Encouragement from the Saints

St. Columba is, I often tell people, my “first” and favorite saint.

I grew up as a particular strain of Protestant: in our parlance, everyone was either a saint or a sinner, and those of us sitting in the pews were all saints in the Lord.  It wasn’t until later, when my life grew more ecumenical in scope, that I understood the word meant different things in different traditions or became introduced to the panoply of saints celebrated by some Christians.

My international travel introduced me to many of these of saints, particularly in Ireland, and that’s where I encountered Columba or Colmcille: an Irish abbot, considered one of the twelve apostles of Ireland, and, according to some stories, a saint who inspired a war over a copyright dispute.

The story goes like this: Columba copied a manuscript belonging to Finnian of Moville.  Columba asserted that he should have the rights to the copy he made; Finnian claimed them himself.  A series of unfortunate incidents results in a battle where many men died and Columba, overwhelmed with guilt, either left on pilgrimage or went into exile.

Historians debate the veracity of the story, but I love the humanity of it. 

Columba is loved and beloved, but not above a story that calls into account his (and Finnian’s) stubbornness.  Few of the saints are.  They are so very real, so very genuine: they falter and fail and love God and glorify God.  Even in Scripture the followers of Christ reveal their own humanity: they are ambitious and greedy, they miss the point, they’re selfish.  Paul gets in Peter’s face about Peter’s hypocrisy (Galatians 2:11-13).

God knows how much we need our faltering failing forebears in the faith.

I am currently in the middle of Levitical reading for my daily Bible study, and I am overwhelmed by the talk of animal sacrifices and entrails and smoke and cadavers.  Reading these chapters is a devastating glimpse into the gulf between man and God, into the amount of blood and atonement and process and procedure required to facilitate right standing with God, any sort of relationship with Him. 

God, too, knows this gulf.  He had to bridge it with His own body.

But he also knows we need models and heroes that we can relate to in our own contexts and in historical contexts as well.  People we can see and hope to imitate.  People who can show us, who never encountered Christ in the flesh, what it is to live like Christ. Who live out for us what the Spirit shapes within us.  So he gave us Peter’s inability to shut up along with Peter’s passion; Paul’s single-minded zeal along with his generosity of spirit; Barnabas’ disagreement over John Mark along with his encouraging spirit.  

And the saints serve as a reminder that we can fail and falter and still glorify God.

A friend of mine frequently encounters what she calls “the cookie issue.”  She tries to maintain a proper diet, tries to keep her weight at a certain number.  But periodically, she deviates from the plan.  She eats a whole pizza for dinner or chomps her way through a box of scones and then—because she figures she’s already screwed up—eats a whole sleeve of Oreos too.

The crux of “the cookie issue” she experiences is this: if I’ve failed, I have to start over.  If I’ve failed, everything is irreparably marred.  If I’ve failed, I might as well keep failing.

But the saints tell us that this is not the case.  They could fail, could show the worst of their humanness, and still manage to glorify God.  They are the chorus of “now but not yet”: the complexity of being a believer in a world where wehave been redeemed, are being redeemed, and where the fulness of our redemption is also not yet fulfilled.

I struggle with this myself.   I promise to keep a reign on my tongue, speak one word of gossip, and feel like I might as well give up for the day.  I decide I’m going to be loving in my approach to someone I struggle to tolerate, lose my head in frustration the moment I encounter them, and give up on whatever I was planning. 

But this isn’t what God wants or expects of us.  Always, God says, and again.  And again.  And again.  Unconditional forgiveness means unconditional opportunity.  We slip, we fall, and on the same day that we slip and fall we can serve as the broken vessel for God’s grace to shine though.  On the day that you’ve sinned greatly, God can work in you and through you to His purpose.  In the hour that you want to give up, God is already working to redeem the wreck.

So on the days that are really rough, I often think fondly of St. Columba and the copyright dispute, and what it tells me about how God uses people in their brokenness.  We ought always aspire to be holy, but failing does not disqualify us from God’s love nor His purposes.

We start over.  We slip.  We fall.  But when we get back on our feet, we’re farther along than before.