Chair's October Blog: Saints of CPW, past, present and to come - Happy Feast Day!
All Saints! Really!?
Longer ago than I care to admit, as a child in a Catholic primary school, I can remember the feast of All Saints as a somewhat remote celebration - something to do with unearthly people who were so Good. The Saints were the lead characters of colourful and sometimes tragic dramas. I had a preference for stories with happy endings and wasn’t totally convinced by the assurances of ultimate glory given by my enthusiastic elders.
There were some good ones of course - St Anne, my namesake, was a comfortable motherly character, St Clare was a gentle soul and St Cecilia had something to do with music (though I wasn’t sure what it was). I also had all their miraculous stories in my Book of First Communion Stories for Girls, which was pure magic as far as I was concerned. Nevertheless, when I left childhood, they stayed behind, and might have done so forever had I not had children of my own.
Imagine my surprise when my (admittedly adorable but all too human) children returned home from school claiming that they were Saints! How things had changed. The chipped plaster saints in medieval garb had been replaced by Real People of recent history and this time it was perfectly possible for us all to join their ranks.
The new Saints had not always been easy to live with in their lifetime - they had made mistakes, tried and failed and tried again. Sometimes they were not even very Good (in the conventional sense). Now here was a group of Saints that it might just be possible to join. I could take all my failed attempts at being Better, all my good intentions gone to waste, and add them to their accumulated total, because one thing kept us coming back and trying again - we cared.
It’s not what we achieve that makes us Saints, it’s the love of God, reflected in us and channelled to others, that brings about the transformation. The Church knows this and reinforces the message through the feast’s Gospel reading of the Beatitudes.
The Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin argued that Love was the greatest source of energy in the universe. It has a power no other force can harness. We do things for love that we wouldn’t do for any other reason (if you are nodding now, your Sainthood is confirmed). Once you realise this and look around, we really are surrounded by a ’communion of saints’. This is never more true than when CPW gathers to learn, love and live together (even temporarily).
Saints of CPW, past, present and to come - Happy Feast Day!
Anne Dixon, CPW Chair