Loosing my keys is on my list of top five most frenzy inducing life situations. In it’s very nature it strikes most often at times when I am already running late and need to be somewhere, (I don’t generally go looking for keys as recreation). Add to that the helplessness of not being able to find something, and I’m generally a mess. Suddenly the world has stopped, and can’t start again until I find my keys. Friends, Family, hygienic maintenance, these all become barriers to finding those prized pearls without which I find myself grounded and sedentary.
One such encounter with the dreaded loss of my primary means of entry into my car happened one June morning. My wife, Joan, and I were gearing up for a long trip to Michigan to visit family and we discovered that the keys were missing.
How could they be missing! We had to go! Soon I was turning up pillows, dumping out the contents of clothes hampers and rifling through the trash. Joan went outside and started to look around out there. Suddenly a thought came to me, almost like an assurance of where Joan had left the keys. I rushed into the other room and put my hand deep in the crack of my couch and triumphantly pulled out my car keys, they were just where I thought they would be!
I rushed out to tell my wife. Holding the keys in a clenched fist above my head primeval exhibition of victory I cried out, “I found them!”
Joan calmly looked back at me without missing a beat, and said, “well of course you did, I just prayed to saint Anthony.”
Saint Anthony is one of the hundreds of popular saints that help Catholics live their lives as better followers of Jesus. Saints are an powerful antidote to one of the maladies of human life that we all experience, vainglory. Vainglory is the perpetual human condition to be blowing ones own horn at all times and at all places. Its a natural tendency. In my own perspective I am the center of the universe. Judging the world through my own empirical data set I can easily come to the conclusion that I am the most important person there is.
I have never accomplished anything that I wasn’t a part of. There has never been an experience in my life I didn’t take part in. Every morning I am the first person I encounter. Every night my own thoughts are what accompany me as i sleep. All the evidence seems to point to a world that’s all about me.
Of course we know that this is not the reality of the world. We all learned when we were children that other people have lives that we are not the center of. Every day things happen in the world that have nothing to do with us. We know we are not the center of the universe, but deep within us that is a narcissistic tendency that makes it difficult to see the world through other eyes. We can even bring this tendency to how we formulate ideas about God. This is referred to at the heresy of selective theology.
Selective theology shows up in many ways. When I choose to make one doctrine more important then another simply because I feel more comfortable with it, that’s selective theology. When I choose to only use ideas about God that I can get my head around, that’s selective theology. When I look at how my church does things and decide that that is the best way to worship God, that’s selective theology. The list could go on and on.
The problem is viewing faith as something that I HAVE rather then something WE have as a community of faithful throughout time. Saints are a good corrective to the problem of selective theology. They connect us to lives and people throughout time, and around the world. they open our eyes to the ethnocentrism, nationalism, philosophical assumptions and the oligarchy of the living. Saints offer a democracy of the dead to us. They are living voices that can speak into a living faith and open up worlds to us that we never could understand without them.
All you Holy men and women, inspire us, teach us. open our eyes to the greatness and glory of God, and pray for us!
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