Saint Nasty

On All Saints Day, our congregation sang a hymn that begins, "I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true. . ."--a line that is not only sentimental, but on at least one account, simply wrong.

I grant that saints are both brave and true. Though principalities threaten and rage, they do what they are called to do. This usually amounts to telling the truth, and that, in turn, usually results in the saints being burned or beheaded. Brave and true, indeed.

But patient? The word conjures up an array of images--of haloed saints listening sensitively to others' worries, smiling at people's weaknesses, setting people back on the path of virtue with a blessing and a gentle pat on the back. Surely, the images suggest, the saints were nice people--that's why they are saints. That's why we sometimes describe a forbearing person as being "patient as a saint." But, I am learning, this phrase can be an oxymoron.

Take, for example, the saint who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize of all history, Francis of Assisi. You would think a life characterized by peace would make Francis a nice guy to be around. Not so.

Just one example: Francis had this thing about money: his friars were not to touch it. And he did not mean the "you-can-touch-money-but-just-don't-let-it-grip-your-heart" stuff.

One day a worshiper at the Church of Saint Mary of the Portiuncula, Francis's headquarters, left a coin as an offering at the base of the sanctuary cross. This was a common offering of gratitude to God in that day, but when one of Francis's friars saw the money--disturbed by its presence at the cross, or perhaps knowing Francis's revulsion of money--he tossed it over to a window sill.

When Francis learned he had touched money, he did not take the errant brother aside, explain his point of view, and then hug him so as to be sure there were no hard feelings. Instead, Francis rebuked and upbraided the brother. He then commanded him to lift the money from the windowsill with his lips, find a pile of ass's dung outside, and with his lips place the coin in the pile.

Was that nice? How could a saint be so nasty? Is he an exception to the larger guild of saints? Actually, when compared to the hundreds of stories of saints that can be culled from the Bible and church history, Francis was merely fulfilling his job description. Saints were not always patient and kind.

A NASTY HOST

Bernard of Clairvaux has been called the "honey-tongued doctor" and the "theologian of love." Bernard's most famous work is "Loving God," and his first work was titled "The Steps of Humility." What is less known about this honey-tongued lover of humility is that he was responsible for more military enlistments than any other preacher of his era.

"Any man among you who is [Christ's] vassal," he once said, "ought to rise up to defend his lord from the infamous accusation of treachery [by the Muslims]; he should go to the sure fight, where to win will be glorious." To crusaders fighting the pagan Wends in Germany, Bernard insisted on no truce until "either their religion or nation shall be wiped out." Bernard's honey tongue had apparently been dipped in hot sauce.

The medieval world was often a cruel one, and one would hope that with the Reformation, the era of faith and grace, we would get a different brand of saint. But right away we run into Martin Luther: The arch-champion of grace was one of the most verbally vicious men in church history. Of the pope and his cardinals, he said, "We should . . . tear out their tongues from the back and nail them on the gallows." Of his theological ally Reformer Ulrich Zwingli: "a wormy nut . . . that tasted like crap in one's mouth." Of Anabaptists: a "seditious mob."

I'd like to think the reserved and scholarly Calvin was better. But in Geneva, a city that he and his elders ruled with an iron hand, he allowed for Servetus to be executed.

I sometimes wonder where these Bible-centered men learned this unsympathetic behavior, and then I open my Bible. The psalmist says he wants to dash the heads of Babylonian babies against rocks. Hosea calls Israel a whore. Amos calls Samaritan women a herd of cows. John the Baptist calls the clergy a bunch of snakes, and the apostle James calls his readers adulterers. The apostle Paul calls the Galatians a pack of fools, and Jesus himself cursed a fig tree that was not producing fruit and minced no words when it came to the most religious people of his day: "You hypocrites!"

IT'S NICE TO BE NICE

I don't know where I got this idea that saints were patient, tolerant, sensitive, "nice." Perhaps it is because I have understood holiness as the embodiment of my idealized self. I am subject to a number of forces that try to make me nice all the time.

For example, human relations experts tell today's manager to be empathic, encouraging, understanding--in short, an all-around nice person. I have been trained to couch criticism in a welter of affirmation and turn the "mistake" into a "challenge."

Still others tell me to put niceness at the apex of my moral pantheon. Miss Manners (a.k.a. Judith Martin) has been waging a steady campaign to get Americans to realize there is more to this life than unabashed assertiveness. I applaud her efforts, because politeness and niceness make our common life pleasant.

If someone jostles me on a crowded bus so that I drop my bag of groceries, politeness requires that I assume no evil intent on the part of the jostler, and that I pretend the incident is no big deal. If the jostler apologizes, I say, "No problem." If the jostler fails to notice that he has knocked groceries out of my hand, I pretend nothing has happened. In this way, hurt feelings, resentment, and anger are held in check, and everyone on the bus enjoys the rest of the ride. Niceness is socially useful. Why not practice it more often?

Similarly, some people argue that the so-called culture war should be waged with civility. In his book "Culture Wars," James Davison Hunter points out that for many soldiers in the culture war, rhetoric can be a "scorched-earth policy by words." The champions of civil discourse, however, argue that while we should disagree with those who seem to be undermining our culture, we should remember that love, as some wise fellow once said, is not rude.

Finally, there is the cult of tolerance to contend with. If anything entices me to be nice, it is the omnipresent maxim that we should not judge anyone, and that we should be sensitive to other people's feelings. These maxims are part of the air we breathe in America.

Once a woman told me she had had an abortion simply because she felt that two kids were enough for her. Inside I was sick, but I did not want to appear judgmental. I was her pastor, and I wanted to keep the door open in our relationship so she would trust me enough to come back to me. So I nodded compassionately and repeated that, yes, it must have been a hard decision for her, adding, "Perhaps I might have done things differently. But I've certainly no right to judge you for your choice." We prayed together--that God would comfort her--and she left my office. It's hard not to be nice, even when, as in the case above, I knew immediately that I had betrayed my faith.

A TIME TO BE NOT NICE

During the 1930s, Adolf Hitler became increasingly vocal about his hatred of Jews. One November night in 1938, Hitler unleashed his SS to wreak havoc in Jewish homes and businesses throughout Germany. Afterward, one witness cabled the "New York Times" about what came to be called "Crystal Night": "Beginning systematically in the early morning hours in almost every town and city in the country, the wrecking, looting and burning continued all day. Huge but mostly silent crowds looked on, and the police confined themselves to regulating traffic and making wholesale arrests of Jews for their own 'protection.' " The official tally (modestly calculated) amounted to 814 shops and 171 homes destroyed, 191 synagogues burned, 36 Jews killed, and another 36 seriously injured.

A couple of months later, Hitler told a Czech foreign minister, "The vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies, and at the end of this year there will not be a Jew left in Germany." A week after that, he publicly announced, "If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

It is not surprising that during this time Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a committed pacifist, decided that kindness, patience, and forbearance would no longer do. And so, though he never stood at the center of the plan, Bonhoeffer assisted in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

At the risk of sounding flippant, murder is decidedly rude. And though some might disagree, in this instance, it seems that Bonhoeffer's participation in the plot was the most Christian thing that he could have done.

But we don't have to ogle the extraordinary to see that there is more to holiness than niceness. Jesus calls mere hypocrites "fools," after all. Between the ordinary evil of hypocrisy and the extraordinary evil of a Hitler lies a field of other evils that often demand something more than patience and civility. The saints perceived clearly that to be holy, to be Christlike, can require a certain fierceness.

THE GOD ADDICTION

To build a complete picture of a saint--well, who can do justice to the breadth and height and depth of such extraordinary people? The "saintly" life often begins with a dream or a vision--to an aged Middle-Eastern nomad in Haran, to a diminutive shepherd outside of Bethlehem, to a young girl in Nazareth, to an angry cult-watcher on a road toward Damascus. God becomes utterly real to them, and they come to an unshakable conviction that in him lies all goodness, truth, and beauty.

This divine encounter is devastating, and like a hit of spiritual heroin, the person becomes addicted to things divine, desperate for the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Thus, in the Psalms, where the passions of the godly are most vividly expressed, we find complete obsession with God: "Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you" (Ps. 73:25; most Scripture references are NRSV) and "My soul is consumed with longing for your ordinances at all times. . . . With open mouth I pant . . . for your commandments" (Ps. 119:20, 131).

Metaphors of thirsting and starving abound: "As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God" (Ps. 42:12).

So fixated are they, the God-driven cannot snap out of it, even when they want to: "If I say, 'I will not mention him, or speak any more of his name,' " wrote Jeremiah, "then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary of holding it in, and I cannot" (Jer. 20:9).

When Francis of Assisi was attending worship one day, the gospel lesson was read from Matthew: "Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts; take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff" (10:9-10, NIV).

Francis was startled at the reading and suddenly filled with inexplicable joy: "This is what I want!" he shouted. "This is what I long for with all my heart!"

"He immediately took off his shoes from his feet," Saint Bonaventure, his biographer, notes, "put aside his staff, cast away his wallet and money as if accursed, was content with one tunic and exchanged his leather belt for a piece of rope. He directed his heart's desire to carry out what he had heard and to conform in every way to the rule of right living given to the apostles."

The command of God was for Francis his joy. So it is with all the godly: there is no difference between God's commands and his rewards. God is alpha and omega, all in all, and they cannot get enough of him. They are God-addicted, like Julian of Norwich: "I saw him and sought him! I had him and I wanted him."

With heart, soul, mind, and strength completely consumed with God, the world for the saint loses many of its hues; things moral and spiritual are seen with startling clarity and usually in black and white: you are either for God or against him, for goodness or for evil.

Thus Isaiah can without flinching castigate Israel in the starkest of terms: "Ah, sinful nation, people laden with iniquity, offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly . . ." (Isa. 1:4). Jesus himself is recognized as one consumed by God and his purposes. He is driven by God into wilderness temptation and driven again back into Galilee to fulfill his mission, where he proceeds to run roughshod over the social and religious conventions of his day.

Jesus is surely patient and kind and even "nice," but not only. For Jesus, as for the saints, God is the first and the last; the world is black and white, only God and un-God. There is no time to waste and no feelings to spare. Very often in the Gospels, Jesus is militant about getting God's truth out and impatient with anyone who stands in his way or simply does not get it.

With the saints so obsessed, it is not surprising that often social custom is ignored, people's feelings get run over. Catherine of Siena, one of the most extraordinary prayer warriors of the Middle Ages, once went to Avignon and met Pope Gregory XI--an extraordinary occasion for any Catholic. You would think she would be in awe, or at least polite, in deference to the papal office. Instead, when they met, she told the pope the vices of his papal court "stank." (She was referring to the glittering pomp of the Avignon papacy, when church offices were sold to the highest bidder, and pope, cardinals, and bishops sported silk and jewels, and their houses were trimmed with gold and ivory.) When the pope calmly asked Catherine how she, a recent visitor to Avignon, France, could possibly know about his odor, Catherine replied that she had smelled the stench while she was still in Siena, some 400 miles away. Uncivil perhaps, but in light of the corruptions of the fourteenth-century papacy, it was also righteous behavior.

Sometimes, of course, even the saints take things too far. There is no excuse for behavior such as when Luther crassly insults both Catholics and fellow Reformers. But Luther also had wisdom to share when opponents criticized his abusive language: "What do you think of Christ? Was he abusive when he called the Jews an adulterous and perverse generation, an offspring of vipers, hypocrites, and children of the Devil? . . . The truth . . . cannot be patient against its obstinate and intractable enemies."

Here, I think, Luther gets to the heart of my confusion about niceness and holiness. Certainly, most of life's encounters demand patience, kindness, and civility--even in some moments of extraordinary evil, like being led to a cross. The fruit of the Spirit really is love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness. It is true that love is not rude and does not insist on its own way.

But sometimes these Christian virtues become mere social habits. And sometimes they merely help justify cowardice and unbelief.

Fortunately, the brave, true, and impatient saints just won't go away. David, Paul, Catherine, Francis, and their impatient companions are embedded forever in Christian memory. They remind us that holiness often looks nothing like niceness, that the Christian life is more than practicing pleasant virtues. It is God-addiction--a driving, tenacious, and sometimes insensitive passion to know him and to make him known--"I saw him and sought him! I had him and I wanted him!"

Mark Galli is editor of "Christian History" magazine.

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