The
Solemnity of All Saints
Dear brothers and sisters,
What keeps each of us from becoming a saint,
from hastening after them, from imitating their example of loving God and
neighbor? The answer, I suspect, is a false understanding of who the saints
are.
Those unfamiliar with them tend to think
the Saints are those who lived perfect lives, who never grew angry or impatient,
who always acted with wisdom and dignity, and who rarely sinned. Those who
think of the Saints in this way see them either as impossible guides to follow
or as personifications of boredom or obnoxiousness. If this is how we view the Saints,
it is no wonder we do not strive to join their ranks.
But those who read the accounts of their
lives know this assumption about them to be quite false. Rather, the saints
are, as J.R.R. Tolkien – the author of The Hobbit and the Lord
of the Rings - once described them, "those who have for all their
imperfections never finally bowed heart and will to the world or the evil
spirit."[1]
The choice of words the Professor employs
is simply another way of saying what we hear every year at this time, but
seldom believe: the Saints are like you and like me. They were tempted and
struggled and sinned - and repented. What, then, is the difference between us
and them?
The Saints, we might say, kept the end goal,
the final victory, always before them. They knew they would struggle and sin,
yet they never lost sight of the merciful love of God because they knew his
hand would always catch their repentant hearts and gently place them back on
the narrow way that leads to the Father's house. This is what Tolkien means
when he says they never finally bowed heart and will to the world or the evil
spirit; they did not, in the end, keep their focus on themselves, but kept it
instead on God.
Having died in the service of God and in
his friendship, the Saints received "the crown of life," as Saint
John described in an earlier part of the Book of Revelation (Revelation 2:10).
We see the bestowing of these crowns depicted in one of my favorite medieval manuscript
images. The illumination shows Jesus enthroned in the center of the image, handing
out small crowns to men and women on either side of him.
 |
| The circle of Johannes von Valenburg, ca. 1299 |
What I especially like about this image is the littleness of those receiving their crowns from the hands of the Lord as the Blessed Virgin Mary and (presumably) Saint John the Evangelist look on; the ones being crowned are, at most, half the size of Jesus, almost Hobbitlike, if you will. Through his eyes, Jesus even seems to confer with Saint John as to which of the little ones is worthy of a crown.
The size of the figures awaiting their
crowns, some already halo-ed, reminds me of some of my favorite words Tolkien wrote
in his essay "On Fairy Stories," namely, that "in God's kingdom
the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed man is still
man."
Here on earth, we tend to be intimidated by
the presence of the greatest – Saints, though they be. We see how fully the
Saints entrusted themselves to God and it that trust cost them. We see their complete
trust in God, at least at the end of their lives, and we see our failures to
trust and love God. But, my brothers and sisters, we need not be afraid to
fully entrust ourselves into the hand of God. If the saints, with their
multi-faceted personalities and, yes, with their imperfections, could do so, so
can we!
The only thing standing in the way of my
growth in holiness is me; the only thing standing in the way of your growth in
holiness is you. Let us, then, like trusting children, stretch out our little hands
to the strong hand of the Lord Jesus so he might lead us along the way of his Saints.
Let us allow him to do so either gently or with some prodding, so that we,
small as we are by comparison to him, might stand among the company of the
Saints and wear the same crown them. Amen.
[1]
J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 93 To Christopher Tolkien, 30 January 1945. In The
Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Revised and Expanded Edition. Humphrey
Carpenter, ed. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2023), 159.
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