Saints not alive!

Yes, folks, all the stupid Halloween stuff is over, leaving me with a couple of pounds of un-tricked-or-treated candy and the obligation to go to church today. I'm not sure why they even have a Vigil Mass for All Saints' Day, as everyone has to be home distributing the goodies lest their home be egged.

But today is All Saints' Day. The Church's definition of a saint, according to a pretty good summary from the gang at the Dummies publishing imprint, is as follows:

The Catholic Church believes that saints are ordinary and typical human beings who made it into heaven. In the broader sense, everyone who's now in heaven is technically a saint. Saints are human beings who lived holy lives in obedience to God's will and are now in heaven for eternity.

We know there are many more saints in heaven than we have knowledge of, people no one ever heard of who lived lives of triumphant virtue. The reason it takes so long for the Church to determine if someone ought to be recognized as a saint is that the investigators strive to separate truth from legend and bad motives, and to make sure that a saintly countenance of the deceased did not conceal an ignoble heart. This takes a while.

It can be tricky to know who is a saint on this side of the tapestry, the side where everything is all threads and knots and nothing makes sense. Some people give off a real glow of holiness, they say; others are known to die a martyr's death, faithful to the end and unafraid. I wonder which is the harder path to sainthood?

The best essay I have ever read about death, and likely ever will read, came from Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, writing in First Things in 2000. In "Born Toward Dying," Fr. Neuhaus described, sparing few grisly details, his horrible ordeal with cancer that nearly killed him. In fact, it actually did for a short bit. He found himself sitting up while his body lay on a table, encountering two beings that had a message for him.

“Everything is ready now.” It was not in the form of a command, nor was it an invitation to do anything. They were just letting me know. Then they were gone, and I was again flat on my back with my mind racing wildly. I had an iron resolve to determine right then and there what had happened. Had I been dreaming? In no way. I was then and was now as lucid and wide awake as I had ever been in my life.

It's an amazing piece of work, a piece that has the ring of truth throughout. His terrible sickness, exacerbated by the incompetence of medical personnel; his determination while this mystical but brief incident occurred to make sure he would not allow himself the comfort of thinking it was a dream in the future by nailing down the reality in his mind while it happened; his terrible depression later as he climbed slowly back to health, while wondering how life can go on when it all ends in death.

I was bowled over when I first read it. I was sitting on a train, and I found myself staring out the window, thunderstruck by the certainty that everything he had been through and every word he had written was especially intended for me to read, as much as it was intended for him, and for everyone else who would read his essay. In other words, God is so great that not only do things happen for reasons, but things that happen to a number of us are still meant for each of us individually. I hope I am making some sense; I sometimes think the things that really make sense in life are things that, in Chestertonian paradoxical fashion, seem the most senseless at first glance.

 Fr. Neuhaus did recover, but sadly, the cancer recovered too; he passed on in 2009. I trust he was not afraid, because he'd seen the curtains, and he knew that everything was ready.