I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church, as a Southerner, and an American - which means I grew up with great suspicion and perhaps even fear of the Catholic Church.
Yes, I heard preachers come around saying the AntiChrist would be a Pope, and that Catholics practiced idol worship and this whole "praying to Mary" thing was blasphemy. As a lover of history, I also understood all the evils perpetrated by different Popes and the Catholic church as a political power. And there were issues with Immaculate Conception (Mary being conceived without sin?), needing to go through a priest to get to God, and there was the whole cannibalism thing of the wine and wafer served during communion supernaturally turning into the actual blood and body of Christ once inside your mouth.
A byproduct of that was a complete dismissal, if you will, of Catholic "saints" - particularly since I grew up believing in the Priesthood of all Believers and that all believers are also sanctified, therefore making them, or us, all saints.
Then I married a Catholic. And met some fantastic Catholics who were as "Christian" as I am. And recognized that any organized religion is going to be rife with fallen humans who do things "in the name of Christ" that surely embarrassed Christ (if Christ can be embarrassed; I don't know). The Catholic Church is highly organized and structured and has certainly had its share of fallen human beings placed in positions of authority who abused their power and used the power of the church for selfish gain.
My wife is no longer a practicing Catholic, having joined me in a more Protestant form of worship. Having said that, I also found myself reading a few Catholic theologians and discovering real beauty and certainly significant contributions to everyone's understanding of what it means to be in relationship with God.
That's a long introduction to "My Life with the Saints." No, not my life, although there is some of that; but rather a book by the same title by a Jesuit priest named James Martin.
I stumbled across this book in a Barnes and Noble bookstore quite by accident, if you believe in such accidents, and bought it as a present for MG - a selfish purchase, because I knew I really wanted to read it. It took several years before I finally got around to reading it (it was first published in 2006), but I did.
And what I was reminded mostly was that it is easy to forget that these people that the Catholic Church venerates as "Saints" were, in the beginning, simply people with an amazing commitment to following God, whose lives reflected something special in that devotion, something I could learn from even as I learn from reading about the lives of Billy Graham and John Calvin and Martin Luther and Chuck Colson and Donald Miller and any number of other believers who have shared their spiritual journey with the public through their books and sermons.
Yes, some of them seemed to be bat crazy. They did things (a teenage girl leading an army against England? Visions in a pig pen in France?) that were hardly normal. Still, once you get past the craziness (any worse than an Old Testament profit lying naked on his side and cooking food over excrement to make God's point?), you have to admire the determination, the passion, the total surrender to an absolute faith that what they were doing was ordained by God.
I read the Bible. I study, as best I can, the Bible and look to it as "God's Word." But I also know there is great wisdom to be gained by learning how other people have interpreted those Words, seeing the example of the way others have lived their lives of faith, and read the stories of the Martyrs (My Southern Baptist upbringing encouraged me to read stories of the martyrs - many of the same lives the Catholic Church venerates as Saints; I guess it was OK to call them "martyrs").
Actually, that's not entirely true either. I did grow up hearing references to Saint Paul and Saint John. But then, consistency wasn't always the strong suit of the church I grew up in.
Martin writes at one point, "Some might argue (and some do argue) that all you need is Jesus. And that's true: Jesus is everything, and the Saints understood this more than anyone. But God in his wisdom has also given us these companions of Jesus to accompany us along the way, so why not accept the gift of their friendship and encouragement?"
A theologian whose writing deeply affected my life, C. S. Lewis, once said of the Catholic practice of calling on Saints that, while he didn't do it, if we do accept that Christians live on after death, why would asking a "Saint" to pray for you be any different than asking your neighbor or members of your Sunday School class to pray for you?
And so I found inspiration in Martin's brief stories on people like Joan of Arc, Therese of Lisieux, Thomas Merton, Ignatius of Loyola, Mother Teresa, Peter, Thomas Aquinas, Joseph ... not all of whom have actually been officially declared "saints" but who have made the first step of being "venerated."
I read, for the first time, this prayer from Merton that begins, "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so ...."
I laughed out loud, at times, in reading the words of Pope John XXIII, a very humble and humorous man. He was once asked by a journalist, "How many people work in the Vatican?" To which the Pope replied, "About half of them."
On a visit to the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, he was introduced to the sister (nun) who ran the hospital, and was referred to as Mother Superior.
"Holy Father,'' she said. "I am the Superior of the Holy Spirit."
"You're very lucky," said the Pope. "I'm only the Vicar of Christ."
And during a dinner party in Paris, he was asked, "Aren't you embarrassed, Monseigneur, when there are women present who wear very low-cut dresses? It's often a scandal."
"A scandal? Why no,'' the Pope said. "When there's a woman with a plunging neckline, they don't look at her. They look at the apostolic nuncio to see how he's taking it!"
That humor was the trademark of a very humble man who, after three years of serving as Pope, wrote, "My sense of unworthiness keeps me in good company; it makes me put all my trust in God."
And it shapes the story of Martin and his own spiritual journey that, despite his being a Jesuit priest, is really not that different than any of us who struggle to develop a personal relationship to Christ.
At one point, in his relating to Peter, Martin writes of his own search for humility, "It's not the kind of humility I wanted,'' he tells a friend.
"What do you mean?"
"I wanted the kind of humility that when others saw me they would say, 'Wow, he's so humble! What a great guy! ... I wanted a humility I could be proud of."
At the end, in his conclusion, just when you could be feeling like you could never live with the faith of these people Martin writes about, he says, "Believing that God wants us to be ourselves is liberating. While I'm always called to grow, God asks only that I be myself, no matter what the situation. So when I'm listening to a friend tell me his problems, or hearing someones confession, or standing before a homeless man in the street, I don't have to say, 'What would Peter or Francis or Therese or John XXIII do?' Certainly they are models of Christian action for me. But God has not placed them in this particular situation. God, in his mysterious wisdom, has placed me here, with my talents and skills, as well as my weaknesses and limitations. Therefore a better question is, 'What should I do?"
In other words, the same place that it started for the people we look to as "saints."
I am one.
Now, if I can only consistently live as one.
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