Sometimes we are asked to look outside our little track, our rationalized, sleek zones of understanding- of those things which we cannot comprehend this side of death. Sometimes it is the suffering we see in others or the suffering we go through ourselves- and sometimes it is simply loving and knowing another person who does not agree with us.
How do you love a person whose very sight upon life and death is diametrically opposed to yours? How do you suppress the desire, the apparent NEED to change them so that they fit inside your track? How do you do this without psychologically punching them into submission? How do you maintain your own sanity, the features of your own face in the face of another?
This kind of meeting, the crashing of different minds, is frightening to us all. Our beliefs are questioned, and beaten up; our dogmas must bear the brunt of relentless waves, and like a wave-break wall, will either stand the test or crumble into the sea, taking our security with it. We are frightened when we are not sure of God, and of how we understand Him. We are frightened most especially the more we have constructed our own belief system, independent of a communal tradition. We are all, all of us, religious. People believe in something, inevitably: themselves, the sun, the fact that they can think, anthropomorphic gods, or the true God. So it is not the fact of ‘religious’ or not, but rather the kind of religion that makes the difference.
There are people who are not frightened, though. These live on opposite ends of the metaphysical spectrum: either they are ensconced in a religious and cultural tradition which is more like Plato’s Sparta: an entity of individuals melded together by the welded iron of laws and eyes, a nightmare of certainty- or they are Saints.
Saints. They live an exaggerated life inside, they are idealists and ideologues: but of Love, not politics. They are embedded in society like jewels in a cotton tapestry, they are those who dream big of loving a God who loves them, with everything the four loves (agape, eros, storge, philia) can offer. They are extremists, and they have no fear, except for the original sin of pride. So they work to become the nada of St. John of the Cross- to become the humblest and the most forgotten: and thus are they drawn to those considered nothing in the eyes of the rest of society, those in the gutters. They see the Lord of Heaven and Earth suffering in the trash heap. In the quest to forget self in the great ocean of God, they look to their Ideal, Christ who “humbled Himself, leaving all glory behind, taking the form of a servant”. In this, the beautiful synchronicity of the Lord becomes apparent: as they humble themselves, and lose their only fear, they become more like Christ, like God. But they do not know this. They only know Love: and bear with joy the suffering and the meeting of those who hate them because their very existence of Love makes anything else held dear look empty( those who are clinging to other things cannot bear the bright light shone on their emptiness).
A saint turns an open, loving and fearless face on the other who does not see the way they do: they are totally free, because they are the power of God, the power of love. They are already lost to self, they have nothing else to lose, and yet their souls are carried quietly and safely in the arms of God and they are more themselves than they would be if they clung to their atomized existence in this life. A saint faces the other and looks at them: really sees them. Most people only see each other through their own need-filters, their own selfish clingings, their own scars and fears: they do not truly see the other, and so they are blind. A saint sees because Christ has cured them of blindness by enabling them to die to themselves. They have no filter save that of the love of God.
We are in the time of the year of the saints. The Church placed the feast of All Saints’ today, November first: why? We are in the waning of the physical earth, the low point on the swing between Summer and Winter Solstices. Here, the Chinese say, the veil between the natural world and the supernatural thins to a point of transparency and openness. Perhaps this is true, as in many cultures of the world, one can see attempts to deal with the uncomfortable feeling of closeness to the unseen in the different religions: Halloween was, before the Church stepped in, a veritable festival of the attempt to appease the entities in the darkness in many cultures. Beginning with saint-missionaries like Bishop Patrick, the Church stepped in to bring Christ’s power and the reality of redemption from the darkness, right at the high point of fear: All Saint’s Day. Halloween actually is ‘Hallow’s Eve’- the vigil Mass for the feast of All Saints. Yet, it is still an uncomfortable time for many people, where death and fear is celebrated and made a joke, where modern-day occultists try to bring back the glory days of evil. But the Saints march in this dark night, in their fearless love, reminding us that death is but a reminder and a visible proof of the supernatural realities: for who has not seen a corpse and known, known in the center of one’s being, that something is gone: this is a visceral and spiritual experience of the reality of the soul as part of yet separable from the body.
And “the death of His holy ones is precious in the sight of the Lord”. Strange, but not when one thinks about it: at the death of a saint, the veil between that soul, who has lived exaggerated love for the love of God, and the Beloved, is finally torn and complete unity becomes possible. Many saints, like St. Therese of Liseux were seen to pass through the veil, to yet be in the body but seeing and experiencing already the reality on the other side. One only has to look at the ethereal, uncorrupted face of St. Bernadette in her glass coffin to understand. It is a look beyond human beauty.
So as we live through these days of the thinning veil, and many of us feel the disturbance, the darkness, we can turn in joy to the saints; we can then begin, on November 2, (All Souls’) to become the saints we are all called to be: we can pray for all souls without fear- and ask to love with the exaggeration of God, because it is His gift and His gift alone. We can do nothing but use our free wills to be willing: and look at this life from the immense perspective of eternity, rather than looking in fear or in ignorance at eternity from the narrow perspective of this life.
