Saints on the Run

All this weekend our calendar celebrates the triple feasts of All Saints – Halloween, or All Hallows Eve, on Friday; All Saints on Saturday; and All Faithful Departed today. There’s a lot hanging on these feast days: themes of ancestors, the changing seasons, the thin veil between this world and the next. But All Saints is a feast day with a lot of room in it: it’s one where we remember all the saints named and unnamed of the church, and where we also know ourselves again to be part of the communion of saints past, present, and yet to come. This Sunday is for all of us.

Maybe because of living in New York City, where All Saints Sunday also happens to be the day of the New York Marathon – or maybe even more so because of the races I’ve run – I think of this in running terms. It’s a metaphor that crops up repeatedly in scripture: Isaiah promises that we will run and not grow weary, because God will sustain us; Paul talks about running the race that is set before us. One prayer for this Sunday asks that we may run without stumbling to obtain God’s heavenly promises. It’s a long-distance run, this life of faith. Being a saint doesn’t come easy.

But just what is a saint? It’s a term we use in three different ways, really.

There are people in the history of the church we call saints, St Francis or St Paul or St Teresa, people whose lives showed heroic faith and miraculous strength, who left a legacy of greatness, who had a deep influence on the church through their teaching and preaching and writing and example. They’re like the elite runners in the marathon, the ones whose whole lives are dedicated to the sport, who are at the head of every pack in the great races around the world. In our tradition we look to these saints as models, getting to know them as people through their writings and stories.

We also remember the less famous folks, our parents or grandparents or dear friends who have died and gone before us, whose lives in some way touched ours and gave us an example to follow. They will never make the larger church calendar, but they made a difference to us. So we remember them with love and gratitude – part of the larger communion of saints, part of our commemorating All Souls Day as we pray for and remember all the dead. They’re like the pacesetters of the marathon, those whom we look to as we run to help us run the race at a good pace for our abilities, who push us to do our best.

And then we also use the term ‘saints’ to apply to all of us, all who are part of the body of Christ, the church. This is one of the Sundays in the church year when we baptize new members, bringing new saints into the community of the church, so we also renew our own baptismal vows. We talk about the communion of saints, all of those in the past, those of today, and all of those still to come into the larger universal church. In the race, we’re the mid-packers and the ones bringing up the rear, muddling along through the course as we go.

This is where the term starts getting a little baggier, of course. If we have heroic saints, and saints we loved and lost, and we’re all saints too, then – well, what does it mean to be a saint?

Thomas Merton, the midcentury Catholic theologian and writer, describes a conversation in his first memoir The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton was struggling with his writing, and his friend Robert Lax tried to get him to focus on what he was really trying to do with it, asking, ‘What do you want to be, anyway?’ Merton, who had just recently converted to the faith, answered, ‘I want to be a good Catholic.’ Lax said, ‘What does that mean?’ And when Merton couldn’t really answer, Lax said, ‘What you should say is that you want to become a saint.’ How am I supposed to do that? Merton asked. Lax said simply, ‘By wanting to.’ And indeed, this became Merton’s focus for the rest of his life.

So do we want to be saints? Again, we might be confused by the meaning of the term. Thomas Merton is a saint, although not an official one. The elite saints seem like a different category of person altogether from us. It’s like being a new 5k runner and trying to model ourselves on the winner of the Western States 100 miler. We’re never going to get there, so why try?

Those saints we have known, whose lives have touched ours in positive ways, might feel a little more accessible. The people who have formed us in our faith: being this kind of saint means thinking about our legacy, what people will remember of us later and how we will influence our community after we are gone. A tall order, but one we can aim at.

And then we think about the third meaning, that identity we already have as members of the body of Christ. We’re saints already in that sense; we’re all part of this race, one way or another. The question is just how well we want to run it.

Of course, watch out – there’s many a story of the couch potato who decides to start running 5k’s and winds up training for a marathon. When you start, you’ve no idea how far you might end up going. Running long distances is in large part psychological – you need to train your body, of course, but you also have to simply want to keep going. So too with being a saint – you need to train your habits and practices, but you also, as Merton realized, have to want to be a saint.

In a few moments we’ll all renew our baptismal vows together. We’ll take up again the statements of our faith in God, and the promises that we make about our own behavior as we live out our beliefs. We say those words all together, but they’re very individual promises – promises that each one of us makes and tries to fulfill on our own, with God’s help. Continuing in the worship and prayer of the community. Resisting evil and repenting when we mess up. Proclaiming the gospel by word and example. Seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving others as ourselves. Striving for justice and promoting the dignity of every human being. That’s work for each one of us. We may be all running the race together, but at the same time, we each ‘run our own race.’ We each have a task, a set of tasks, laid out before us, a part to play.

As Jesus teaches it, the life of a saint really boils down to loving God and loving our neighbor. The path of faith, of following Jesus as a disciple, demands these two things. And we can always grow in how well we do them. The great saints are those who were suffused utterly with love for God and others; the rest of us are still learning how. But the difference is really only one of degree, for the task is the same – training ourselves bit by bit to love. Training ourselves to put God before other gods in our life, whether they be money or success or family or whatever else we’ve put in the wrong place of prominence. Training ourselves to reach out in love to others, seeking Jesus in them even when they’re difficult and hard for us to like. Training ourselves to live our lives so that we value the welfare of others, even others halfway around the world, over our own convenience. Training ourselves to give to the financial needs of the church and its mission, as we are doing in our stewardship campaign. Training ourselves to allow that God loves each and every one of us, beloved children of God.

Of course, even with all of this, it’s not our doing good things that will get us to holiness – it’s God who makes us holy. God meets our desire and our half-baked attempts and does what is needed to bring us the rest of the way. We run the race only with God’s help – God as our aid station, our cheer squad, the wind at our back and the strength in our stride. And God as the one who receives us at the finish, ready to give us the medal and the great embrace, saying, ‘Well run!’

So today we celebrate all of us, beginners and pros alike, in this Kingdom of God race. We give thanks for God putting us on the path; we challenge ourselves to go further. And little by little we grow in love of God and our neighbor; little by little, we continue on the course. Little by little, we become more and more saints of God.