On a recent trip to my alma mater, The University of the
South, I stopped to admire the new baptismal font in All Saints’ Chapel. As I
passed my fingers over the stone relief figures standing tall and unsmiling all
around the large cement bowl, I wondered aloud to my old college roommate who
they could be. “Oh, they must be part of the ‘never-ending succession of benefactors,’”
she laughed. As undergraduates, we used to poke one another in the ribs and
giggle about the university prayer as it was solemnly intoned in chapel
services--the prayer that asks God to bless all who have contributed to this
institution and to “raise up to the University, we humbly pray thee, a
never-failing succession of benefactors.” We used to imagine God pouring plump
middle-aged men and women onto the campus in fur coats and fine suits, gifting
the college with trustees who would fork over large sums of money to the latest
capital campaign. It seemed to me in my youthful idealism a tacky blessing to
be constantly bothering God about in our official prayer.
Of course, now
that I am a plump middle-aged woman wandering about the campus, even hoping to
be a trustee from the Diocese, and praying about my own parish pledge drive, I
am not as easily amused by the phrase. But as I thought this week about All
Saints’ Day, I remembered that baptismal font in All Saints’ Chapel, surrounded
by what was surely a circle of the saints of the Church, not benefactors of the
University, and I wondered about how often we in the Church do confuse the two.
Don’t we often see the Church as an institution held up by virtuous pillars of
saints, by men and women carved in rigid stone who guard the status quo, by
benefactors who have given of their treasure, time, and talent to keep the
institution going? Don’t we often picture the saints standing in a closed
circle around the heavenly throne like members of an exclusive club? And don’t
we often think of blessing as something that we ask for and receive from God,
like a university receives a bequest from a powerful donor, as something that
will forward our cause and bring peace and prosperity to us or to those that we
love?
Our Gospel reading for this All
Saints’ Day sure does its best to shake up this common idea of blessing and
sainthood, however. Luke’s Beatitudes
tell us what it means to be blessed, and they certainly make it clear that
blessing is not marked by a never-failing succession of wealth or even of easy
happiness, for that matter. The saints that Jesus sculpts around his baptismal
font in this reading are poor, hungry, weeping, hated, scorned, and cast aside.
They are people who are able to love their enemies, who can turn to those who
hate them and offer them blessing, people
who seem to give more than they are ever given in this world. Luke does not
offer us the easier spiritual take on Jesus words’ that Matthew does in the
Sermon on the Mount, giving us blessing on the “poor in spirit” rather than on society’s
poor, on those who hunger for righteousness, rather than on those who don’t get
enough to eat. I might be able to identify with Matthew’s version, but if you
are like me, you can’t help but pull back incredulously from Luke’s stark
blessings, unable to recognize yourselves among the poor and the hungry,
unwilling to bless those who hate you, and all too clearly able to see
yourselves sitting among those whom Jesus curses: the rich, the filled, the joyful,
the acclaimed. One of my favorite prayers is that evening collect that asks God
to “shield the joyous.” I want God’s blessing to shield me, not to throw me to
the wolves! Why do God’s blessings here have to be so totally backwards, so
dismally painful?
Think for a
moment about the saints, the blessed ones, among us? Pick your favorite saint
from the list that the church has handed down throughout the ages or even from
those beside whom you have sat in the pew. Isn’t it always the case that those
who have blessed us the most have at some point experienced the most profound
pain in their own lives? Think of St. Francis of Assisi who only heard God’s
call as he lay ill and hopeless as a prisoner of war, and who had to give up
his wealth and his heritage before he could serve God. Think of the famous
women mystics like St. Julian of Norwich, all gifted with magnificent visions
of God, who suffered terrible physical ailments or extreme rejection by others,
“enduring grace” just as much as desiring it.[1]
Think of St. Paul, with his terrible “thorn in the flesh,” or of Martin Luther
King, Jr. who grew up in poverty and prejudice and endured countless arrests
and death threats before being murdered. Think of some of our holiest and
kindest St. Thomas saints, people like Darlene Peterson, crippled and blinded
from MS and grieving the tragic death of her only son, yet welcoming so many
people into our parish and blessing so many lives.
We can’t deny it. There is something
about suffering that opens us up to God, and there is something about
prosperity that lulls us into a dangerous sleep. Theologian Paul Tillich
explains that Jesus is not praising those who suffer because of their suffering
or cursing those who have much simply because they are rich. God despairs of
“all of us who are well off, respected, and secure, not simply because we have
such security and respect, but because it inevitably binds us, with an almost
irresistible power, to … things as they are [in this world.]” It allows us to resist the change that the
Kingdom requires and to convince ourselves that we need neither God nor our
neighbor. In the same way, God can promise that blessing will come to those of
us who are mourning in body and soul because “the very fact of our lacks and
sorrows [in life] may turn our hearts away from things as they are,” toward
God’s Reign on earth.[2]
The blessing that God offers us, you
see, is a moving, swirling thing—a part of the dance of Love that is the
Trinity itself. It demands transformation and movement and cannot survive in
hearts and souls that refuse to be torn open or in customs or institutions that
refuse to break. Christian Sharen points out in his work on blessing that our
blessing always connects to the need of another. On a simple level, he quotes
John Bell’s short mealtime grace: “God bless to us our bread. Give food to
those who are hungry and hunger for justice to those who are fed. God bless to
us our bread.” But the dynamics of blessing goes deeper than the simple
political correctness of asking nicely for justice. Sharen shows that, from the
beginning of creation, God blesses with love and goodness everything that God
has made. Any special blessing, like God’s blessing to Abram, to “make his name
great,” is only to make Abram and his descendents a blessing in turn to the whole
world. Blessing in the Scriptures—in the blessing of Israel and in Jesus—
always happens within history, multiplying as we pass it on, bearing fruit in
and through the suffering that is inevitable in this world. This dynamic kind of
divine blessing cannot be, then, something that we keep for ourselves, but must
be something that we give abundantly away to others.[3]
So what about that baptismal font at
Sewanee, ringed with straight-backed saints who hold in the holy waters? I’m
thinking that the Church would do better with Frederick Buechner’s more fluid
image of the saints as handkerchiefs dropped by God during God’s “holy
flirtation with the world.”[4]
Picture the movement of a flirtation, the quick give and take, the strong, dynamic
energy passing back and forth between two people. Imagine God and the world
each looking for a relationship one with the other, testing the waters,
reaching out and touching, withdrawing in a blush. Into that movement, God
drops blessing in the form of a saint, a person set apart, often by hardship,
to flutter down into our lives on the wind of the Spirit, like a handkerchief.
“Pick me up,” the blessing begs. Pick me up and pass me into a waiting hand,
and look into God’s eyes as you do it and see the love there. Please don’t stuff me safely into your dark
pocket. Don’t use me to blow your nose. Look up, like Jesus looked up into the
eyes of his disciples, and pass blessing on, no matter what the cost.”
[1]
See Carol Flinders’ well-named book, Enduring
Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics.
[3]
Christian Sharen, “Blessing,” in The
Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, ed.,
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012.
[4] Frederick Buechner, quoted in a sermon by Samuel Candler,
http://day1.org/2379-saint_carlton_is_lowest
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