All Saints - Fr Damian Feeney

This sermon was preached at Worcester College, Oxford, on the feast of All Saints 2009 by the Vice-Principal, Fr Damian Feeney.

First of all, thank you for the kind invitation to be with you this evening as we celebrate the Communion of Saints. Part of the difficulty with this feast is that it’s actually quite difficult to define, as it were, the terms of the engagement. On one level, today is about those who have attained to the beatific vision in Heaven: those whose self-emptying enables Christ’s presence to increase, while ego decreases; and whose lives are lives of many dimensions, lived to the full, since they are lives lived in full consciousness of God’s grace, mercy and glory.

Throughout the church’s year we learn of the qualities and stories of specific saints throughout the church’s year, seeing those lives as reflections of the glory of Christ himself; and then tonight we consider the Saints en masse, in what Eric Milner-White referred to as the multitude which none can number – a glorious image which resonates within Isaiah’s vision of new heavens, a new earth - words later on re-stated in the book of Revelation.

Within that multitude we celebrate not only those whose sanctity is well known to the church on earth, but also those whose saintliness is known to God alone, or who, whilst lacking the formal processes of canonization, have been saintly people in local communities, familiar contexts, perhaps in our own personal stories. So we are drawn to a more general reflection upon the nature of holiness itself – of what it means to be holy, both in the contexts of history and in the confusions of the present day.

All these lives – the well known, the un-remembered, the half-acknowledged – are lives lived out in response to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the image of the invisible God. Many good, holy and faithful men and women came before Christ, and in their way point to him, but they were lives lived in messianic hope rather than a sense of response to Christ’s witness. Isaac Watts, who penned the memorable words for tonight’s anthem, reminds us of the truth that saints point to Jesus;

We ask them whence their victory came,
They, with one united breath,
Ascribe the conquest to the Lamb,
Their triumph to his death.

That’s all well and good, and saints form a considerable part of the connection between Jesus’ story and ours; we are sustained by stories of saintly living, whether they be distant or closer to home, because they are stories shaped by Jesus’ story; we cheerfully acknowledge that, human nature being what it is, the fact and detail about a saint’s life can become obscured over time by legend and embroidery in much the same way that we treat the cult of celebrity today. Maybe we don’t mind that too much, since it’s part of our essential recognition of the saint – and therefore a sign of love – to treat them in this way.

Perhaps we should also pause at this point to acknowledge that the doings and dealings of the saints are not always popular: holiness can, in some forms, be a downright irritant. I think it was Clive James who once observed ‘You can always tell a person who lives for others by the looks on the faces of the others.’

If that’s true, then the appeal of the saint is far from unconditional. Sanctity is attractive to some, unappealing to others. To some the way of the saint stands in the way of freedom rather than pointing to it. Newman’s portrayal of the demons in The Dream of Gerontius paints the saint as antithetical to the notion of independent thinking and intellectual freedom for which an august College such as this self-evidently stands. Newman penned these words for the demon’s mouths:

The mind bold and independent,
The purpose free,
So we are told, must not think to have the ascendant
What's a saint? One whose breath doth the air taint before his death;
A bundle of bones, which fools adore...when life is o'er;

These are words which still resonate, given the recent visit of the relics of St. Therese of Lisieux to this country and city. Here relics were accorded the kind of attention normally only given to those at the height of celebrity – an estimated 300,000 visitors across the country – and, according to one pilgrim interviewed by the Times Online, (and clearly anxious to plug in to the prevailing zeitgeist,) ‘She’s got the X Factor.’

To others, she was indeed a bundle of bones, adored by fools. In contemporary Britain, this is the theme which will not go away. That which is holy to some is mistrusted in a new and overt way by others in a way which would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. It is a debate being conducted freely, in newspapers and on the internet, on radio and television, on the shelves of Blackwells and (no doubt) in common rooms.

The task of defining sanctity today is therefore, as ever, a challenging one. On one level, the counter cultural nature of sanctity means that it is what it has always been – an appeal to the divine, defying opposing tides and currents, to risking unpopularity, or worse. It’s well known that there were more Martyrs created in the last century than in any other before it – we at St. Stephen’s House were reminded of this last week as we commemorated those who lost their lives during the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – an historical event which receives relatively little attention when compared to the Holocaust or to Stalinist Purges, but where over one million Christians lost their lives.

We should remember, too, that Martyrs, in many instances, died not only at the hands of those who wished to kill Christianity, but also at the hands of fellow Christians in conflict and disagreement. Oxford is full of examples of the holy who chose their historical period less wisely, whether you gravitate to Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer, or Nichols, Yaxley, Belson and Pritchard. All of them encountered an understanding that matters of faith and belief were important – that they, alongside of the political trends of the day, were the things which shaped lives, and were sufficiently important to need to silence those who pointed in another direction. Today’s church is operating in a very different context, where apathy and open ridicule are more likely to be the response.

One indispensible trait in the genuinely holy is a disturbing, prophetic edge which can lead to uncomfortable encounter. To try to follow Christ at all is an invitation out of places of comfort into wilderness places: the saints are those who, in word and action, showed an integration of living and believing in which no part of their lives were immune from God, where nothing was held back, where the free response sought to equal the measure of God’s generous gift in Christ. Their words, lives, deeds and writings beckon humanity out of the darkness of soulless, inanimate living into the fullness of life which is the very glory of God.

Saints are good for all of us, whether we are of faith or not. For the faithful, they point to the very root of our being, who is God himself. For the seeker after truth, they remind us that in a celebrity – ridden world of narcissism and veneer they represent the humility which lies at the heart of all compassionate human dialogue. Their calling is, of course, the calling of all Christian people – God’s desire that we should be numbered among them, living signs of the reality of His presence, activity and love in his world. May their lives, their witnesses, and their prayers surround our steps as we journey on, until Christ is all in all.

All Saints - Fr Andrew Davison

This homily was given by Fr Andrew Davison at both Fairacres Convent and St Stephen's House on this year's Solemnity of All Saints.

I begin this sermon, uncharacteristically, with reference to an electronica remix of a speech by Winston Churchill. I have an MTh student to thank for this particular piece of music, of a kind so far outside my listening habits that I really have no idea how to begin to describe it.

It works with Churchill’s 1941 speech to the allied delegates. ‘Every stain of [Hitler’s] insipid, corroding fingers’ intones the prime minister against what I take to be a drum and bass background ‘will be sponged and purged’. What a perfect beginning, I thought, for the sermon I want to preach on All Saints’ Day.

Except that Churchill did not talk about Hitler’s insipid fingers. He did not say ‘insipid’ but rather ‘infected’. All the same, he could have said ‘insipid fingers’. That would have been startling, but true. It would also have served my purposes better. It is not the infection of evil that I take as my theme today, but rather that evil is insipid and goodness is the opposite. Evil is insubstantial and goodness is solid.

Today we celebrate the saints. We celebrate holiness, and with holiness we celebrate fullness of being and solidity of personhood.

God is good, and God is real. To share God’s goodness is to share his reality. Quite simply, to be holy is to be more real. This is not a statement that would go down well in Oxford’s philosophy faculty, but it is true. To be holy is to be more real. It is theme that has been explored in quite a bit of Christian art and literature.

Take, for instance, The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. In that book, goodness is so real, and evil is so insipid, that when the residents of hell take a day-trip to heaven the grass there cuts their feet. Even the grass of heaven is weightier than those who have chosen to make themselves evil.

As another example, think of the ring wraiths in The Lord of the Rings. After years of evil they are hardly there any more, just shadows beneath their cloaks. That is more, the ring wraiths are almost indistinguishable. Evil is dull. It blunts the edge of God-given individuality.

The evil of the ring wraiths has reduced them to the level of the same. Goodness does exactly the opposite. Goodness makes thing more what they are, not less, more individual, not less.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with the saints, whom we celebrate today. There is no more diverse and characterful collection of people than the company of saints. The saints are individual, different, interesting.

Fra Angelico knew a thing or two about sanctity. He is a saint himself, or at least a blessed. He made the point about the characterfulness of holiness clear in his paintings. You will find at the top of [this post] a reproduction of part of one of his paintings. The original is in the National Gallery in London. It shows the saints around Christ enthroned in glory. What I love about this picture is that the saints are so individual, so characterful, so full of particularity. They abound with being, reality and character. This is exactly right.

The great Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen wrote only one opera. It was about a saint, St Francis of Assisi. It wasn’t like many operas people had heard before. Messiaen was tackled about this. There is disappointingly little sin in your work, Monsieur Messiaen. His reply: ‘sin isn’t interesting, dirt isn’t interesting. I prefer flowers. I left out sin.' [Sin isn't interesting. I prefer flowers The Guardian 29 August 2008].

Sin isn’t interesting. This is an important point. We protest against violence in film or on television. We object to obscenity in broadcasting. Rightly so. But it is just as problematic that evil is glamorised in films and on television. The truth is entirely the opposite. There is nothing glamorous about evil. As Messiaen said, ‘sin is boring’. Goodness is interesting. [Weil, Simon Gravity and Grace, pp. 62-3].

Moving on, as our reading from Wisdom put it just now, only to the foolish do God’s holy ones seem to have died. Really, ‘their hope is full of immortality’. Whilst evil saps life; goodness confirms it. Holiness, we might say, is healthy. Sanctity conquers death.I once had exactly this conversation with the wife of a student at Merton. I was working on my DPhil and I got involved with leading an Alpha course. It seemed this thing might involve rather an idiosyncratic take on the Christian Faith. I thought it would be wise if I got in on the team that organised it. It’s amazing how much you can do by opening questions after the video with the line ‘well what do you think? Did that make any sense at all?’

One Alpha session fell on the Feast of St Alban and I made some comment about St Alban praying for us. ‘How on earth can he pray for us?’, the other Alpha leader asked, ‘he’s dead!’

Perhaps impertinently – she was a consultant anaesthetist – I replied ‘you are wrong because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God … [God] is God not of the dead, but of the living’. Only to the foolish to the saints seem to have died. They are full of life because they are full of goodness – they are full of the life of Christ, which can withstand death. The saints have a fullness of being which death cannot touch.

In that holiness, in that tangible reality, God is with us. Some time ago, in first century Palestine, God was with us, walking the earth. In the life of the world to come, ‘the home of God’ will be among mortals, as we are promised in our second reading. Now, in between, God is present with us in the Blessed Sacrament and he is present with us by his Holy Spirit. Nowhere is the presence of the Holy Spirit more obvious than in the holiness of the saints. In them we encounter the presence of God with us; we encounter in the reality of their holiness the reality of God.

Evil is dull and same-ish. Goodness is interesting and full of individuality. The evil men and women of history were insipid – even if Winston Churchill didn’t quite say it. Evil, though it blights our world, is insubstantial. Goodness, however, is solid. Goodness is joyful. It is so real that it hits you in the face. To this the saints bear witness.

My favourite saint put it rather well ‘the goodness of the good is stronger than evil in its wickedness’ [Virtuosius est bonum in bonitate quam in malitia maulm. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles III.7.6].