Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the
desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who
called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for
it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’

Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole
batch of dough? Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new
batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ,
has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the festival,
not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with
the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters,
by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice,
holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship…
to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the
things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand
of God.

God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple. What
sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and
godliness…?

3 John 4; John 8:31; 1 Peter 1:14-16; 1 Corinthians
5:6-8; Romans 12:1; Colossians 1:22; Colossians 3:1; 1 Corinthians
3:17; 2 Peter 3:11-14.

…..

Saints are many people but they have this in common:
they remind you of Jesus. They love everyone. They know who they
are. Saints inhabit every Christian denomination or group. They’re
people you feel good around: they radiate goodness. They’re sinners
- indeed more aware of their sins than anyone – but they have
had a personal experience of God’s grace and forgiveness. Because
of that they can’t be negative about the personhood (as distinct
from the behaviour) of anyone else: they are very accepting people.

Saints not only remind you of Jesus, but they tend
to see Jesus in others. Teilhard de Chardin once prayed, ‘Grant
me to recognize in others, Lord God, the radiance of your own
face.’

They are simple people – not naive, or simplistic,
but simple. They inhabit ‘simplicity the other side of complexity’
rather than ‘simplicity this side of complexity’ (or ‘complexity
the other side of simplicity’). They are simple as much because
they’re smart as holy!

And they are joyful people – partly because their
lives aren’t cluttered with material possessions and unspiritual
entanglements. They enjoy God forever. God is all they need. They
believe that if you have God and everything else you have no more
than if you had God only; and if you have everything else and
not God you have nothing.

In 1975 Time magazine listed the following as living
saints: Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Schwester Selma Mayer in Jerusalem,
Archbishop Dom Helder Camara in Brazil, Coptic monk Matta El Meskin
in Egypt, Annie Skau in Hong Kong, and John Lewis in San Antonio.
(1)

Here we’ll explore just one characteristic of all
the saints: they have been cured of phariseeism. Cured? Yes, phariseeism
is a spiritual and social disease.

The pharisees of Jesus’ day were ‘separatists’. They
distanced themselves from evil, segregating themselves from anyone
unclean. ‘Away’ was their directional signal when it came to dealing
with evil. The evils they were concerned about were mainly of
two kinds: heresy and sexual sin.

Now Jesus upset these people because his judgments
were more against ‘sins of the spirit’ rather than sins of heterodoxy
or sins of the flesh. Not that he made light of these. The truth
sets us free, he said. After his pastoral word to the woman caught
in adultery – ‘neither do I condemn you’ – he then adds, ‘Go and
sin no more’. (The pharisees – ask them! – always remember the
latter but not the former statement by Jesus to this woman).

The pharisees’ mind-set was to demand repentance
before they practised acceptance. With Jesus these were reversed.
‘I accept you,’ he says to sinners, ‘so let’s work on change together.’

For the pharisee, the law is the means of telling
the good guys from the bad guys. But, underneath, many pharisees
are jealous of the bad guys who are enjoying their sins, but the
pharisee isn’t enjoying righteousness half as much. Immorality,
Mencken said, is the morality of those who are having a better
time. A pharisee is a good person in the worst sense of the word.
Kenneth Bailey talks about ‘law-breaking sinners’ and ‘law-keeping
sinners’ and each being worse than the other! For the saint, whose
life is characterized by thankfulness, gratefulness, the law is
a reminder, codifying a thankful response to the law-giver.

Every Christian is on a journey from sainthood to
pharisaism or back the other way…

…..

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally
drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

One of the most noticeable things about the saints
is that they channelled their thirst for God into caring for the
necessities close to hand – healing the sick and the lepers; feeding
the poor and the needy; preaching the word of God to as many people
as possible; providing education for the unlettered. Because they
were totally absorbed with God, they were also totally absorbed
with his creatures. The saints were joyous realists. Much is written
today about self-acceptance and feeling good about oneself. The
saints, as seen in their prayers, accepted themselves as sinners
and knew that they were accepted by God for what they were. They
stood in complete sincerity before God and believed deeply that
growth and success were from him who was behind and beneath all
their strivings. Their lives were thus filled with great joy.
St Teresa wrote that she believed joy to be as essential to holiness
as good works.

Praying with the Saints

`The simplicity that is in Christ.’ – 2 Cor 11:3
`The simplicity that is toward Christ.’ – R.V….

The word `simple’ itself is a word which has come
down in the world… When it first appeared, centuries ago, in
English literature, it stood for a noble, shining, virtue; but
no one likes to be called `simple’ today. As originally used,
it meant single-hearted, crystal-clear, straightforward. But today
the word smacks of its own unfortunate derivative `simpleton’,
and so is under a cloud…

The world’s greatest people have invariably been
characterised by a deep simplicity of life and character. Tennyson’s
lines in his `Ode on the Death of Wellington’ are familiar:

Foremost captain of his time, Rich in saving common-sense,
And, as the greatest only are, In his simplicity sublime.

`As the greatest only are,’ says Tennyson; and the
poet is right. The really great – the Isaiahs, the Pauls, the
Bunyans, the Wilberforces – have been at heart as simple as a
child. And that is true also of those who, although their names
never appear on any roll of fame, are nevertheless great in God’s
sight – utterly obscure and unknown to us, yet great in character.
A person may be a saint without many of the qualities which this
complex world ranks high: no one can be a saint without a deep
simplicity of soul…

When St.Anthony of Egypt, sickened by the worldliness
and vice of the great pagan cities around him, cut the cables,
sacrificed all his wealth and standing, and made his home in the
desert. So it was again when St. Francis of Assisi led his little
band of friars out from the moral and social entanglements of
mediaeval Italy into something like the joy and freedom of first-century
Galilee. So it was most dramatically when Martin Luther, leading
on the Reformation, cut at one stroke through the complex casuistry
of papal doctrine, and gave back to the individual soul the directness
and immediacy of true religion…

`The common people’, we are told, `heard him gladly.’
They did not hear their own Rabbis gladly. Their own Rabbis only
fogged their minds, and blurred the issues, and spoke above their
heads. But when Jesus spoke it was all so practical that they
could connect it up at once with their own experience; it was
so straight that none could miss its meaning; it was so concrete
that it came on them as a glorious discovery after the weary abstractions
to which their Rabbis had persistently treated them. Remember
that simplicity of speech is a very different thing from superficiality
of thought. The simplest language is often the profoundest…

J. S. Stewart, The Gates of New Life

There’s a well-known phrase of Ignatius: `an intimate
knowledge of our Lord, who has become very human for me, that
I may love him more and follow him more closely’. We may remember
the song from Godspell:

Day by day, day by day, oh dear Lord, three things
I pray: to see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly, follow
thee more nearly, day by day.

It is based on a prayer of Saint Richard, that goes
like this:

Thanks be to thee, Lord Jesus Christ, for all the
benefits and blessings which thou hast borne for me. O most merciful
Friend, Brother and Redeemer, may I know thee more clearly, love
thee more dearly, and follow thee more nearly.

Margaret Hebblethwaite, Finding God in All Things

`I judge no one… but if I judge…’ The gentle
and gracious souls who would never dream of criticising us are
the very people whose silent and unconscious condemnation is the
most devastating. A straight stick, lying beside a crooked one,
does not judge its twisted neighbour, yet its very straightness
is the crooked stick’s most terrible exposure… It seems to vindicate
the contention of Francis of Assisi, who held that those who live
a beautiful Christian life have no need to resort to words in
order to rebuke the iniquities that disfigure the Church and world
around them.

F W Boreham, The Tide Comes In

The villains of Jesus’ parables were seldom people
who did the things they ought not to have done; they were usually
those who left undone the things that they ought to have done.
The priest who passed by on the other side; the rich man who let
Lazarus lie unhelped at his gate; the servant who made no use
of his talent – these were the objects of his severest condemnation.

F W Boreham, The Tide Comes In

Stand still, and look deep into the motivations of
life. Are they such that true foundations of sanctity can be built
on them? For truly we have been born to be saints – lovers of
Love who died for us! There is but one tragedy: not to be a saint.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia

Paul the Simple, an Egyptian saint, once heard Anthony
the Great read the first verse of the first Psalm: `Blessed is
the one that does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly’, and
immediately, Paul departed into the wilderness. Only after some
thirty years, when Anthony met him again, St.Paul said to him
with great humility: `I have spent all this time trying to become
the man that does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly’. We
do not need understanding on many points to reach perfection;
what we need is thirty years of work to try to understand and
to become that new person.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, ‘Meditation and
Worship’

It is all too easy for us to treat the Pharisees
as embodying all that is worst in humankind. But in fact they
were probably the best men of their time, the most religious,
the most devoted to the will of God, the most eager to express
their loyalty to him in obedience to his every word, the most
determined never to compromise with the world around them. But,
as St.Paul came to see it in retrospect, they were exposed to
a fatal flaw: the trouble with their outstanding righteousness
was that, all too easily, it could be viewed precisely as their
righteousness. It was a righteousness that could be measured,
so that, at a certain point, you could say that you had now achieved
it. This meant that it could all too easily come adrift from it
s original inspiration in devotion to God and become self sufficient,
an end in itself…

The basic form of complacency, after all, is that
one is pleased with oneself.

Simon Tugwell, ‘The Beatitudes’

Lord have mercy on me, A pharisee. Not when I pray,
But surely, surely, thrice a day. I say, ‘See her, see him. How
foolish they…’ Each one at whom I laugh Diminishes by half.
So I grow tall By proving others small. Lord, pity me A Pharisee

Margaret Beidler, ‘Pity me’ (Luke 18:10-13).

As St. Paul came to see it in retrospect, [pharisees]
were exposed to a fatal flaw: the trouble with their outstanding
righteousness was that, all too easily, it could be viewed precisely
as their righteousness. It was a righteousness that could be measured,
so that, at a certain point, you could say that you had now achieved
it. This meant that it could all too easily come adrift from its
original inspiration in devotion to God and become self-sufficient,
an end in itself… The basic form of complacency, after all,
is that a person is pleased with himself.

Simon Tugwell, ‘The Beatitudes’

It is, of course, true, whatever denomination you
may happen to belong to, that the majority of your good churchgoers
will be living under law and not under grace. The human heart
is incurably legalistic… We prefer the limited demands of an
ecclesiastical system, heavy though they may be, to the unlimited
demands of genuine surrender to Jesus Christ. Within its own limits,
legalism may produce admirable types of character. The pharisees
were by no means contemptible people; they had a zeal for the
law of God, and a devotion to it that would put many Christians
to shame. The trouble is that what law can achieve is always limited,
since the most that it can effect is modification of character
from without, and not transformation from within. That inner transformation
can really begin only when we pass from the sphere of law to that
of grace, from the status of a servant to that of a son or daughter.

Stephen Neill, On the Ministry

Elmer had, even in Zenith, to meet plenty of solemn
and whiskery persons whose only pleasure aside from not doing
agreeable things was keeping others from doing them.

Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

It is significant that the One born that night was
called ‘Emmanuel’, not ‘Pharisee’. The word Emmanuel means ‘God
with us’, while ‘pharisee’ means ‘the separate one,’ and when
it comes to doing something redemptively about the power of destruction
in the world, the difference between ‘with’ and ‘away’ is absolutely
crucial… The approach of Jesus was the utter antithesis to phariseeism.
He moved about, not as the Separate One or as a self-righteous
Purist, but as ‘the friend of sinners…’

John Claypool, ‘The First Christmas: Jesus’

… This demonic process has affected every religious
order which has ever existed. The escape into canon law has always
been an escape from the awful challenge of religion and intimacy
combined.

Andrew Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest

A pharisee is a righteous man whose righteousness
is nourished by the blood of sinners.

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of Guilty Bystander

I have long regarded the year AD 383 as one of the
most disastrous turning points in history, since in that year
for the first time, in the condemnation of the Spanish heretic
Priscillian, the blood of Christians was shed by Christians…

…In the 16th century we find Francis Xavier, purest
and most devoted of Roman Catholic missionaries, writing to the
king of Portugal to urge that the Inquisition should be introduced
into India, as an indispensable aid to the work of evangelization,
and unfortunately securing a favourable answer to his request.

Stephen Neill, On the Ministry

When ‘righteous’ persons determine to do God’s will,
but are not first born again and awakened to a higher life, they
cannot discern what is God’s will… They believe their own desires
and wishes are the will of God. For example, they refrain from
human arrogance, imagining they are humble; but they retain their
pride under the guise of the lofty demands of divine truth…
They refrain from all lust for power and revenge, but they have
by no means abandoned the lust for power and revenge. Nor do they
in reality become less desirous of power and revenge, but rather
more so. For now they can do so completely without regard for
others in the name of God. They imagine that when they now seek
to force through something, they do so for the sake of the kingdom
of God. When they persecute or crush another, they do it thinking
that the welfare of the church or of the Gospel or of Christianity
demands it. The purely human desire for revenge and domination
is thus represented under the guise of zeal for morality and the
kingdom of God, for what is good and true. This is satanic. This
is hypocrisy. However, hypocrites will never be conscious of it
so long as they remain in their unregenerate state.

Hugo Odeberg, Pharisaism and Christianity

Many of the insights of saints stem from their experiences
as sinners.

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than
out of a prig.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

The servants were permitted to hold evening prayer
in the kitchen, under Mrs. Fairley’s indifferent eye and briskly
wooden voice. Upstairs, Mrs. Poulteney had to be read to alone;
and it was in these more intimate ceremonies that Sarah’s voice
was heard at its best and most effective. Once or twice she had
done the incredible, by drawing from those pouched, invincible
eyes a tear. Such an effect was in no way intended, but sprang
from a profound difference between the two women. Mrs. Poulteney
believed in a God that had never existed; and Sarah knew a God
that did.

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

All [the publican] knows, from being himself an extortioner,
a moneylender, a thief, and so forth, is that there are moments
when for no reason, because it is not part of the world’s outlook,
he will forgive a debt, because suddenly his heart has become
mild and vulnerable; that on another occasion he may not get someone
put into prison because a face will have reminded him of something
or a voice has gone straight to his heart. There is no logic in
this. It is not part of the world’s outlook nor is it a way in
which he normally behaves. It is something that breaks through,
which is completely nonsensical, which he cannot resist; and he
knows also, probably, how often he himself was saved from final
catastrophe by this intrusion of the unexpected and the impossible,
mercy, compassion, forgiveness. So he stands at the rear of the
church, knowing that all the realm inside the church is a realm
of righteousness and divine love to which he does not belong and
into which he cannot enter. But he knows from experience also
that the impossible does occur and that is why he says ‘Have mercy,
break the laws of righteousness, break the laws of religion, come
down in mercy to us who have no right to be either forgiven or
allowed in.’ And I think this is where we should start continuously
all over again.

Archbishop Anthony Bloom, School for Prayer

Healing is the result of love. It is a function of
love. Wherever there is love there is healing. And wherever there
is no love there is precious little – if any – healing.

M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie

I identify joyfully and painfully with the founder
of my contemplative prayer fellowship. Whenever he has written
to me, he has always ended his letters: ‘With as much love as
I have so far received’. He and I know that we have hardly scratched
the surface – hardly begun to be filled with all the fullness
of God’s love.

Peter Dodson, Contemplating the Word

…..

Lord, grant your people your protection and grace.
Give them health of mind and body perfect love for one another
and make them always faithful to you. Grant this through Christ
our Lord.

Daily Mass Book

Please look at me, dear Lord. In your merciful and
loving kindness is my hope, for you see me just as a good doctor,
anxious only to heal and correct. This I ask you, kind Lord, trusting
in your powerful mercy and your merciful power. Forgive my sins;
rouse me from my half-heartedness; forget my ingratitude. I acknowledge
in myself those voices and evil passions which still fight within
me, whether due to long-standing evil habits or carelessness repeated
every day or deep-seated flaws of my weak nature or hardly recognised
temptings of evil spirits. Against all these enemies may your
gentle grace give me strength and courage.

Aelred

As an adolescent I had prayed a pitiful prayer for
a clean life, saying, `Give me chastity and give me control over
myself, but not yet’. I was afraid you might answer me too quickly
and straighten me out before I was ready; for what I really wanted
was not to be cured but to be fulfilled.

Augustine

…..

The saints, Lord, are profound and simple people,
who pray profoundly simple prayers. Like ‘Lord, have mercy on
me, a sinner.’ Their perspective derives from a comparison between
themselves and the holiness of God.

The pharisees, Lord, are profoundly complex people,
who pray, ‘Lord, I thank you I’m not as bad as so-and-so…’ Their
perspective derives from a comparison between the best in themselves
and the worst in others, and any hypocrite can do that.

So, Lord, my simple prayer is this: help me to be
more like Jesus, and less like the pharisees, day by day. Amen.

…..

A Benediction: May your sins be forgiven by Jesus,
who loved sinners. May your pride be healed by Jesus, who was
meek and lowly. May your self-esteem respond to his gentle acceptance,
and may you live all the days of your life in the love of God
the Father, the grace of Jesus the Son, and the communion of the
Holy Spirit. Amen.

…..

Aelred, cited in Praying with the Saints, Dublin:
Veritas Publications, 1989, p.8-9.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, ‘Meditation and
Worship’, in John Garvey (Ed), Modern Spirituality: an Anthology,
London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, p.28.

Augustine, in Sherwood E Wirt, The Confessions of
Augustine in Modern English, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977, p.113.

Margaret Beidler, ‘Pity Me’ (Luke 18:10-13), in Faith
at Work, October 1977.

Archbishop Anthony Bloom, School for Prayer, London:
Darton, Longman and Todd, 1970, pp. 8-9.

F. W. Boreham, The Tide Comes In, London: Epworth
Press, 1958, pp. 21-22, 62.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, London: Collins,
1973, p.83.

Teilhard de Chardin’s prayer, in Tony Castle (ed.),
The Hodder Book of Christian Prayers, H & S, 1986, no. 30

John Claypool, ‘The First Christmas: Jesus’, sermon
preached in Northminster Baptist Church, Jackson, Mississippi,
December 23, 1979.

Daily Mass Book, Brisbane, The Liturgical Commission,
1990, p.37.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia, Ave Maria
Press, 1979, pp.23-24.

Peter Dodson, Contemplating the Word, SPCK, 1987,
p. 55-56

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Pan Books,
1987, p.54.

Andrew Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest, Pocket
Books, 1986, p.341

Margaret Hebblethwaite, Finding God in All Things,
London: Fountain Paperbacks, 1987, p.77.

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954,
p.9

Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry, Panther, 1927,1961,
p. 319

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,
quoted in T. P. McDonnell (ed.), Through the Year With Thomas
Merton, Image, 1985, p.8

Stephen Neill, On the Ministry, SCM, 1952, p.101,
120

Hugo Odeberg, Pharisaism and Christianity, Concordia,
1962, pp. 100-101.

M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing
Human Evil, Simon & Schuster, 1983, p.44

Praying with the Saints, Dublin: Veritas Publications,
1989, p.6..

George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905, p.11

J. S. Stewart, The Gates of New Life, Edinburgh:
T & T Clark,, 1956, pp. 211-217.

Simon Tugwell, ‘The Beatitudes’ in John Garvey (Ed.),
Modern Spirituality: an Anthology, London: Darton, Longman and
Todd, 1985, pp. 60-61.

…..

ENDNOTES.

1. Time cover story, ‘Saints Among Us’, Dec. 29,
1975, pp. 47-56).

---

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