Ssaints

Yes - I can spell but there is always that slightly strange conversation which we have somewhere around All Saints Day about Saints with a capital and saints with a small letter at the beginning.

I wonder what most people would say if you asked them - what is a saint - I suspect the answer would be people who help other people, people who pray a lot, people who do good things or people who go to Church every day. There is a social idiom to call people saints based solely on their external behaviour - she was a saint often expresses the kindness and generosity of a person with or without any apparent religious belief.

Saints with a capital letter are people who the Church has recognised as especially holy - but it does not take much reading of hagiography to realise that many of those who bear the title saint would not be the sort of people you would want to go down to the pub with on a Sunday afternoon - many were eccentric and some downright unpleasant.

The process for being made a Saint stopped in the Church of England when we split from Rome in the sixteenth century - since then anyone who we consider especially holy has been given what is called a commemoration. The Roman Catholic Church still makes saints - and as you might have picked up from the news has changed the rules and regulations for doing so - under the new fast track system the number of miracles attributed to a saint has been halved and the old "Devil's Advocate" the person who presented a contrary picture of the candidate for Sainthood as a sort of fail safe, has gone. When historians look back at the later 20th Century they might be tempted to think that there was period of religious awakening - looking at the number of new saints - when in fact it was a much more mundane rule change which let a lot of extra people in.

And that is really the fact of the matter - whilst Saints are good and holy, there are also plenty of good and holy folk who never become Saints, who never have a day named after them. Saints are like markers along the way and offer inspiration to those walking in the way of Christ - but that inspiration is not always exclusive.

When St. Paul writes to his Churches, he addresses the whole congregation as the saints in.....and adds a place name. It is good for us to think about this - although we are not in Corinth or Ephesus we are still the saints in, still called to Godly living, still called to display attributes of holiness.

These attributes of holiness are all the things we might expect courage, kindness, empathy...you could come up with a long list but what I want to suggest seperates all the saints from people who are just doing nice and good things are that saints see the world through God's eyes and that is not an easy thing. If we take every situation which we encounter and ask God to show us how God sees it - two things happen. The first is that the everyday suddenly becomes alive and holy - we see that God really is all in all. The little things we do become saintly acts - every time we say good morning or give someone a hug - this making all of life somehow caught up in God is wonderful and saintly.

The other thing that tends to happen is that we see things from a different and often larger angle. What had seemed simple and easy to point the finger at - say people behaving badly - suddenly becomes a bigger issue, not of blaming the individual but of healing wounds which lie deep in society - we find ourselves caught up in things - we are part both of problems and solutions because as the family of humanity - as those who are created - we are all linked together.

And we are linked with all who have gone before us in this path too - all those who have sought to look at the world through God's eyes and have based their action on that vision. The Communion of Saints (and I rather like to think that all of us get a capital letter when we are received into God's arms) rejoices with us - saints on earth and Saint above - all looking to God, asking God to work through us, and praying to catch divine vision - seeing the world as God sees it and acting on that sight.