Picture postcard saints

When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist. — (Archbishop) Dom Helder Camara

America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts — a child — as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters.

And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign. (Mother Theresa — “Notable and Quotable,” Wall Street Journal, 2/25/94, p. A14)

We like our clergy and our saints to be picture postcard saints. We like to look at sweet prayer cards of them and hear of their heroism, their strength, and their travails for the faith. We like icons that we can hang on the wall as we ask the intercession of the saints, preferably icons truly prepared in the appropriate way, with gold colored edging.

It is a different matter when we truly read the writings of godly clergy and pious saints. There often we are violently confronted by the Kingdom of God, by the uncompromising demands of God’s holiness, and by the unquenchable love of God. Those are not picture postcard moments, but moments that may hit us with the force of a slap across the face. And that is often when we show ourselves to be the “sons of those who stoned the prophets,” for that is often when we reject what the saints say and refuse to put it into practice.

Saints are safer on a shelf or on an iconostasis than in our hands as we read them. As Archbishop Camara pointed out, it was when he asked the difficult questions about the Kingdom of God that he was promptly rejected. People preferred him to be that picture postcard saint who fed the poor and sacrificed of himself so that they could eat. That was safer than a bishop who asks why so many are so poor, even if they are working a full-time job. No, a picture postcard saint will never ask about the possible structural causes of extreme poverty. A picture postcard saint would keep his mouth closed and simply make up with his commitment what we are unwilling to address through our societal structures.

Mother Teresa encountered the same thing when she spoke about abortion. She was a picture postcard saint as long as the Sisters of Charity worked with the lepers and fed the poor. Mother Teresa talked in expansive terms of the need for all of us to love one another with the same type of unquenchable love as that which God give us. And that was safe; that was a picture postcard saint. When she said that the greatest poverty is to be deprived of love and that one could be outwardly rich but inwardly truly poor because of being abandoned and unloved, why many applauded and quietly wiped a tear from their eyes.

But, when she began to speak out about abortion, when she spoke of the violence of abortion and the violence of war being equivalent, then various of her “Christian” followers dropped away, let alone the secular media. That was not a picture postcard saint, but a saint who looks directly upon the face of God and turns around, like Moses with his face shining with the glory of God, to inform us of what God desires of us.

And that is the problem with saints, is it not? Saints are not picture postcard people. Saints do indeed shine with the burning love of God, but that is precisely the problem. It is the burning. God’s love is called unquenchable because it is like a fire. It burns out the dross that is in us and purges us so that we may become more like him. Not surprisingly, we often do the same with God as we do with the saints. We find him much safer on the iconostasis, or even on a “Jesus bracelet” or–Lord have mercy–on a “fish” license plate that safely proclaims we are Christians. To encounter God is, like Isaiah, to realize that you are a sinful person. “Woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips,” said Isaiah, and that is what happens to all who truly encounter God. He is not a picture postcard God, or as C.S. Lewis put it, “He is not a tame lion.”

So, look again at the two quotes above. Both quotes are pro-life quotes. I could have found many more about the poor and about abortion. I could have found just Orthodox quotes, but I wish to stretch your mind. But, let me limit it to those two quotes. Read them again and, frankly, let them burn you. What is God saying to you?