“[The saints] have a quality which sets them off from the rest of us as Bach is set off from a composer of television jingles. Yes, they are all geniuses. Yes, again, they are all excessive. But they are something else. They are literal. Literalness is the fork in the upward road where they part company with ordinary people.

“And it is the Gospels, the solid, explicit Word which they take literally.”

Phyllis McGinley, Saint-Watching (1961)

Dear Saints,

The Bangor Daily News reported in mid-October that Pope Benedict XVI is expected to canonize Blessed Mother Theodore Guerin, a 19^th century Frenchwoman who presided over a community of nuns in Indiana. Canonization in the Roman Catholic Church is the outcome of a long process. The candidate’s alleged virtues and miracles are subjected to close scrutiny. Mother Guerin’s canonization will mean that, in public worship, her intercessions will be asked for; churches can be named for her; Masses may be said in her honor; she will get a day in the calendar; and pictures of her will show her face surrounded by a halo.

The early martyrs, including most of the Apostles, were the first to be venerated by the Church. (Veneration is not the same as worship or adoration.) Then similar honors were given to “confessors,” Christians who had been persecuted for their faith, but not killed. Other deceased Christians began to be added to the list, those who had sacrificed much for Our Lord or whose examples were considered worthy of imitation. The formal, centrally regulated process of canonization came into being about 1,000 years ago, as the veneration of certain local saints began to spread from one country to another.

We Anglicans don’t canonize. We have days in the calendar to honor the Virgin Mary, the Apostles, and certain other individuals mentioned in the New Testament. We have inherited many of the saints canonized by the Roman Catholic Church prior to the Reformation, with a certain partiality toward the saints of the British Isles who have given Anglican Christianity its distinctive flavor. Instead of canonization, we have a procedure for adding names to our calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. The most recent General Convention approved the addition of Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first woman to be ordained an Anglican priest (January 24); Archbishop Janani Luwum of Uganda, tortured to death on the orders of Idi Amin (February 17); William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944 (November 6); and the author C. S. Lewis (November 22). Convention also authorized commemorations for Harriet Tubman of the Underground Railroad (July 20); Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (May 17); and Joan of Arc (May 30).

The Church of Our Father typically celebrates “feasts” (holy days) of Our Lord, the Virgin Mary, and the Apostles, and some of the “Lesser Feasts,” at our Wednesday morning Eucharists. One of the challenges of preaching about the Apostles is that, except for the big names like Peter, Paul, James, and John, the New Testament says almost nothing about them other than to mention their names. Most of them don’t even have speaking lines in the Gospels. But reflection on the scheduled Bible readings can still lead us into Jesus’ presence, however little information we might have about the particular saints we happen to be honoring on those days.

Between the Apostles and Joan of Arc (in the flow of the centuries), we come across a group of 4^th century bishops with names like Athanasius of Alexandria, Egypt (May 2); Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea (June 14); his brother, Gregory of Nyssa (March 9); and another Gregory (of Nazianzus; May 9). They are mainly remembered for their defense of orthodox, or Nicene, Christianity against Arianism. Arius, a magnetic Libyan priest, taught that Jesus was not the eternal Son, but was a special, sinless creature, the highest of the creatures, appointed because of his virtue to be God’s favored servant. Jesus was not fully God, according to Arius, but more of a demi-god, similar perhaps to Hercules.

It is hard for us 21^st century Episcopalians to grasp what was at stake in that controversy. I commonly hear clergy dismissing it all as an obscure argument over “mere words.” In the debate over the relationship between Jesus’ divine and human natures, the Greek words in question were homoousios, “of the same Being (or substance),” and homoiousios, “of a similar substance.” The difference in spelling is one iota (ι), the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet. At the Council of Nicea (325 a.d.), homoousios won the day. From the Nicene and subsequent Church councils, we get the words we say about Jesus every Sunday in the Creed: “…God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”

But over a period lasting 60 years or more, Arianism went underground briefly, and then rose to dominance with the support of the Imperial family. Athanasius was sent into exile five times. Whenever he was banished, the baptized refused to acknowledge the Arian bishops appointed in his place. The Arians tended to be “ecumenical,” insisting that all should be united in the celebration of the Eucharist, no matter what they believed about Jesus Christ. The Nicene Christians stayed away from Arian eucharists and fed dogs with bread from the Arian altars. The Arians insisted on the inviolability of diocesan boundaries. The Nicenes believed that, as long as the Arians preached a pagan Jesus, their sacraments and ordinations were invalid and it was necessary to cross diocesan boundaries to rescue the Christians in Arian jurisdictions.

Arius had a certain logical consistency and an assortment of Bible verses on his side. But Arianism failed to answer the question of how human beings are saved. An Arian might strive to become Jesus’ equal in goodness, but could never hope to know God as he really is. It is a futile program of self-help. But the Nicene answer is grace, God’s gift of himself to us, and God’s self-revelation. God, the eternal Son of God, became the Son of Man– fully human– to bring about our adoption as the children of God, and to restore the image of God in us fallen creatures.

If Arius had won, there never would have been a Church of Our Father.

It seems to me that today we are witnessing in the Church a contest between Nicene Christianity and something else. I’m not sure what the “something else” is, exactly, but it is not Nicene Christianity. Understanding what happened in the 4^th century might help us find our way through the present challenges. It is possible that the Lord is about to let us go through a time of testing and discipline to humble us fractious Christians and restore us at length to unity with himself and each other.

I used to find it annoying to try to keep up with all the additions to our Lesser Feasts and Fasts. Now I marvel at the variety of ways it is possible to live as a Christian saint. As we celebrate this All Saints’ Day, it would be worth our while to try to appreciate the contributions and zeal of those saints with strange names who, more than 16 centuries ago, took their stand against one iota. And thanks be to God for all his saints who have taken the Gospel literally!

Faithfully,

Chuck Bradshaw +