Saints and Sanctity

Christianity is not a Sunday-morning nod to God; it is Calvary thrilling through each moment. Sanctity is not folded hands and bent head; it is the risen Christ living in you now. Morality is not lust, chastity and an Index of Forbidden Books; it is a loving faith that cannot be contained, that does not ask, what must I do to stay out of sin? but rather, what more can I do for Him who has done so much for me?

It is this sort of conversion—begun at baptism, repaired by repentance, perfected through the bittersweet of earthly living—that touches the Catholic ideal of high holiness. Its consummation will be an eternal conversion, when the risen Christian faces the risen Christ in end-less contemplation, in ceaseless love.

–Walter Burghardt, SJ. Saints and Sanctity (1965)

My affinity for things Mid-Century goes beyond Mad Men and Danish Modern (and does not, please know, extend to jello-molds). I am, not surprisingly, interested in mid-century American Catholicism. I wasn’t sentient during the time, not really, but it’s the Church into which I was born and which formed me, for good or for ill.

So, with books. I will always go for a book – like The Hack that lays out Mid Century Catholic experience in gruesome detail – but I’m also nourished by popular spiritual books of the time, from Merton and beyond.

Take saints. There are countless good ones from this period – Saint-Watching by Phyllis McGinley, for example, still in print as late as 1989 via Crossroads Press, but no more, I fear. A wonderful book.

I spent a good chunk of Sunday afternoon reading another one, one that surprised me quite a bit, and even moved me, and that I believe deserves to be in print – Saints and Sanctity by Walter Burghardt, S.J.

Burghardt was a famed homiletics instructor, whose key notion centered around the homilist focusing on three points during his homily – I think that might be a Jesuit thing as well. Anyway, the “three points” comes out quite a bit in this book, perhaps because it came naturally to him in the writing, perhaps because some of these were originally preached.

The book is here, available via archive.org.

It’s quite wonderful. Suitable, for example, for a discussion group or even high schoolers. Burghardt applies aspects of the saints’ lives to aspects of our lives in illuminating ways, ways that still – almost sixty years after the writing – resonate. It’s clearly written, easy to understand, but with layers and lots of depth.

I’m going to reproduce his entire chapter on St. Francis Xavier here. I could just reproduce images of the pages or direct you to read it yourself, but I thought it was worth reproducing in an easily clippable space.

He writes about St. Francis Xavier and frustration. What Burghardt notes strikes me as still absolutely timely, and despite the decades that have passed, not at all out-of-date. And, as I like to say, over and over again – an excellent antidote to the contemporary pop Christian baptism of the American striver and fulfilment culture which gives the distinct impression that if you’re not a “success” you’re not fulfilling God’s plan for your life – because God made you to set! the world! on fire!

And you’re spending your days scrubbing toilets and giving change at the convenience store?

You were made for more! Don’t you have…..dreams????

Well. Here ya go:

When we think of Francis Xavier, we are tempted to picture a shooting star blazing across the Indian sky, a giant in seven-league boots straddling the Indies and Japan, a conquering hero planting a cross on China’s Christless coast. We see “a saint in a hurry,” moving seventy-five thousand miles in ten years, much of it on his own bare feet. We see the waters of baptism flowing from his hand ten thousand times in a single month: on a twelve-hour day, one baptism every two minutes for thirty days. We watch him dining with head-hunters, crashing Buddhist monasteries, telling the rulers of Japan: your vices make you “filthier than pigs and much lower than dogs.- We see him touch a lifeless boy to life, call a rotting corpse from the earth, stop a funeral procession to give a young man back to his mother.

That is the way you and I see Xavier; it is not the way Xavier saw himself. If ever a man felt himself a failure, if ever a human being felt the exquisite agony of frustration, that man was Francis Xavier.

Here is a brilliant mind that has given up the praise of men for love of God. Here is a soul on fire for souls, sent by King and Pope to Portugal’s new empire in India. He sets sail, dreaming of countries white for the harvest, of kings and people hungry for the religion of the beloved Portuguese. He reaches Goa, and before his eyes stretches the slave market. Here human beings are paraded like beasts, sold for silver, beaten with whips while their Christian masters, men of Xavier’s own race, men of Xavier’s own faith, count the blows on their rosary beads!

Men of his own race and faith. They are living in open sin; their god is gold and their own bellies. They will help Xavier, of course—if it does not Interfere with their precious traffic. And so Christ is sold for cloves and pepper. No wonder Francis will write to King John of Portugal these strong words: “. . . It is a sort of martyrdom to have patience and watch being destroyed what one has built up with so much labor. . . . Experience has taught me that Your Highness has no power in India to spread the faith of Christ. while you have power to take away and enjoy all the country’s temporal riches. . . . It will be a novel thing . . . to see yourself at the hour of death dispossessed of your kingdoms and seignories, and entering into others where you may have the new experience, which God avert, of being ordered out of paradise.- ‘

 Xavier turns from his own to the natives, and his heart sinks. This one has become a Christian for a new hat; that one, for a shirt; a third, to escape hanging. He works wonders among the peace-loving Paravas. and wild tribes descend from the hills to slaughter them. He baptizes six hundred on the Island of Manus. and a local rajah massacres them. Never will he see the finish of a single conquest; never will he repair the scandal caused by the greedy Portuguese. He cries aloud “his longing to leave the Indies alone, and to go to Abyssinia, to Arabia, to Madagascar, anywhere so that he might do some little good before he died, for all he had done so far had apparently been brought to nothing.”

He opens a second front, in Japan, and the way of the cross starts all over again. If he ever had the gift of tongues, it deserts him now, and he stands, in his own worth, “like a statue” amid the chattering crowd. He gives a year of his life to Kagoshima, nets one hundred souls, and its ruler forbids him to preach Christ under threat of death. The nobles insult him till his face turns scarlet; innkeepers shut the door in his face; the common people guffaw at his accent, pelt him with stones. And he writes perhaps the saddest sentence he ever wrote: “The children ran after us with shouts of derision.”

 He visions a third front: China. He plans his attack with extreme care, and the Governor of Malacca, a Catholic, ruins his strategy. He laughs at excommunication; he calls Xavier “a depraved and vicious hypocrite”; he organizes persecution—and Francis dares not show his face in the streets. “Never In my life have I endured persecution like this, not even from pagans and Mohammedans.” And when he leaves Malacca, he leaves it for a lonely island, six miles from the China of his dreams. to wait for a boat, a brown sail that will never come. And six miles from China he dies, without a last anointing, without the body of his Christ, with no one to whisper over his frail frame: “May angels lead you into paradise.”

“It is a martyrdom to watch being destroyed what one has built up with so much labor.” These are moving words, for they well up from a heart frustrated, from a remarkable figure who felt himself a resounding failure. But they are more than moving, more than a personal confession: they point up a ceaseless situation, for they echo, at some time or other, from every human heart. It is of this that I shall speak, of human frustration: first, the sheer fact; second, the problem born of the fact; third, a Christian solution to the problem.

First then, the sheer fact of human frustration. I do not mean, at the moment, the minor setbacks inseparable from human living: the headache that yields to aspirin, the heartache that surrenders to a smile. I mean, rather, the reverses and frustrations that scar a man’s soul and scar his personality, that disrupt his life and impair his relationship to others, that imperil his career and atrophy his ambition, that keep him from fulfilling himself as a human being and a Christian. I mean, therefore, the marriage that has turned from ecstasy to a joyless thing, from perfect oneness to an armed neutrality. I mean the job that eats up half your waking hours and brings only monotony, fatigue, rebellion. I mean the situation that makes a man a second-class citizen, a second-class human being, even a second-class Christian, simply because his skin is black. I mean the lingering illness that withers your body and threatens to shrivel your soul. I mean the living death of loneliness, the conviction that you are alone and unloved, an unsufferable burden to yourself and to others. I mean the frustration of helpleness: the anguish of a mother who, like Mary beneath the cross, can only watch and wait while a dear one suffers and dies. I mean even the frustrations within Catholic living—wherever a good man’s enthusiasm is chilled by an impersonal organization, wherever conscience clashes with tradition, wherever education has been reduced to memory and obedience, wherever the wicked prosper and the good are trodden down, wherever God has hid His face and dark night invades the soul. I mean the frustration of every Xavier as his God-centered life is thwarted by evil.

And in our age the fact of frustration has been intensified—on every level: science and art, philosophy and religion, business and politics. For this is a paradoxical age. It is an age of un-paralleled progress and astonishing anxiety. Never has there been such success, never so much uncertainty. Never such pride in technology, never such fear of the machine. Never so much victory over nature, never such enslavement to things. Never so much promise, so much pressure. Never so many people, so few persons. Never so many Christians, never such insistence that this is a post-Christian age, that Christianity is irrelevant and God is dead.

The sheer fact of frustration is obvious enough. But from the fact a problem is born. There is a psychological problem, of course: the effect of failure on a man’s development as a person. How do you fight that feeling of frustration which builds up an ulcer in the body and a corresponding cancer in the soul —that sense of failure which kills enthusiasm and makes a human being bitter as bile, jealous of the laughter in another’s eyes? But I would see even this problem in its religious dimensions: the effect of frustration on a man’s development as a Christian. And here the problem has three facets; for frustration can touch your faith, your hope, and your love. There is a crisis of faith: How is it possible to go on blindly believing in a gracious God, when God’s providence is so elusive, when my little world lies in ruins around me? There is a crisis of hope: How dare I look forward with confident expectation of God’s help, when my expectations have been shattered, when God’s help has not been there? There is, above all, a crisis of love: How can I go on loving—loving God and man—when my love has been rejected, when my love has been rebuffed?

The solution, on Christian lines, is not simple. A first step, a basic premise, to any solution is a seemingly harsh sentence from Scripture, where God is represented as saying: My thoughts are not your thoughts. Nor are your ways my ways. . . . But as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are my ways higher than your ways. And my thoughts than your thoughts. (Is 55:8-9)

 This is dreadfully difficult for a human being to accept—even for a Xavier. Just because I am trying to do God’s work with every ounce of my being, is no guarantee that my plans will prosper. There is no guarantee that an effective Christian apostle will not be cut down in his prime, no guarantee that fiery eloquence will be more fruitful than silent suffering, life more redemptive than death. There is no guarantee that because you have given yourself totally to a Christian marriage, your oneness will be lasting; that because you have given your child a godly education, he will not turn from God; that because you love Cod deeply, you will not lose your job, your home, your family, your health; that because you live like Christ, you can avoid dying like Him. There is no guarantee that because you believe, you will not doubt; because you hope, you will not despond; because you love, your love will not grow cold. There is no guarantee that a Xavier will reach China. In this sense there is a Christian frustration, a Christian failure.

The second step to a solution is closely linked to the first: if God’s ways are not our ways, it does not follow that our ways are unimportant, useless, fruitless. As the title of a powerful French movie once put it, “God needs men.” Not because He is weak, but because He wants it so. There is no Christian seed which does not bear some fruit: no act of faith which does not somewhere fructify, no Christlike love which does not attract Christ’s love. There is no suffering offered to God on the paten of my flesh which is not redemptive, does not bring God’s life to someone, somewhere.

Only God knows how much Xavier meant for the China he never saw. You do your Christian task as God gives you to see it; the rest, the increase, is in His hands. God still uses what the world calls foolish to shame the wise, still uses what the world calls weak to shame its strength, still uses what the world calls low and insignificant and unreal to nullify its realities, “so that in His presence no human being might have any ground for boasting” (cf. 1 Cor 1:27-29). The blood of Christians, the love of Christians, is always a seed. In this sense there is no Christian frustration, no Christian failure, this side of hell.

At this stage in our solution the Old Testament has a pertinent story. The Jews were rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. Among the workmen was Nehemiah. His task was small: to build one section of the wall. Four times the enemies of the Jews sent messengers to him: Come down, let’s talk about this thing. And four times Nehemiah sent back the selfsame message: “I am doing a great work, and so I cannot come down” (Neh 6:3). Here Is your answer to frustration, as it was Xavier’s answer: “I am doing a great work, and so I cannot come down.”

 Whether he was sitting at a desk as private secretary to Ignatius Loyola. or washing the sores of a leper in Venice, or teaching catechism to an Indian child, or standing like a statue among mocking Japanese, or simply dying six miles from his dreams, Francis never forgot one thing: “I am doing a great work: I am doing God’s work.” In his every failure, to the very last failure off the coast of China, he was a resounding success. For, as Paul Claudel said of him, “he did what he was told to do—not everything, but all he was able to do.”

The third and final step is a paradoxical Christian truth. In all frustration, the challenge to faith can only be met by deeper faith, more expansive faith, a faith that looks beyond my little world to God’s plan for all His world. The challenge to hope can only be met by total trust, utter abandonment to God’s design for me and mine. The challenge to love can only be met by greater love, by such selfless love as once in-spired a famous sonnet long attributed to Francis Xavier. It is not really his, but it is expressive of his love, and, please God, it will be expressive of your love. This Spanish sonnet loses something in translation, but the basic idea breaks through: