The Lure of Saints

"...Luther and the first Protestants tossed out the baby (tradition, devotions, pieties) with the bathwater (the belief that tradition, devotions, and pieties would justify one before God)....Faith became belief centered rather than practice centered, and belief and practice remain separate in many of our lives even today." -Jon M. Sweeney, The Lure of Saints: A Protestant Experience of Catholic Tradition.

I loved this book. At times I stumbled along trying to understand the incredible bizarre behavior that seems to characterize Saints (capital). I'm not sure how I feel about praying to (or more correctly, with) the Saints. But as Sweeney points out, Christ defeated death and if He did so, if we really believe He did so, then we cannot believe we are separated from other Christians by the grave. And while I think some have improperly idolized the saints, when we look at their lives, I see individuals who only wanted to point us to Jesus and did it with such intense passion, that we couldn't help but notice.

While I'm skeptical about the Roman Catholic process of beautification and canonization, I have to admire the care they take before thrusting someone up on a spiritual pedestal. Protestants would be wise to take more care in whom they emulate, because we tend to create Christian celebrities a little too easily and then be crushingly disappointed when they fail in their Christian walk. (Think of any number of high profile Christians and the end result.)

And who are we kidding? Protestants have their own saints, or what are Jim Eliot (and Elisabeth for that matter), Rick Warren, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Amy Carmichael, Jonathan Edwards, and C.S. Lewis? While our practice may be different, we certainly do elevate devoted followers of Christ. And I don't think we are wrong to do so.

I loved this by iconographer  Marek Czarnecki: "...[I]t is difficult for me to understand Christ and his gospel without the example of saints....I love the saints because they take Christianity out of the realm of pure, beautiful ideas and existentially live inside them....It's not always comfortable or pretty, but they show the sum of what happens when someone becomes the variable, or unknown sum, in Christ's own ideal and divinely formulated equations." In other words, a saint doesn't just wear the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelet, he/she LIVES it.

The practical thing I took away is a new understanding of a novena, a term I've heard but never understood. Novena means "nine" and tradition teaches that the Disciples and other followers of Jesus waited nine days between the Ascension of Christ and Pentecost. During that time they stayed in the Upper Room, praying and waiting on the Lord. And then the tongues of flame fell. A novena is a specific prayer that is prayed repeatedly and with intent for nine days (or sometimes nine weeks). I have a family member in intense peril right now and I have had no idea how to pray. Understanding the novena gave me a biblical reference to praying a focused prayer; the situation is so baffling to me that I found the words of another who understood better what he is going through to focus my prayer time. Now I pray and wait. 

For me the beauty of the book came down to this: "We spend a lot of time trying to be spiritual...but God does not ask us to be spiritual; God asks us to become like Christ, to become Christ in our unique way...to become ourselves." This is becoming a saint, the only kind I'm certain about.