When I was in high school, I was on the track team. I was a relay runner and a sprinter. In addition to being a student athlete, I was also making a rather adult-ish commitment to my own spiritual life as a senior when I signed up to meet with a Jesuit spiritual director, Fr. Rowe. He was a quiet man, reliable for the long pauses, helping me to lace my thoughts together and find God’s presence in my emotions, in my life. November, near All Saints Day, we got into the stories about St. Ignatius, who was a criminal before he was a saint (fun fact), and I made a joke about how there was a saint for everything, even when you couldn’t find a parking spot in the dead of winter on the North Side of Chicago after 11 pm (it’s St. Catherine…try her, she’s amazing at this). After a few more chuckles and eye rolls about some of the weirder saint iconography and stories, Fr. Rowe said, “yes, all this, and…I like to think that the saints are all assembled in a great stadium, watching us ‘run the race’ (1 Cor 9: 24) and ‘press on toward the goal’ (Phil 3: 12) and they are all…cheering us on.” Cheering for us! While we ran laps around the stadium! This appealed to me greatly, as a runner, and I could see it. I could hear it!
I still love that image. The saints are rooting for us and they know we can do it, even when we want to give up, even when we are tired. If I learned anything from being a sprinter, it’s that we always have a little more in the tank to clear the finish line and feel confident that we gave everything we had. We surprise ourselves, and all the more so when we have a crowd of witnesses. If we need more support from the stands, we can look up while we run this one and, just like when you make eye contact with a friend or family member from the starting line or the stage, they will wave and hoot and holler because they are right behind you. They are encouraging you and believing in what you are capable of doing with your talent, your practice, your effort, your life. You may want to know their stories so that you might hear their voices calling out to you as you run, as you trip, as you stumble and right yourself and keep your eyes on that finish line.
In the month of November, the church celebrates and honors All Saints and All Souls. We remember the men and women who inspire us, and who have walked the path before us, however crooked or imperfectly, in faith. I think about all the saints whose lives and stories have ever meant anything to me: Saints Ignatius, Teresa of Avila, Francis, Clare, Patrick, Brigid, Barnabas…I think about my grandmothers, Alice and Nancy, and my grandfathers, George Louis and John, and certainly my excellent father, Robert. I think about my friend John who died when we were 20. I sometimes imagine ancestors I never knew, too. All of these holy men and women often were just people who “struggled exceptionally hard to turn a bad thing into a good one,” wrote Robert Coles, in the introduction to A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints. “I think if we are to understand saints,” he wrote, “we have to try to follow their lead. Imagine the worlds they never stopped imagining, never stopped reaching for…” Indeed.
“Don’t call me a saint,” said Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, “I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” We often say of the saints that their lives were rarefied, or their achievements beyond the reach and scope of our lives. Not so. Day does not want to be called a saint for that very reason. She seems to understand that as soon as she is a “saint” then we all say, look what she did. That’s saintly. I’m not a saint…when in fact, we are all saints, all possessed of the capacity to turn a bad thing into something good, to witness, to protect, to defend, to imagine worlds we want to live in, to reach for what is not yet but what we know can be, because we are, all of us, God’s beloved. We are all that special.
It is not what we believe that matters so much in the end. It is what we do based on what we believe that matters. How does believing in Jesus make us different? Sometimes we are pretty bad at being followers of Jesus because we know what he said, but we don’t act like it; we don’t do it. They did. They have hung up their track shoes and it is our turn on the track, taking the baton in the relay. And they are packing the stands with popcorn and peanuts in hand, cheering us on. It’s not that they did it, and became saints, and we aren’t like them. It’s that they did it so we know what’s possible, and we can do it too.
On Sunday, at the 10 am service, all families and children will assemble for worship together, and we will sing For All the Saints. “O blest communion, fellowship divine! We feebly struggle, they in glory shine; yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine. Alleluia, Alleluia!” All are one in God, for we all belong to God. We are in this together. Let us remember, and celebrate, and never feel that this world is too much for us or our fears and problems are too great, for we are not alone. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (Heb 12: 1). We got this. Amen.
Sarah Christopher
Associate Pastor
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