July, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
John Hus (July 6), Nathan Söderblom (July 12), Vladimir of Russia (July 15), Bartolomé de las Casas (July 17 or 18), Macrina the Younger (July 19), Triumph of the Sandinista Revolution (July 19) Albert Luthuli (July 21)., Birgitta of Sweden (July 23) John Cassian (July 23), Thomas a Kempis (July 24), Walter Rauschenbusch (July 25), William Reed Huntingon (July 27), Titus Brandsma (July 26), Mechthild of Magdeburg (July 27), Stanley Rother (July 28), Johann Sebastian Bach, Heinrich Schütz, and George Frederick Handel (July 28), Vincent Van Gogh (July 29) William Wilberforce (July 30), Olaf King of Norway, (July 29), Frank Pais (July 30), Ignatius of Loyola (July 31).
(Some of these saints have their own propers appointed in Lesser Feasts and Fasts, or an appropriate selection may be made from the commons of saints and martyrs in the Book of Common Prayer or from the Lutheran Book of Worship, or from other lectionaries providing for saints days and holy days.) The lessons given here are "Of a Saint I" in the BCP:
Micah 6:6-8 What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love
compassion?
Psalm 15 Domine, quis habitabit? Lord, who may dwell in your tabernacle?
Hebrews 12:1-2 Looking unto Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter
Matthew 25:31-40 I was hungry and you gave me food, a stranger and you
welcomed me
"Time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephtah, of David and Samuel and the prophets--who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promisess, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, . . . others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. . of whom the world was not worthy." --Hebrews, chapter 11. ..
We all know some of these saints as personal friends, through the writings, the art. music, or the memories they left with us in our communities and churches. We have read some of their books, marvelled at their poetry and art, and sung their hymns and psalms and spiritual songs. We have traced their steps in our cities and countrysides. . We have visited their shrines and tombs, and we have shouted "Presente!" at their resurrection amongst us, a cloud of witnesses urging us onward. They come to us in dreams and visions, in our repentance for our failures and in our hopes for tomorrow. Our lists of saints are larger than they used to be when all we knew was a bedtime litany: "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Bless the Bed That I Lie On."
Every faith has saints and witnesses--and harkens to their lives and teachings. The Pirke Abot, or the Wisdom of the Fathers, or old sages, is part of the Talmud, the library of centuries of debate, eigram, dialogue which Judaism hearkens to even today. The ancient Wisdom of the faith is kept alive and communicated to each generation clause by clause, phrase by phrase. The old rabbis are quoted by name, their anecdotes and proverbs, considered judgments and cryptic remarks passed on generation to generation. The scriptures are the library that gave them life.
Lutherans and Anglicans and some others have now a process for adding names to their calendars of "worthies" or "blesseds", without requiring as Rome does, that some miracle of healing be accomplished by their intercession. In Islam, there is (as in radical protestantism) no formal way to canonize "saints". The Sufi masters can be called shaykh ("elder"), or murshid ("guide"), but it is not uncommon to style a Sufi saint as "wali Allah", or Friend of Allah. They are said to have no fear, and no sadness, and are protected by Allah. Al-Hujwiri wrote that the Friends of Allah are those "whom he has specially distinguished by His friendship and whom He has chosen to be governors of His kingdom and has marked out to manifest his actions and has peculiarly favoured with many kinds of miracles and has purged of natural corruptions and has delivered from subjection to their lower soul and passion, so that all their thoughts are of Him and their intimacy is with Him alone." They are the eyes through which Allah looks at the world.
Hinduism has gods to lead the list of saints. Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu are a kind of Trinity and aspects of a single reality. Vishnu becomes incarnate to repair the world, "for the protection of the good and the destruction of evil-doers, and for the re-etablishment of dharma I come into being in successive ages", ( Baghavad Gita 4,8) These incarnations of Vishnu, or descents, are not fixed, but include atavars as varied as a fish, a boar, a man-lion, a dwarf, Paras'u-Rama, Rama, and Krisnha, and even, finally Buddha. Re-incarnations of God, or atavars, are pretty good descriptions of saints as well, come to think of it.
Buddhism has its "bodhisattvas" who do not wish to attain their own private nirvana. For the bodhisattvas, theology is always liberation theology. Instead of privatizing salvation, they have surveyed the highly painful world of being, and yet desirous of winning supreme enlightenment, they do not tremble at birth-and-death. They have set out for the benefits of the world, for the ease of the world, out of pity for the world. They have resolved, "We will become a shelter for the world, the world's place of rest., the final relief of the world, islands of the world, lights of the world, the guides of the world's means of salvation.''
No religion can live without saints, as no species can live without reproducing, no tree or plant without its seed. Even Nazis sang the stirring "Horst Wessel Lied" in honor of one of its imagined martyrs to its workers' revolution gone mad, and even now can only have a phantom life by honoring its zombie dead.. Socialism on the other hand has authentic sacred women and men--Rosa Luxemburg I am thinking of, or Leon Trotsky, not Joseph Stalin for sure. I bought a little book years ago called "Gay Legends of the Saints," thinking I would find there St. Oscar Wilde or The Blessed Virgin Gertrude Stein, but instead was directed to a chapter on "The Queer Ways of Simeon Stylites" and "The Legend of Saint Spiridion and the Funny Mules." There's a Queer Nation of saints surrounding us.
Robert Ellsberg includes in his book of daily reflections "All Saints" commemorations for Mohandas Gandhi, the Great Soul of India, Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher; Hagar, the Egyptian slave whom Abraham's wife Sarah thought was her property; Johann Sebastian Bach, the Lutheran composer; Harriet Tubman, abolitionist; Oskar Schindler, "Righteous Gentile", Henry David Thoreau, naturalist; Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidim; Anne Frank, Witness of the Holocaust; Albert Luthuli, Zulu chief; Rabbi Abraham Heschel, and many more. They being dead, yet speak to us. And some of us talk to them.
"I sing a song of the saints of God, " wrote Lesbia Scott in 1929, and declared that "one was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green", and furthermore that "one was a soldier, and one was a priest, and one was slain by a fierce wild beast", and we all loved her for insisting that "You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea, in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea, for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one, too." Not many trains left, or teatimes, but I still run into saints every day of my life, and invite them to tea.
The Social Awakening, as it was called, in the time of Walter Rauschenbusch and the "social gospel" brought saints back into prophetic protestantism. "We praise thee for thine elect, the prophets and martyrs of humanity, who gave their thoughts and prayers and agonies for the truth of God and the freedom of the people. . .uphold us by thy spirit in steadfastness and joy because we are found worthy to share in the work and the reward of Jesus and all the saints" he wrote, in 1909, in Prayers for the Social Awakening.
In seminary I acquired a slim volume called "The Invocation of Saints" by the Anglican theologian Darwell Stone, published in 1903. He distinguishes the Invocation of saints--prayers like "Hail Mary, Pray for us sinners" or "Good Saint Anne, Send Me A Man" from another route called the Imprecation of Saints--in which the request for the help of the saints is made to God directly: "Grant O God that the holy deacon Stephen, who made supplication even for his perseuctors, may stand before Thee as our intercessor." This is the Anglican way. So far as I know, no official Anglican liturgy has within it actual invocations of saints, but instead uses the ladder of imprecation. Popular devotions are another matter--and there we find an abundance of petititons for the help of the saints, but again we usually ask them to pray for us rather than enlist them to find the wallet we lost on the bus. Most official Roman Catholic liturgies, as well--certainly the most ancient--go the route of praying "with" rather than "to" the saints. Nevertheless, St. Thomas Aquinas says that it is legitimate to pray for whatever it is legitimate to desire. And if it is legitimate to desire the help of the saints and faithful departed (as we acknowledge it is legitimate to ask God to help them), then we may include them in our prayers and thank God for their intercessions..
A word or two about the saints and worthies of July that I have asked to pray for us throughout this month. John Hus, Czech priest and reformer, was martyred in 1415, a hundred years before the Protestant Revolt began in 1517 with Luther's 95 Theses. He opposed the commercialization of the sacraments, and was basically lynched for his stand. The marriage of religion and big business today is reason enough to ask for his help. Eventually the Moravian Church derives from him, and Luther called him Saint John Hus.
Nathan Soderblom was Primate of the Church of Sweden, one of the pioneers whose work led to the World Council of Churches. He died in 1931. Vladimir was the first Christian ruler of Russia, who died in 1015; he is honored together with Olga, his grandmother. Bartolome de las Casas was among the first to expose the European oppression of the indigenous people of our "New World", which was their Old World. The dominant imperial theology taught that the Indians were among the races which Artistotle had said were destined by nature to be slaves. He wrote "A brief Report on the Destruction of the Indians", describing Spanish atrocities, a book much used by the English in their war on Spain. . He died in 1566.
Macrina the Younger was born into a family in which canonization was in their DNA--of her nine siblings, three were canonized, besides her parents. Among her brothers were Gregory of Nyssa and St. Basil. She founded a monastery for women, as Basil did for men.
July 19 is the anniversary of the Triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, and a great day not only in Nicaragua but to freedom loving peoples everywhere. The year was 1979, when the young people of Nicaragua forced the monster Somoza out and the U.S. flew him to Florida. On one of the doors at Casa Ave Maria, which I can see from where I sit at my desk, is a carving of the image of Carlos Fonseca Amador, the young martyred founder of the Frente Sandinista, who guided the revolution to victory. He is surrounded by the inscription: "Tayacan Vencedor de la Muerte" and "Novio de la Patria Rojo y Negro: Nicaragua Te Grita Presente!" [Brave Hero, Victor over Death--Sweetheart of the Red & Black Homeland--Nicaragua Shouts to you: We Are Here!"]
Albert Luthuli was the Zulu chief and Nobel Laureate who died in 1967.One of the founders of the African National Congress, his name is linked with that of Nelson Mandela as one of the great Christian saints of African liberation. "We know Christianity for what it is, we know it is not a white preserve," he said. "Mayibuye i Afrika! Come, Africa, Come!" he sang.
Bridget of Sweden, or Birgitta in her own language, died in 1373 on this date.Like Catherine of.Siena, she preached about politics and to politicians, urging the Popes to leave Avignon and go back to Rome. She founded an order of monks and nuns, ruled by an Abbess. John Cassian was born in Rumania around 360, travelled to Palestine and Egypt, in the age when the desert monks and hermits were moving the martyrdom of Christians from the coliseum to the cloister. He got on the wrong side of a theological dispute over the universal salvation of the world (which he believed, along with Origen, and maybe St. Paul who said he couldn't talk about what he saw in the seventh heaven). And he disagreed with Augustine's teaching on predestination, always a risky business, though the oppressors have been somewhat defanged..
Thomas a Kempis I have known since I was a boy in grade school and got hold of a copy of the Imitation of Christ. It helped me grow in Catholic piety, and I think everyone in Sunday School should spend some time with it. Its piety is much loved in evangelical circles. His real name was Hammerken or Haemerlein, but he was born in Kempen, near Cologne, hence his stage name. He went to Holland to be educated by the Brethren of the Common Life, and stayed with them until his death in 1471. His little book is read by people of all denominations, and is called "the most perfect flower of medieval Christianity."
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) was first a pastor of a German Baptist church in Hell's Kitchen, New York city. He came to see the gospel required a transformation in the social and economic system responsible for poverty. The Kingdom of God became for him a kingdom of justice, something wider than a heaven for individual souls. He declared, "The eclipse of the kingdom ideal was an eclipse of Jesus." Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel are forever linked, and the whole church forever grateful for his call to its horizontal dimensions.
William Reed Huntington was the rector of Grace Church, New York City, who led the House of Deputies in the last years of the 19th and the first years of the 20th century. He led the revival of the order of deaconesses, articulated the goals of Christian unity, laid the foundation for the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (the basis of church unity to be the scriptures, the creeds, the sacraments, and the apostolic ministry). It is on the basis of the Quadrilateral that Anglicans are in communon with the Church of South India, and many continenetal Lutheran churches, and now with the Lutheran Church in the United States. He was an active ecumenist and liturgical scholar, and led in the revision of the Book of Common Prayer in 1892.
Titus Brandsma was a Dutch Carmelite priest martyred by the Nazis in 1942. He preached against the "new paganism" of the Nazis and denounced oppression of the Jews. He forbade Catholic newspapers to run Nazi advertisements, and in 1942 was arrrested, sent to Dachau with 2,700 other clergy. He was killed by a lethal injection of acid on July 26. John Paul II beatified him as the first victim of the Nazis to be officially declared a Catholic martyr.
Machthild of Magdeburg (1210-1281?) was a German mystic of the 13th century, known to us through her book The Flowing Light of the Godhead. She became a Beguine, a simple religious vocation. She had a critical eye for corruption in the church: "Alas, Crown of holy Church, how tarnished you have become. . . with priestly power you battle against God and His chosen friends. . . my shepherds from Jerusalem have become murderers and wolves." Not the sort of thing that gets printed in "Forward Day by Day!" She left her Beguines, who could not protect her from the hierarchy, and fled to a Cisterican convent, where she was welcomed and lived out her life.
I have visited the church in Santiago Atitlán, beside the most spectacular mountain lake in the world, where the heart of Father Stanley Rother is buried; he was murdered in the rectory next door in 1981 by the U.S.-sponsored death squads which were terrorizing Guatemala at the time. A long way from Oklahoma, where he was born. Not a whiz at Latin, he had nevertheless mastered the Mayan dialect of the Indians in Atitlán, but not the logic of the death squads terrorizing these gentle hill people. "Anti-communism" was the excuse for the murder of priests and community leaders who sided with the poor. His body was returned to Oklahoma, but the parish in Atitlan asked his family to allow his heart to be buried with them in beautiful Santiago Atitlán. And it is now a shrine for the people with whom he lived and died.
The music of Johann Sebastian Bach has been more widely heard than even that of the Beatles, and it has throughout the ages inspired as many people as the Book of Common Prayer. A deeply religious man, he wrote several hundred cantatas, including one for each Sunday and festival of the liturgical year. It would be a poor western Church indeed, or world culture, without the B Minor Mass and the Matthew Passion. He fathered 20 children by 2 wives, an Olympian feat, and four sons were also great musicians. Archbishop Söderblom called him "the fifth evangelist." He died on July 28, 1750. Heinrich Schuetz was born a hundred years before Bach, and studied music with Giovanni Gabrielli in Venice, and later with Monteverdi. The plague drove him from Dresden to Denmark, but eventually he returned to Dresden and died there November 6, 1672. Philip Pfatteicher says that "most of all, his choral settings of biblical texts show unsurpassed mastery." George Frederick Handel was born in 1759, son of a pastor's daughter and a surgeon. Originally educated in law, he became an organist at the Reformed cathedral in Halle, then went to Hamburg to work on operas. He went to England where his work was much admired, and commissioned, at court. George III especially was enamored of his music. In 1741 his "Messiah" was famously performed in Dublin. He died on July 14, 1759 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Vincent Van Gogh thought of himself as a failure, and his contemporaries mostly held him in contempt. Robert Ellsberg writes that "ultimately his subject was the holiness of existence." The son of a clergy family, he wanted to enter the ministry too, to serve the poor. But his grades in Latin were too poor, and so he free-lanced as a preacher to poor miners, living in poverty. He turned his back on family and church, declaring "their whole system of religion horrible." At 27, he turned to a career in art, and his sole support came from his brother Theo, an art dealer, and Vincent lived on the edge of madness. "I should like to paint in men and women something of that quality of eternity which was symbolized formerly by a halo and which we try to convey by the very radiance of our coloring." Not so mad. But he checked himself into a mental asylum and continued to paint. On July 27, 1880, he shot himself. Theo rushed to his side, and Vincent said, "Who could imagine that life could be so sad?" And then he died, on July 29. We grieve as well as honor the sadness of his life, and the consummate joy of his art, ikons into the mind of God.
William Wilberforce was born in Yorkshire in 1759, into a wealthy family, educated at Cambridge, elected to the House of Commons. He became an evangelical Anglican in 1784, and afterwards always refused high office or a peerage. He promoted missions, popular education, Catholic emancipation, and is most of all remembered for his crusade against slavery and the slave-trade. He died one month before Parliament put an end to it, in 1833, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Olaf, King of Norway, and Martyr. Born in 1995 into a royal family. He went on Viking expeditions to Friesland, Holland, and England, and was baptized (or confirmed) in Rouen, in France. He set sail for Norway in 1015, with the inention of establishing the Christian religion there. He brought bishops from England and Normandy to help him. His equal enforcement of the laws offended the aristocracy, and many nobles joined King Canute of Denmark and Britain, and the king of Sweden, to drive him out. He fled to Russia and refuge. In 1030 he attempted to retake his kingdom but was slain on July 29 and Canute added Norway to his dominions. Soon after his death the people acclaimed him a saint, and he is now known as "the eternal king of Norway". St. Olaf's college in Minnesota is named for him.
Frank Pais was a Baptist student and lay director of Second Baptist Church in Havana, who was "riddled with bullets" by the police of Fulgencio Batista, U.S. puppet dictator of Cuba, on July 30, 1957. A participant in the Cuban revolution, he was shot to death in the street. Not the first, and not the only martyr of U.S. oppression of the Cuban people and their independence, but notable for being a Baptist, revolutionary, and martyr. He is remembered and honored by Baptists here in Nicaragua, from whom I learned of him..
Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) was Founder of the Society of Jesus, which we know as the Jesuits. Born of a noble Basque family in Castile, he was a courtier and a soldier. Wounded in battle, he spent months in recovery reading the lives of the saints, and when well set off walking to the shrine of Our Lady at Moserrat. There, after an all-night vigil, he changed his rich clothes with a beggar and laid his sword and dagger on the altar of our Lady. After months in reflection, a series of mystical visions, and a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he determined to become a priest. At the University of Paris, he called a small group together to form a society which eventually became the Society of Jesus, swearing individually obedience to the Pope. By now protestantism had incited widespread revolution and explorers had opened Asia and the Americas to missions. Jesuits set out for everywhere, as Robert Ellsberg says, "contributing substantially to the calendar of martyrs." Some of the martyr-makers were loyal Anglicans, subjects of good Queen Bess. One of his great contributions was the publication of his "Spiritual Exercises", now used widely and ecumenically. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church is a devoee of Ignatian exercises.
Protestants generally celebrate October 31 as the festival of the Reformation, the anniversary of Luther's posting the 95 Theses on the hurch door in Wittenberg in 1517. But every saint's day is a festival of reformation, for through the saints "the holy ghost broods over the bent world with warm breast, and ah! bright wings," as Hopkins wrote, to reform the church and repair the world. The writer to the Hebrews urges us as athletes of God to "lay aside every weight"--and everyone knows how disastrous overweight is to a runner. And "the sin that clings so closely," (or "so easily distracts"). The Greek word there is "euperistaton"--a word found only in this one place in all of the Greek scriptures. The Authorized Version takes six words to translate it . "Peristaton" means "surrounding", and "eu" is an ejaculation meaning "well done!" or "nice going!" or "bravo!". A marginal note in the English Revised Version whispers, "admired of many", so that the sin that clings so closely is really the "sin that is surrounded with exclamations of 'well done!' Which is why we canonize nobody while they are still alive. They are not made holy by our applause. Paul addressed the church at Corinth as "saints" and then went on to read their beads for their varius misdoings. So the writer urges us to lay aside the search for glory, the aim to fame, and to persevere in the race that is set before us. All the saints surround us in the amphitheatre, urging us on.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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