All Saints’ Sunday
By Mark Oakley, Monday 5th November, 2007
I´m not sure if you have been to the Louisiana art gallery recently but now is a very good time to go as the gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of Lucian Freud´s paintings. Such exhibitions are rare. Freud is a private man, now in his 85th year and still a little way to go if he is to catch up with Titian who was still painting in his 90s. Lucian Freud is, of course, the grandson of Sigmund Freud and his often unsettling portraits, often of nude figures, have remapped the human body as profoundly as his grandfather remapped the mind. Freud tends to paint members of his family or friends and he takes a very long time to paint a portrait. If you sit for Freud you are committing yourself to many hours of the day and for many months of the year. And what strikes you as you look at his paintings is how the human selves are unwrapped in every sense by the artist´s inner eye. We see the sitter´s body, uncovered, and we see something of their soul uncovered too, we sense the fragility, we see the uniqueness of this person and we see the solitariness too. Some think that Freud´s paintings are pitiless, brutal, bleak in their focus on the lumpy chunks of flesh we are. Others, though (and I am one of them) feel that there is a sympathy in him, although he depicts with an icey precision, and that the boundaries between our public presentation and our private selves are blurred by his paint. ‘I paint people’, Freud has said, ‘not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be’. And he tells his subjects, I will paint what I see, not what you hope I will see.
Well, perhaps we need some of Lucian Freud´s x-ray vision in the church on a day such as All Saints´ Day? We have become so used to the plaster statues and the stained glass, as well as the casual way in which we can use the word Saint either with goodness or with sarcasm (Don´t call me a Saint, said Dorothy Day, you mustn’t dismiss me so easily), that on a day like this it may seem that we´re not sure as to what we are really doing except becoming a sort of holy Madame Tussaud´s, wheeling out some past heroes for the purposes of passing admiration or, more likely, complete incomprehension and a sense of irrelevance.
The roots of this day may help. We know that in the early Church congregations of Christians would remember their own people who had died, especially those who had given their life as a witness for their Christian faith (martyr means witness). We know that the congregation would go to the grave of the particular friend on the anniversary of their death (actually called by them their “birth day�) and remember, celebrate and pray together for encouragement. They believed that these people were at rest, but at rest in God, alive in him, still held by him, a love stronger than death. It is like us, perhaps, remembering such people as Geoffrey or Wendy, Christian people who have lived with us and from whose presence we benefited. Saint was a word used for anybody who was a Christian, friends and family members perhaps who were alive or who had died. They were not remembering perfect people, angels, plastercaste goodness. They were remembering their own, with faults and doubts, who had nevertheless known their need of God and, in some cases, been brave and sacrificial. Saints were sinners who kept trying.
And so we don´t need to do cover up jobs with saints, or have overly romantic heroic notions of them. We are not afraid of them being looked at by the Lucian Freuds of the world – in fact, what we see there when they are is perhaps what matters most of all. And in the gospel today Jesus tells us what we can expect to find in those who know their need of God: an understanding that can forgive other people, a strength of character that will not just reflect back the aspects of the enemy but will break the circle of revenge, a humane dignity that will do to others as they would have done to them.
We have the word Blessed for what Jesus calls the poor, hungry, weeping and hated – it is a holy sort of English word but the Greek word makarios is plainer – it meant happiness but more than this, it meant a sort of “Good on you!� “Good on you when you are hated…�and so on. Makarios was the word used of the Greek gods´ happiness and contentment. It was also used of the rich and those who had all the material goods, family, crops, health, beauty and honour that the world looks for to call them successful. By using this word Jesus was turning the tables yet again. It is not the elite who are blessed, not the rich, the powerful, the high and mighty. No. God´s blessings are on the poor, hungry, crying and hated, the bottom of the heap. Those who know their need of God, those who long for him, those who have not created false selves out of what they own and what they can do, but whose self is unraveled and whose soul is open. And here is the other thing you will find in a saint, in a Christian: both a desire to be as open as these are to God (note Jesus is speaking to his disciples – a radical thought – this is how his disciples ought to be) and a deep concern for those who are in this condition. Can one claim to be a follower of this Jesus if you do not contribute to the poor of the world? Can you claim to be a follower of him if you do not hear the tears and cries of people? If we are to love as Christ, it will mean true friendship in the private domain and it will mean justice in the public domain.
Desmond Tutu says (or shouts) that we, together, make up the rainbow people of God – all our differences being shaped into a symbol of hope for the world. It is true that history shows we have a God who likes casseroles, opening the fridge to see what´s there and using what there is. This is a God who sees very clearly who we are, in company and alone, who doesn´t want plaster but human beings so that, like Aslan, he can defrost us a bit and bring us to life, life that is eternal.
Story of man who became a priest after singing in the choir. As people came to the altar and returned to their seats, all I, he said, was an endless procession of feet. All of the feet were different. Some shoes were shined and some were not. Some shoes were worn at the heel and some bulged near the big toe. All those shoes, all those feet-going to and from the altar for the body and blood of Christ!” The priest went on to say that what he was watching from his place in the choir seemed like and endless and timeless procession of coming and returning. “All those feet,” he said, “spoke something to me of eternity, and the communion of saints, and the body of Christ. And how it is we are all a part of the coming and returning. That we are members, one of another, and of that same procession from and back to God, the one from whom we come and the one to whom we shall return.”
