What Does It Mean?
All Saints Scripture Readings
When dealing with the gospels or any of the Holy Scriptures of our Judeo-Christian faith tradition, especially in the context of the liturgy, it’s critically important to approach them with an adult mindset. Too often, people seem to read the Scriptures as though they were eight-year-olds. It’s not just that they miss the nuances of the texts or the niceties of translation but, more importantly, they impose on them a childish worldview. When people try to graft a child’s understanding onto an adult perspective, the results are predictably distorted. The two just don’t fit together. The childish belief system becomes an add-on to the rest of life. Faith appears as just another obligation along with work, family, and other responsibilities that demand our time and energy, instead of an integral, core life-motivator.
Children can’t adequately grasp the depth of analogical concepts. They try to understand them as though they were the everyday ideas derived from their experience. For them, God appears as a bearded old man up in the sky, sitting on a throne, and sending bad people to hell. Heaven becomes a place above the clouds where God lives, surrounded by angels with wings and saints with halos and harps, where everybody is happy and wears long white robes. There’s a big gate where Saint Peter stands at a podium checking off people on his naughty or nice list. Hell is somewhere down below where there’s fire and the devil and demons with horns, tails, and pitchforks make the bad people that God sent down there suffer forever … which is a very, very long time. Obviously, none of this has any relationship to an adult life. Is it any wonder that people of that mindset discard a faith that has no relevance to their lives?
All the language of faith is analogical. Faith words only point at and suggest a deeper reality. Take God, for example. Undeniably, we refer to the source and ground of all that is as God, even though there’s nothing in our human experience that enables us to comprehend adequately what that means. How could we make sense of a source and ground of being that itself lies beyond existence? God must be beyond existence as we know it, yet it’s unthinkable that the source and ground of spacetime should be utterly divorced from space and time. Likewise, it’s absurd to think that the source and ground of life should be lifeless and inert. So why is it so difficult for people to accept that the source and ground of all consciousness should himself be conscious and possess all the powers of consciousness that we enjoy?
And what about heaven? That, too, is analogical. The gospels speak of it as the Kingdom or Reign of God or the Kingdom of heaven. They all refer to the same world of meaning. To be a part of a kingdom and under the reign of a sovereign means that a person is a citizen of that kingdom, regardless of where they are. Heaven, then, is not a place. It has neither territory nor location. Heaven is the state of belonging and being subject to God, the source and ground of our being. It means that our consciousness—our intellect, will, and imagination—are aligned with God’s. Entering the Kingdom of heaven means being at one with the source and ground of all existence, and therefore being at one with reality.
We don’t start out on our life’s journey at one with reality. We’re born into our own individual, isolated universes, and yet we’re wholly dependent on others for our well-being. That dependence causes us fear and anxiety. We do whatever we can to control all those factors we depend upon through arguments, manipulation, or force, if necessary. We are deeply aware of our fragility and so we give our trust only rarely and with great trepidation. However, as adults, we come to realize that, without the ability to trust, we remain locked up in our own separate and dysfunctional realities. If heaven is learning to make peace with the reality outside of ourselves and God, its source and ground, then hell is being locked inside, away from that world, prisoners of our own illusions by our own choice. That’s why it’s so hard to enter the Kingdom of Heaven—the realm of reality—because it means forsaking the fearful world of our own creation.
Here we are at the Solemnity of All Saints. Once again, the concept of “saint’ is an analogical term, and to understand it, we need to ditch the third-grader. “Saint” is simply an anglicized version of the Latin word, sanctus, meaning “holy.” That attribute—holy—is applied specifically to God and to anything infused with the divine Presence. In other words, one who is holy is immersed in reality, that is, the very being, life, and Spirit of God. Therefore, whatever is holy has been separated from the world of isolation, illusion and delusion. Those we acknowledge as saints are those who’ve fought the good fight, finished the race [cf. 2 Timothy 4:7], and have accepted, as much as is humanly possible, reality in all its forms, and have surrendered to it.
I have here a copy of the four-volume Butler’s Lives of the Saints. We’ve all heard the stories of their lives and been encouraged to emulate them. Yet, if you were to read many of their stories, you’d find very little you’d want to emulate. Most of them were women and men of extremes. The one thing we could discover in all of them, however, is an intense commitment to fidelity. They were heroically faithful to the mission to which all of them were called. That is, to become authentically real. You don’t become a saint by trying to be somebody different. You can only do so by being radically true to your deepest self. Saint Irenaeus in the second century put it this way: “The glory of God is humankind fully alive.
In today’s gospel, we heard the Beatitudes. They’re the bedrock of our spirituality because they’re the blueprint for living authentically, and true spirituality is creating for oneself an honest relationship with reality. If you wish, you may capitalize the “R” in Reality because, as we’ve seen, Reality is the expression of God. Is becoming a saint something unobtainable for us less-than-heroic citizens of the Kingdom? Not at all. In fact, becoming a saint should be the goal of every sincere person. It means becoming as fully as possible the woman or man we were created to be. We’re not there yet, but we’re on our way. And today we celebrate our heroes, all those, known and unknown, who’ve made it. We see in them the persons we long to be: not just holy, but whole.
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