford.
For those of us who queued up and bought our rose petals to cast over the casket which held her leg and foot bones, it was as if the Reformation had never happened and the memory of our spiritual heritage had been reawakened. The Roman Catholic Church were naturally criticised for doing just that and reducing Christian faith to the superstitious days of the old Church. As someone who has been on a holy bone hunt around the country of Italy, piecing together the face, foot and hand of St Catherine of Sienna, I can sympathise with this reduction of faith to a gruesome spectacle but I have to say this time it was different. It was not so much the reverence and earnestness of the faithful who convinced me that to see the relics of St Therese was of great spiritual worth but rather the person whose bones I came to see. Whereas many saints are distant, superhuman figures whose lives are more legend than fact, here is a saint whose photograph we have.
For many she fits into that category of people, like St Therese of Calcutta or Maximillan Kolbe whose devotion and courage are truly inspiring and stand above us as icons of perfection that we can but look up to in awe. And of course this is where we want our saints to be. In the same way as our modern celebrities are airbrushed to look perfect, so too are the lives of the saints airbrushed into legends and models of sanctity. However there is a difference: whilst the unhappy stories of marital breakdown and unflattering celebrity pictures too often bring out the unsavoury side of our natures, it is the failures and despairs of the saints that make them as such. For me, this is why I deeply wanted to be in the presence of St Therese, not because of her holiness and piety, not because she entered the Carmelite order at 15 and left a spiritual path of littleness that many could follow, not because she heroically bore such terrible pain and turned her suffering into joy but because for most of her time as a nun she knew none of the consolation of faith. She felt alone and abandoned. As Simon Tugwell in his Ways of Imperfection describes it, unlike her Carmelite contemporaries her life was not a gradual journey up Mount Carmel to an ever closer, if dazzling, relationship with God. Instead, it was a descent from the highest realms of communion with God in her early years to the very depths of despair. This was the extent of her spiritual life: non-existent. What makes her a saint is that in this darkness she found her vocation to love, to stand alongside those who were far from God and to pray for them, as one of them. On her deathbed Therese looked with joy to the life to come, not to find peace or joy in the presence of the Lord but to begin her work. As she writes:
‘I feel that my mission is soon to begin – to make others love God as I love him… to teach souls my little way. I will spend my heaven doing good on earth. This is not impossible, for the angels in heaven watch over us….After my death, I will let fall a shower of roses.’
It was for this reason that the Roman Catholic Church took such a bold and potentially divisive step, for Therese is a saint not because she is better than us but because she is one of us. She does not so much show us the way to God as walk alongside as a fellow pilgrim and friend, reassuring us of the truth of God’s saving love for all of us, both saint and sinner.
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