Why Aren't We All Saints?

Last week, 1^st November was All Saints’ Day.  I might have written a blog post about it then, but I had got out of the habit of updating this blog at all, and wanted to work my way back in with a silly post about dragons.  But at any rate, the calendar of early November is full of death and destruction, or attempted destruction.

Hallowe’en, with children dressing up as ghosts, skeletons and vampires to confuse evil spirits, is the prelude to the day for commemorating all the saints that have ever been: the ones whose feast days everyone knows (with St Patrick’s and St Andrew’s Days already being bank holidays, many people think St David and St George deserve the same honour), and the ones no-one except God even remembers existed.  After that, 2^nd November is All Souls’ Day, to remember any of our dead friends and family who weren’t quite saints but we loved them anyway.

Then we have a jolly festival of fireworks and bonfires to celebrate Britain’s most famous terrorist – or, as Sellar and Yeatman brilliantly re-interpreted him in 1066 And All That, a loyal citizen who had heard the King say ‘No bishop, no king,’ misinterpreted this as a request, and decided to try to help achieve it by blowing up the Houses of Parliament.

Then the mood turns sombre with Remembrance Sunday, acknowledging the huge numbers of service personnel, civilians and animals who have died in two world wars and many lesser ones.  These deaths aren’t so far from living memory that they can be turned into a fun party – even if they do provide an excuse for singing irreverent soldiers’ songs from past generations.

Then the calendar turns from death to birth, as we start to look forward to Christmas.  I’m going to treat Advent as starting early, as I described last year, and try not to have too many nervous breakdowns between now and Christmas.

But right now, All Saints’ Day is still playing on my mind.  ‘Saints’ or ‘holy people’ as the term is used in the Bible doesn’t mean just exceptionally good people who are now dead, are believed to have the power to work miracles and have been canonised by the Vatican, but all Christians.  So why aren’t all Christians saints?

When someone on the internet posts questions about the relationship between religion and virtue, it usually degenerates into a slanging match, with theists implying that most atheists are evil dictators like Joseph Stalin, and atheists implying that the only effect religion can have on theists’ lives is to turn them into fanatical persecutors like the Spanish Inquisition.  Each side claims Adolf Hitler as a member of the other, since, being a true politician, he was equally happy to describe himself as a Christian or denounce Christianity as suited his needs.  Like Donald Trump, he was a politician in a Christian-majority country and knew when God-talk would win him support.

People quote Steven Weinberg’s saying that ‘With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion,’ as though this means that religion can only ever change people for the worse, not for the better.  I don’t know whether anyone has actually carried out a large-scale study to test whether this is true. 

Perhaps you might get a cohort of a thousand students, 250 of whom had converted to Christianity while at university, 250 who had converted to Islam, 250 who had converted to Buddhism and 250 who had remained secular atheists, and study how they develop over the next thirty or forty years to test whether theistic religion, non-theistic spirituality or secularism is most effective in developing good moral character.  As PDB11 says, it’s not as if this sort of experiment allows for a double-blind test, like testing the effectiveness of a medicine compared to a placebo.  But that wouldn’t be what it was for.  It would be to study what effect practising a religion has on people’s spiritual development.

It’s easy to point to some people who have done terrible things in the name of religion.  But this doesn’t really prove that religion is the reason for their being evil, any more than Harold Shipman is proof that studying medicine turns people into serial killers and that the best way to make the world a better place is for there to be no more doctors.  What is more of a challenge to the belief that God works in the hearts of believers to change them is that most of us who do have religious faith would have to admit that, in practice, we and our fellow-worshippers aren’t necessarily kinder or better people than our non-religious friends, neighbours and colleagues.

I am currently reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.  There is a scene near the beginning where the narrator, Liz, describes first becoming aware of a guru who will be significant in her life (yes, I know it’s a memoir, but I think of the author as ‘Elizabeth Gilbert’ and the persona of herself that she presents in the book as ‘Liz’):

‘I walked into David’s apartment and saw this picture on his dresser of a radiantly beautiful Indian woman and I asked, “Who’s that?”

‘He said, “That is my spiritual teacher.”

‘My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face.  Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: “I want a spiritual teacher.” … I felt this weird division in myself, and then my mind stepped out of my body for a moment, spun around to face my heart in astonishment and silently asked, “You DO?”

Of course, Liz soon discovers that it’s not practical to expect a world-famous guru who has myriads of devotees worldwide, and who lives on a different continent, to move to New York to give one-to-one counselling to one questioning American.  But she can meet a group of followers of the Guru who meet every Tuesday evening to meditate and chant:

‘Far from being freaked out by these regular-looking people singing to God, I instead felt my soul rise diaphanous in the wake of that chanting … I started going to the chants every Tuesday.  Then I started meditating every morning on the ancient Sanskrit mantra the Guru gives to all her students (the regal Om Namah Shivaya, meaning “I honor the divinity that resides within me”) … And when I heard the Guru had an Ashram in India, I knew I must take myself there as quickly as possible.’

Liz’s religious experience comes through the Hindu tradition, but what is readily available to her in New York – communal worship sessions once a week, and private devotions every day if she chooses – doesn’t sound so different from what is available to Christians in Britain, even if rural churches are dwindling and closing down because there are no longer enough members of a congregation to support a priest.  I must admit that our hymn-singing, liturgy, and even the ritual of Holy Communion don’t necessarily give me a transcendental sensation – but sometimes they do.

But do people need more one-to-one spiritual counselling to help us to develop – and shouldn’t that be possible without making a pilgrimage to a different continent?  After all, carbon emissions from people flying off on holiday are already a major driver of climate change – and one that it is far easier to do without than essentials like using fuel in growing food, or commuting to work if it isn’t possible to work from home.

Maybe parish priests should be in more of a position to give members of their congregation individual guidance than a guru addressing her devotees over Zoom – or an American pastor of a megachurch of thousands, for that matter.  And they really do try to help everyone who particularly needs and asks for help in a time of crisis.  In my times of spiritual upheaval, I have known plenty of vicars who are trained counsellors, therapists who are ordained clergy, and vicars who aren’t specifically trained to deal with me freaking out but still do their best.

But a vicar of an urban church with a congregation of a few hundred doesn’t have much time to meet with each member of their congregation for an hour of counselling each week, or even each month, combined with all their other duties.  A rural vicar might well, like ours, have to divide their time between six churches with a total of perhaps sixty worshippers – still too many for the vicar to get to know each of them really deeply as an individual, but too few that they can afford to support a vicar.

Maybe small study groups should be more of a place for people to discuss theology and spirituality, encourage each other and grow.  But this relies on enough members of the church being young, confident, interested and full of energy. 

In a rural church where most of the congregation are over sixty, mostly not very educated, and prefer church to be as reassuringly familiar as possible, there can be a tendency for ‘discussion’ groups to be mainly a matter of following a scripted book (watch this scene of this film; ask members of the group a question and give them time to answer, but not time to discuss their answers or any worries or further questions that arise from their questions; read this Bible passage, say the prayer printed here), just because this is easier to do without requiring whoever is leading the group to do much thinking or preparation.  Sometimes when our vicar has tried to organise a ‘café church’ style service, with cards with questions intended to stimulate discussion, members of the church have grumbled that it’s too early in the morning for any question more profound than ‘What’s your favourite pizza topping?’

Admittedly, some of this is my fault.  When there is room for open discussion, I bring my anxieties, obsession and paranoia to the discussion and air them, and, if I’m particularly worked up, I can’t manage to listen to and comprehend what anyone says in reply.  So it’s not surprising that church organisers assume that it might be better for me if there isn’t time to discuss my worries.  It isn’t – if I’m worried, I’m worried, and not being allowed to discuss it just makes me feel worse – but it is more conducive to allowing everyone else to learn something helpful to them if they don’t have to listen to me.

But if God is real and the promises of the Bible are true, why doesn’t God Himself, in the person of the Holy Spirit, act as spiritual counsellor to each person?  As Jesus promises his disciples, shortly before his death, in John 14 (I quote verses 16-18 and 25-26 in the amplified version, as this provides multiple different meanings of the Greek word parakletos):

“And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper (Comforter, Advocate, Intercessor—Counselor, Strengthener, Standby), to be with you forever—  the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive [and take to its heart] because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He (the Holy Spirit) remains with you continually and will be in you…

“I have told you these things while I am still with you.  But the Helper (Comforter, Advocate, Intercessor—Counselor, Strengthener, Standby), the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name [in My place, to represent Me and act on My behalf], He will teach you all things. And He will help you remember everything that I have told you.”

When Jesus was with his disciples, he could be a spiritual teacher to each of them in person, especially his twelve closest friends.  But he couldn’t do the same for the thousands of people who flocked to listen to him, some of whom on the edge of the crowd were probably straining to hear (like the scene in The Life of Brian where Brian and his mother are listening to the Sermon on the Mount and asking each other, did Jesus just say ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers’?).  But the Spirit of God, living in people’s hearts, can be a spiritual teacher to everyone, all the time.

The mantra I quoted earlier, which Elizabeth Gilbert says means, “I honour the divinity that resides within me,” makes a lot of sense in the Christian context of the Holy Spirit.  This isn’t a direct translation of the words Om Namah Shivaya, which Wikipedia discusses in more detail here.  Literally, it means, ‘my salutations to Shiva, the auspicious one.’  However, as this site explains, this is also about honouring our own divinity.

But, as Christians, why haven’t we been enlightened?  Why are Christians so divided and uncertain about what is God’s will?  Why did over 74 million Americans, many of them devout Christians, vote for Donald Trump on Tuesday?

But I don’t really have to look at America.  When I look at the times in my own life when I have been most obsessed with religious matters, I have expressed this in precisely what St Paul describes as the works of an unspiritual nature: hatred, fits of rage, quarrels and heresies.  When I look at reports in the newspapers about scandals among the most spiritually intense holiness discipling programmes, I see the worst kind of sexual immorality: that rooted in coercion and manipulation.  When I read newspaper reports of debates over church policy on gender and sexuality, I see factions.  It all seems far away from Paul’s description of the Spirit-filled life bringing love, joy and peace.

One explanation could be that God doesn’t exist.  But I’m not going to dismiss God’s existence just because I personally haven’t heard Him speaking to me, when plenty of people I know who are wiser and saner than I am have heard Him.

A second explanation could be that God’s Spirit isn’t in most Christians after all.  Some Christians believe that, even if you think you have been saved because you believe in Jesus, and may have said a prayer asking Jesus into your life and publicly declared your faith in church by being baptised or confirmed, you haven’t really been saved unless you have been baptised in the Holy Spirit.  I had one message on the internet from someone claiming that this manifests itself as a ball of fire in the stomach coming up through the mouth and causing people to prophesy and speak in tongues. 

I don’t know where the writer got the ‘ball of fire in the stomach’ bit from – the nearest I can find in the Bible is the description in Acts 2 of the Holy Spirit descending on people in what looked like tongues of fire – but I do know that the Bible clearly states that the Spirit gives different gifts to different people and that not everyone speaks in tongues (1 Corinthians 12:27-31), and that what is more important is to love one another (1 Corinthians 13).

A third answer to the question ‘Where is the Holy Spirit?’ is that He is in each person who sincerely believes in God and wants to obey Him, but that we aren’t all good at hearing God’s voice.  Particularly in Advent and Lent (and, for that matter, in the seasons of Christmastide and Eastertide – why is it that, while Christian newspapers are full of recommendations for good study books to read during Lent and Advent, there don’t seem to be many equivalent devotional guides for studying during the Christmas-to-Candlemas and Easter-to-Pentecost periods?), I ought to make more time to pray and be receptive, and give God a chance to speak to me.  

In practice, I suspect that if God ever does speak to me, it’s as likely to be at a random time when I’m busy with something else, rather than during a time of prayer.  But maybe first I need times of prayer and meditation, of reading the Bible and thinking about it, to prepare my mind so that I’m ready.

Yet another answer could be that God teaches us through each other – and sometimes through ourselves, our own thoughts.  After all, as Liz in Eat, Pray, Love realises, just because when she cries out to God in moments of difficulty, her answers come in the form of her writing messages to herself doesn’t mean it isn’t God speaking to her, through her.