James R. Gorman
At our first Vacation Bible School session this Monday night, Sue Schemberger played the role of Martha from Jesus' time. Sue was in costume and she told her story as if she were really there. She told the kids how she remembered Jesus and how well she knew him.
After the session was over and the kids were leaving, one little kid came back to Sue and said, "Do you really know Jesus?" To which Sue could only respond, "Yes I do."
Today, July 25th, we celebrate the feast day of St. James the Apostle, a man who really knew Jesus, if by that we mean lived at the same time and place as Jesus did and shared his journey literally as well as figuratively.
I confess that I'm not much of a Saint person. I was not raised in that sort of a tradition, where we might have patron saints or get off of school for feast days of saints. I was never required to read the biography of a saint.
In the church I grew up in, we never celebrated the Saints. O, sure, they were sitting there in our stained glass windows, which hardly anyone ever explained to us. St. Peter was in quite a few, but so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who, with Peter, couldn't quite stay awake one hour as Jesus prayed. We called all these guys Saints, and named our churches after them-St. John, St. Peter, St. James, St. Paul-but we never observed their feast days in the way that the Lutherans, Episcopalians and Roman Catholics do.
I think this is because I was raised in a branch of Protestantism which used the word "saint" to mean all the people in the Church. Like St. Paul did in his letters, we liked to think of all the saints at Corinth or all the saints at Milwaukee or all the saints at St. John's by the Gas Station. We didn't really think much about the special saints set aside by the Church. We especially didn't learn the more legendary stories told about them. We had a suspicion that these legendary stories told about the Saints were really just stories used to bolster certain favorite causes.
As I searched through our library on the subject of Saint James, for example, I found several stories about him that were used to support causes that were less than honorable. The main legend suggested that St. James the Elder once visited the Spanish peninsula, bringing Christianity to the Celtic peoples who resided there. According to this legend, his bones were taken back to Spain after his martyrdom in Rome in AD 44. There his bones, or relics as the church call them, were enshrined. But then, following the fall of the Roman Empire, the shrine was forgotten and lost. In middle of the 800's, so the legend goes, a hermit led by a beckoning star and celestial music discovered the location of the buried relics of St. James and the site was reconsecrated as Santiago de Compostela. St. James in this way became one of the patron Saints of Spain and its colonies through this legend. Cities and missions named for Santiago or St. James also became some of the first great pilgrimage sites in Europe. The Benedictine monks built monasteries and hostels to host the pilgrims journeying through the Pyrenees mountains, creating in the process what was perhaps the first major European tourist industry.
The problem with the legend is that it was created in the 800's because Christians in Spain were having problems with the Arabs, or Moors, who lived there and they needed a legend to gain popular support for their wars against the Moors. And this may be the problem that my part of the Christian tradition has with the stories of the Saints. Too many of the stories were legendary and were made up for purposes other than to induce a genuine piety among the faithful.
Still, there is a faithfulness in observing the feast days of the Saints that I wouldn't want to throw out.
St. James was a real guy. He was the first of the Apostles to be martyred. He, with Peter and James' brother John, were there at the Transfiguration at the top of Mt. Tabor and, even though they couldn't stay awake, were there in the garden on the night of betrayal along with John and Peter.
They "knew Jesus" in a most literal sense. And why not celebrate those who best knew Jesus?
At my 42 year old cousin's funeral, the priest said a strange and yet typically Roman Catholic thing. He said, "We no longer need to pray for Peggy. Now we can pray through her."
My Protestant heart had some difficulty with that, but I found it strangely comforting. I needed to hear that Peggy still had work to do for us. Catholics don't so much pray to the Saints as they pray with them in the same way that all of us will go to someone we love and trust and ask them to offer special prayers for us or for someone we know who needs those prayers. We say, "Will you say a prayer for my son who is lost and alone?" We only ask this of those whom we trust. We would never go up to a stranger and ask them to pray for a loved one.
How different is this from asking in prayer for the help of a trusted servant of God who has died?
I just discovered a great exercise that is better than a horoscope. I discovered recently that there is at least one saint for every day of the year. So, here's what you should do. Go to your birthday and find the saint whose day has been assigned to that day and read about that saint.
My birthday (August 18th) happens to be the feast of St. Jane Frances de Chantel, who lived in France in the Middle Ages. Jane was a deliriously happily married woman. She said that she and her husband, Christophe, "Shared one heart and one soul." This great happiness lasted until her husband was killed in a hunting accident. Just as her husband was dying he said to the man, "Don't commit the sin of hating yourself when you have done nothing wrong." The heartbroken Jane, however, had to struggle with forgiveness for a long time. At first she tried just greeting her husband's killer on the street. When she was able to do that, she invited him to her house. Finally she even became the godmother to his child.
She has become the patron saint of those who need to forgive and just can't do it. I know that there aren't many of us like that out there, but she's there for us if we should ever need her.
It is possible to ask those we love and know to be trustworthy, to pray for us now in this hour of our need. It's kind of an un-Protestant thing to do, isn't it?
Maybe it is good for us to celebrate a Saint's feast day now and again, to remind us of those practices of the Church which give us comfort and hope in our times of need. For there are certain folks among the deceased that have led lives that make them trustworthy to us. It is not wrong for us to have them in mind when we pray.