Who are your saints?

For my birthday this year my daughter gave me a used book, published in 2000: Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World. This large coffee table book consists of fifty beautiful black and white portraits accompanied by interviews with dissidents and human rights activists from countries around the world. The cover photo is so disturbing that I did not put it on the coffee table but hid it in my study, like pornography. I don’t want my young grandchildren to see it. It shows a person, standing alone in a desert landscape, shrouded entirely in black, with a noose around his/her neck, presumably about to be executed. 

This photograph accompanies the only interview in the book by “Anonymous.”  “Anonymous” was, or is, a human rights activist in Sudan. In 2000 it was too dangerous to publish his/her photograph or name with the interview. Civil war flared there again in 2023. Pray for the people of Sudan.

This dark book of saints. Some are famous — Desmond Tutu, Sister Helen Prejean, Václav Havel, Elie Wiesel, the Dalai Lama. Many died. Most I’d never heard of. Most make reference to religious faith as the source of their convictions, courage, and even joy. I thank God for them. They embody the fierce love of Christ’s Spirit in the world. Spirit of justice, spirit of mercy.

These saints also judge me. Such a tepid follower of Jesus I am, a fearful middle-class American consumer. I don’t pray to saints. That lesson from my Protestant formation stuck. But I do love them. I do despair of ever coming close to being like them, though technically, by Jesus Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, I’m already a saint.

The proper love of saints should lead us to the love of God and love of neighbor. But saints also divide us.This happens when my saints are not your saints. We play “saint upmanship.” When saints come to church, watch out. What would I do, as a pastor, if someone stood up during “joys and concerns” and asked prayers for Charlie Kirk. This happened recently in my neck of the woods. I hope I would pray in the spirit of John Calvin, quoted by Professor Dieleman in Tuesday’s blog post, “that the whole human race, without exception, are to be embraced with one feel of charity.” The hardest work comes after worship when we are called to practice charity, to lean into loving the communion of saints on earth. Especially when we disagree. Lord, have mercy. We believe that in this sanctification work the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness.

In our lives in Christ, we scurry between guilt, grace, and gratitude. It is deeply human, this  movement from despair to hope and back again. I’m a pessimist by nature. Neuroscience says most of us are. I wake up thinking My lifestyle is destroying the planet! We are headed toward civil war! I hate my fat stomach! And so on.

Then, swiftly, by grace, I become aware of a deep underlying happiness. Phrases from hymns and verses from scripture light up my brain. I feel a crazy love for the sunrise, for the deer in my yard, for the whole earth. I feel my mother’s presence with me, though she died five years ago. I see saints everywhere.   

Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident, onetime presidential candidate and long opponent of Putin, died in prison on February 16, 2024.  The New Yorker of October 21, 2024, beatifies him on its cover. In a long excerpt from his memoir, partly written from prison, he describes two “techniques” that help him to keep believing in his principles. First, he forced himself to meditate for hours and hours on his own death, the worst possible death — forgotten by everyone, no funeral, no family, buried in an unmarked grave. The second technique, he says: 

is so old you may roll your eyes heavenward when you hear it. It is religion. . .

I have always thought, and said openly, that being a believer makes it easier to live your life, and, to an even greater extent, engage in opposition politics. Faith makes life simpler. . .

It is not essential for you to believe that some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old, or that the sea literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left to worry about?

My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.

For all the saints. Alleluia!

Kerry Kennedy and Photographer Eddie Adams. Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing our World. Umbrage Editions, Inc., 2000.  (republished in 2008)