A young Saint through Reformed EyesA young Saint through Reformed Eyes
An edited version of a sermon preached at Robert Stewart Memorial Church,
Newcastle upon Tyne on All Saints Day 2009 by Revd Ray Anglesea
“Thousands are expected to flock to what could be the biggest demonstration of religious faith since the visit to the North of Pope John Paul II in 1982.” So read the banner headline in The Journal, September of this year. Thousands indeed did come to see some of the bodily remains of the 19th-century French Roman Catholic Carmelite nun St Thérèse of Lisieux, preserved after her death from tuberculosis at the age of 24, and displayed in a casket or reliquary at St Andrew's Roman Catholic Church, Newcastle. The Journal was correct; pilgrims flocked to the church to venerate her casket before the precious Perspex covered elaborate box moved on to other Northern locations at Darlington, Middlesbrough RC Cathedral and York Minster.
During the unprecedented month-long tour of England and Wales of the relics of this young saint it is estimated that some 150,000 people will have visited her reliquary, some 100,000 candles will have been lit and 50,000 pink roses left for the saint Catholics know as "the little flower of Jesus". In Ireland, three-quarters of the overall population turned out to see her remains – that’s nearly 4 million people! All this in an age when we do not go to church!
I too am taken by the mystique and charisma of this young Saint. Whilst in Normandy a couple of years ago I visited Lisieux and the Latin cross-shaped Basilica of St.Thérèse dedicated to her in the city where she lived and died. The Basilica turned out to be a monumental shrine, the second largest pilgrimage site in France after Lourdes. Some famous people have taken inspiration from the young Saint. Mother Theresa of Calcutta took her name from the young child, Edith Piaff was known to have a photograph of her by her bedside and the late Princess of Wales was reported to have often lit a candle in her memory.
Does the veneration of relics have a part to play in a 21st-century church? Do we need relics to cure people of their suffering or is it just superstitious nonsense, a pretentious claim? Or is the Theresa phenomenon just a reinvention of ways to interpret Christian belief that makes sense in an extraordinary age of anxiety and estrangement when people, according to John Goldsmith's letter to The Times last week “are looking for a credible way out of the cul-de-sac of scientific materialism!”?
Is it possible that by looking in the rear driving mirror of Catholic faith we can make sense of the wisdom and sensibilities of an emerging culture of the twenty first century - in a church where attendances are diminishing but spiritual hunger is rising? It was Lenny Bruce the American stand-up comedian writer, social critic and satirist who said “every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God!”
In our Reformed tradition the veneration of relics would be rejected by most Protestants today; they certainly were rejected by the Protestant Reformers. Erasmus had a deep mistrust of this superstition. Calvin in The Treatise about relics written in 1543 tried to persuade Protestants not to follow this strange religious practice, which he attacked with fierce ridicule. Luther too denounced this practice and the idolatry it encouraged. In England, similar reflexive hostility goes back to the Reformation. Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s minister, who is enjoying an unexpected bout of popularity stemming from his starring role in the 2009 Booker Prize winner, Wolf Hall, sent his commissioners to monasteries and shrines in 1535 to report on similar phenomena. And the reaction of his Protestant commissioners to popular piety, particularly the veneration of relics, was indistinguishable from that of contemporary secularists: Yuck, gross! “We fownde moche vanitie and superstition,” one observed!
The idea then of venerating relics is viewed by many as distasteful - at worst they may inspire revulsion - at best they may be viewed as an anthropological curiosity, an oddity that the rational English cast aside at the Reformation. The visit of Thérèse’s relics has not been without its critics - the more secular of our newspaper columnists have howled with derision at the displays of pious sentimentality. Matthew Paris, an agnostic, writing in The Times called for an “all out war on religion!” Simon Jenkins, contemporary secularist and former newspaper editor, described relics as “jujus, religious placebos for the credulous classes.” We would only presume that the spectacle of praying before – not to – a dead girl’s bones would be an obvious anathema to Richard Dawkins, author of the God Delusion.
On this All Saints Day what then are we in the Reformed tradition to make of this young saint and the popular fashionable phenomena surrounding her visit? Our Reformed fathers in the faith claimed that there were no mysteries in Christianity and that its truth was clearly understandable - we are saved by our own faith, there is no need for priests. My overall personal impression of my visit to her Basilica in Normandy, and to other visits I have undertaken to shrines at St Francis’s Basilica in Assisi, to Fatima, Portugal and to the tomb of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican crypt and regular visits to the shrine of our own northern saint, St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral was that I am always more moved by the people around me than the remains of the saint. There is no noise, no hysteria, just an atmosphere of intense devotion, of focused prayer.
Reformation theologians never claimed that there were no mysteries in Christianity. Calvin wrote in reference to Scripture that it was “not without God’s extraordinary providence that the sublime mysteries of the kingdom of heaven came to be expressed largely in mean and lowly words” (Institutes 1.8.3). And if some people do obtain benefits from visiting relics or a shrine, then maybe for them relics offer a path to God not away from him.
In one of the most highly acclaimed TV series of recent times, the inimitable Brian Sewell, Britain’s most famous and best-loved art critic and historian, makes the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. His remarkable journey, at times moving and hilarious, is a deeply personal exploration of art and religious belief, which takes Sewell by boat, car and horse through France and North West Spain via Paris, Chartres, Orleans, Bordeaux, Lourdes, Bilbao, Burgos and Leon. But what made the programme The Naked Pilgrim so very watchable and moving is how as a lapsed Catholic Sewell comes to question his loss of faith. And yes when he does reach Lourdes it prompts an emotional response in him to the faith of pilgrims where yes, there are discarded crutches. We can argue the toss about whether it’s a result of psychosomatic healing or divine help.
But if we can possibly put on hold or possibly begin to deconstruct our Protestant way of thinking for a moment, there is something about Thérèse that confounds my scepticism. To disappear behind the doors of a convent at the age of 15 was, according to Clifford Longley, to enter a life of total obscurity, you might think. So how come Thérèse has been proclaimed not only as a saint but a Doctor of the Church, the highest accolade the Vatican has to bestow? She had no degrees in theology or philosophy, she didn't spend a long life in study, wrote one book and many letters, died at 24. And now she is world famous.
I think part of the answer - a way into her accepted and popular appeal - lies in the fact that this saint was so very ordinary. She simply did the little things of life – which we all have to deal with – very well. And her simplicity caught the imagination of any number of people. Thérèse saw a wild flower on the forest floor, and saw it was perfect as God intended. So she decided that God wanted her to be perfect too.
But another way of looking at this child saint is to understand that she was, literally a child, a little one. Receiving the kingdom of God like a child, as Theresa did, is about knowing our dependence – on God and on each other, about learning how to trust in the love of God, and about being uninhibited in our response to the challenges and changes God brings, in our lives, our churches and our communities. In that child-like following the kingdom will come near to us and we will be agents of God’s kingdom, bringing the love of God in Christ to a needy world.
Clifford Longley in his Thought for the Day a couple of weeks ago mentioned that Thérèse boiled her whole religion down to one word - love - and then practised it. One tiny example he quotes. Thérèse decided to be kindest to the people she liked least, to give them a warm smile and if she could, do them some little service. So on this All Saints Day let us emulate the child saint Thérèse. Find someone you dislike, and be really nice to them. Wow!