In a message dated 01/21/2000 6:33:31 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
> The second principle (saints are not dead and gone, but the same
> people we read about or knew on earth)may explain, I think, some
> peculiarities of devotion to saints. Take St. Coecilia: she was an
> accomplished musician and becamethe patron saint of musicians
> everywhere. This presupposes, it seems to me, that her interest in music
> did not wane with life. Thats how believers looked at it, and I would be
> interested in the theoretical formulation (before St. Thomas, that is)
> that nature is perfected, not altered, in heaven. The identity of nature
> is remarkable because we are also told that saints (in heaven) see God
> in His essence, that is to say in a way impossible to saints on earth.
> Thus, we have a strong affirmation of the "I" (I am what I am, come
> heaven or high water) and the "Thou", a God not only generically present
> to repentant sinners et al., in this life and in the next, but also
> unattainable as He is to human beings on earth (1 Cor. 2.9). To keep
> these two poles in mind may save us from seeing devotions to the saints
> as a quaint, if often charming, mental aberration.
> Luciana
Luciana,
You've brought up so many interesting aspects of a living person's
relationship to a saint, and I'd like to add the idea of the saint as a role
model. One gets the impression (or I do) that this must underlie the Catholic
practice of naming children after saints. The child honors the feast day of
his or her patron saint, and the implication may be (the "bargain"?) that
saints take a special interest in children named after them. When a child is
named after a relative, and I don't know if this is done in Catholicism, the
role model aspect might be less obvious--the immediate purpose might seem to
be, say, to flatter the relative. But I don't imagine anyone names a child
after a relative thought to be a bad person---nor does it seem right to
choose a bad person as a godmother or godfather. In Judaism, and I think this
is folk-custom rather than any specific religious law, one never names a
child after a living relative, and the relative chosen must be deceased. The
net result, again, is a pair in which one person (the child-namesake) is
living, and the other (the relative being honored) is deceased.
The saints would presumably be role models for their faith, and one can't
tell if a new-born child will be interested in music. The situation in which
a musician or aspiring musician prays to a saint associated with music would
involve an older person offering the prayer. The roots of the practice might
be pre-Christian. Among the Greeks, certain deities were associated with
certain occupations, and were prayed to by practitioners of those
occupations: Mercury with medicine, Hercules with merchants, and so forth. On
a cross-cultural basis, it's very common for children to choose heroes or
role models whom they believe are like themselves. A child who wanted to be a
musician might like to have posters or photos of famous musicians that could
be hung on a wall. Sometimes children have secret heroes, and the exact
reason for choosing that hero might not be obvious to others. I recall as a
child taking a fancy to Goethe, and deciding that he and I were kindred
souls. As I wasn't an infant Goethe-scholar, I had probably seen one
quotation from Goethe, and for some reason it seemed to me that Goethe would
have understood me better than anyone else seemed to understand me at the
time. He was a role model, although it's hard to say for what--perhaps that
I wanted to be as wise as he, or as able to put difficult ideas into words.
One reads so much recently about role models, and the saint as role model
does seem to avoid one problem that can apparently come up with human role
models. The role model unfortunately is seen as limiting, as if nobody could
ever achieve anything unless they had seen somebody else do it first. Parents
might complain, say, that movies and television ought to portray women
presidents of the United States, because if they don't it conveys a message
that no girl can ever become president of the United States. A more wholesome
point of view was expressed by an African-American father who said his son
wanted to be an astronaut. And it bothered this wise child not at all that at
the time there had never been an African American astronaut; he wanted to be
the first. I'm mentioning this because at first it seemed odd that one never
hears a parallel complaint about saints: say, "My child has diabetes, and
it's very discouraging to him that there are no saints with diabetes."
One might gloss this by saying that it would probably be regarded as very
disrespectful to demand that saints be manufactured to order, tailored to the
needs of individual parents. But isn't it something more basic? The saint is
the most idealistic of role models, the one no living person can be certain
of matching. Irrespective of how they regard the saints, most people will not
become saints. The few who do will never know about during their lifetimes.
Unless we assume some kind of divine premonition on the matter, even the
saints may not have known in their lifetimes that after their deaths they
would be regarded as saints. I like the idea of the open-ended role model
where the goal can never be reached. It keeps people on their toes. With a
human role model, there's always the chance of surpassing the role model, and
then perhaps slacking off. One might become more famous than a revered uncle,
run the 500 meter dash faster than a childhood sports hero, and so forth.
pat sloane
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