All Saints (LAMP Sunday) (02.11.14)
WHAT AM I TO WEAR?
Occasionally, what you read or hear can take your breath away! The first of the Eucharistic Prayers for Reconciliation has this line – “Help us to work together for the coming of your Kingdom (Lord), until the hour when we stand before you Saints among Saints in the halls of heaven, with the blessed Virgin Mary …..”
It’s the words ‘Saints among Saints’ that does it for me. I find it hard, knowing myself, to consider being the bearer of the title ‘Saint’. Am I taking the text of the prayer too literally? The answer is emphatically, ‘No’.
In the Old Testament’s Book of Leviticus, God lays emphasis on the goal of human hearts being one with the holiness of God.
Leviticus 11: 44: “For I am Yahweh your God, so you must consecrate yourselves and be holy because I am holy …. For I am Yahweh, who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God, so you must be holy because I am holy.”
Leviticus 20: 26: “Thus you are to be holy to Me, for I the Lord am holy … “
It is crucial for us to understanding what God means when he commands us, using the imperative form – “you must … be holy”. This is not a Divine recommendation. Human holiness cannot exist in a parallel state alongside, as it were, the Divine. Holiness is unique to God. A human, to be holy, has to willingly allow her/himself to be subsumed into God. This does not involve the loss of our unique, individual identity. Holiness within a human could be compared to the multiple reflections of a unique brightness reflected from the polished surface of a single diamond.
The New Testament’s First Letter of St Peter (1: 13-17) reiterates the Old Testament teaching: “Therefore gird up your minds, be sober, set your hope fully upon the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”
Though each Eucharistic Prayer express the same hope that we may become part of the heavenly community, when God’ calls us, the starkness of that line in the first prayer for Reconciliation brings it home in a special way.
I start to appreciate that if, miraculously, the picture conjured up by the line, ‘Saints among Saints’, were to become my reality I would have had great advocates in heaven and on earth to thank. Being a saint among the saints is not an achievement. It is pure gift. The flaw in my thinking is my use of an earthly mindset in attempting to visualize a heavenly scenario! It’s plainly not fit for purpose!
No human in heaven will ever be there ‘under their own steam’, as the phrase has it. Even if we were to spend every waking moment in prayer, self-denial and constant love of our neighbour, it would be insufficient. Humans are gifted with heaven solely by the beneficence of Almighty God, our Father in adopting us as the sisters and brothers of His only begotten Son, Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Maybe my being brought up short was the Lord’s way of prompting me to ponder more fully the meaning behind, ‘Saints among Saints’. There’s a helpful stepping stone in the first Reading for the Feast of All Saintsfrom the Book of Revelation (7: 2-4,9-14): “I had a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue. They stood before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.”
The clue is in the ‘wearing white robes’. The robe of holiness, which the Lord longs to gift to us, makes good the scars and damage of sin in the reconciled and forgiven. Jesus makes use of the same wearing apparel in his parable about the king and wedding feast (Matthew 22:1-14) an extract from which has these lines:
“Then the king said to this servants, ‘The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. Go the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, both good and bad, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.
“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding garment. ‘Friend,’ he asked, ‘how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ The man was speechless.
“Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
“For many are invited, but few are chosen.”
The inclusivity of Jesus’ parable brings me comfort. “… all the people they could find, both good and bad …”Perhaps the ‘good and bad’ included even some of the original invitees who had had experienced a conversion of heart. This means there’s hope even for the likes of a sinner like me!
“But what about the guest without the wedding garment?”, you ask. Yes indeed! The heavenly Father would not allow his ‘good and bad’ to suffer embarrassment. Where God calls a person to a particular vocation, matrimony, priesthood, permanent deaconate, religious life, single life, he provides us with all that is required for the fulfillment of that vocation. What is essential in the one called is a trust and a willingness to put on whatever is divinely provided. The ‘wedding garment’ has multiple forms.
For unknown numbers of Christians in China, North Korea and many other lands, their ‘wedding garment’ is a lifetime of painful persecution and hardship. It’s not unimaginable that Pope Francis accepts his ‘wedding garment’ as the Papal Mitre. A holy bishop, long since gone to God, once said, “Inside every bishop’s mitre, unseen, is a crown of thorns.” Maybe some wedding rings bear the same. For sure, the process of our being subsumed into the holiness of God involves following Christ along the way of the Cross, to Calvary and through death to Resurrection. Could the wedding garment, lacked by the guest, identified by the king in Jesus’ parable have been the practice of contrition and penance that should have been woven into his life?
The personal, unique, ‘wedding garment’ you and I are called to wear in the assembly of All Saints will have been tailor-made with divine care, enduring love and endless patience throughout our Baptismal pilgrimage here on earth. Above all else, our ‘wedding garment’ will, if worn with humble commitment, redound the holiness of the One who has clothed us in it. To be invited to the assembly of All Saints is pure gift. Perhaps the ‘wedding garment’ may be embossed with the Gospel for this Feast – Matthew 5: 1-12 – ‘The Beatitudes’.