Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

All Saints

This Sunday we celebrated All Saints Day at the little Anglican church I go to. It got me thinking about just what it means to believe in saints, and whether it has any connection with the taboo of all good Protestants everywhere on speaking with the dead.

The culture of saints is strongest in the Catholic church, I think, but as a new Anglican (I suppose I am; I mean I go there and I take communion, but I was baptised a non-denominational Christian in a Pentecostal context; and I have sympathies with a wide range of Christian tendencies from Quaker to Baptist to Anabaptist to Trappist to Spiritualist; the list gets bewilderingly long and yet remains bewilderingly Christian as I grow older) -- as a person new to the Anglican tradition, they do still stick out. St Mary's Addington is dedicated to guess who, and the phrase "May Mary and all the saints pray for us" in our liturgy is beautiful, but not one I'd encountered much in the evangelical-charismatic Pentecostal/Baptist/Vineyard world. (What I used to consider 'genuine Bible Christianity' while somehow filtering out that there do exist much older organisations that worship Jesus; or worship the Father and believe in Jesus, depending on how exactly one wants to phrase a distinction which is complicated and simple at the same time. But more on that later, perhaps.)

The most famous saint (if you don't count Jesus himself; and is he not a human?) is of course Mary (of Nazareth, not Magdala; though the other Mary is getting more popular press lately). I never used to get into Mary (you practically have to hand in your badge as a Protestant of *any* kind if you express interest in her; at least in any active saintly capacity, as anything other than a nice Palestinian girl who had a superstar child). But there's a tapestry of Mary on the wall and it's one I really like. Plus I've read a few stories about Marian visitations, or near-death experiences, and they seem to have similar resonances. She sounds, by all accounts, as if she's a very real, very loving person who has interesting things to do.

How does one square the idea of there being actually existing saints - in the Catholic sense of ordinary people who actually have God's ear, or some kind of permission to violate the Prime Directive separating heaven and earth - authority to listen and intervene on their own behalf?

How, when one comes right down to it, does one square the idea of Jesus of Nazareth, an otherwise perfectly ordinary person, being such an entity as 'the Christ' - whatever exactly that means - but seems to involve having keys to all the locked doors of the universe, at once, everywhere?

From a Jewish or Islamic perspective, the idea of a human being 'the Son of God' is as blasphemous as the idea of a human 'ascending to Godhood' sounds to a Christian; or as praying to a saint and expecting a miracle not in God's name, but in that of a mere human, sounds to a Protestant. But why do we believe in one, and not the other? If Jesus is truly human, are his friends not also human? If Jesus truly has the Christ power or title or role (and again, I can't really comprehend what that might be; except that it makes Superman, the Silver Surfer and Santa Claus look like wannabes) - then does he also give that to his friends?

What does 'to be a Christian' mean other than to have some portion of what it is that Jesus had (and presumably still has)? Or can such a thing as 'unity with the Divine' even exist in portions less than the whole lot? Can it even be given singly, to one person here and there and not to the whole intersecting mass of humanity, everywhere, across all time and forever? Can God Himself be divided? By definition (at least by the Jewish definition which Christianity inherited) I'm not sure the One God can be anything other than One.

And what does being 'a saint' mean other than the humility to listen to cries for help and the authority to perform miracles - either in this life or the next?

Or: are saints merely a lapse, an error, a slide from true faith in the One Living God Who Alone Answers Prayer back to polytheism? Are saints a back door to necromancy, consultation with the unquiet dead? If (and I am not now speaking hypothetically) - if an entity appears in a psychic channel (which is a fancy term for saying 'a voice speaks to you in your mind') - claiming to be a saint, and giving reasonably good evidence for in fact being that saint, and doing the things saints are popularly supposed to do (which is: answering questions, giving knowledge, performing miracles, pointing the way to Jesus, or to Christ, or to God): if this happens, how should we react to it?

If there are no saints, and if all contact between the dead and the living is forbidden, the province of evil, then presumably any entity claiming to be such a thing would be either an illusion or worse. But what if it just turned up in your head, unexpected, uninvited? Can evil powers do that? I do believe that there do exist limited spiritual entities or powers or personalities who aren't good friends. But all indications are that getting in touch with one of them requires first doing serious damage to one's soul; much like bacteria get into a wound, or the old myth about vampires and invitations. If there is bad stuff around, just how thin is the veil between this world and the next, and how afraid should we be of sneezing - or thinking - in the wrong place and attracting demons?

But it's so tempting. The Anglo-Catholics have some really neat saints. St Anthony of Padua - patron saint of lost things. How do you get that job, anyway? Is it like you go up to heaven and say 'you know what, now I understand my eternal vocation. Healing, ennh. I've always just wanted to help people find... stuff. You know, missing stuff. Car keys, that sort of thing.'

It's probably a sign of my inherent geekiness that I could see myself actually signing up for that. It sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

Well, that or psychopomp. Escorting people into the afterlife would rock. 'Hi, guess what, you're dead. Now you're going to find out what's really going on. Trust me, it'll blow your mind.' It would be like the afterlife equivalent of preschool educator. They'd be all totally random little bundles of joy and you'd just almost want to die all over again to get that seeing it for the first time feeling.

Or saint of matching lost socks.

Is there an opening for a saint of PHP debugging? Or did that come from the other place?