We are all Saints - Talk by Jon Jelfs at St Bride's 30th October.

We are All Saints!? (saintliness– dimensions of self– beatitudes) Contemporary spirituality gives a lot of attention to the self. Spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen for example says:

“Spiritual awakening is and always has been about self-discovery. Spiritual practice, to a large degree, is about learning to master the challenging art of differentiating between the many dimensions of your own self. This is no easy task….although we experience our sense of self changing from one moment to another, we rarely understand what is actually happening.”

Christianity has often highlighted what we might call the relative self. A self formed by our genetic makeup, our early childhood experiences, our struggles and traumas as well as our strengths, our unique gifts and achievements. The awareness of this relative self, emphasising its weaknesses and failures, has been so strong that a sense of inherited sin developed – sometimes called original sin, or sinful nature, or even total depravity. Some of us base our fundamental sense of self on our flaws, our weakness or our troubles. But, paradoxically there is in Christianity also the invitation to express another dimension of self, something that seems to have a different origin and source. This is the invitation to express the imago dei – the image of God – perhaps articulated most powerfully in Eastern orthodox theology, the idea of theosis- the attainment of the likeness of God.

Tomorrow is All Saints Day when Anglicans and Roman Catholics honour the Saints of the Christian church. Maybe this notion of sainthood or saintliness is a reminder of the extraordinary capacity of human beings, at least some human beings some of the time, to express the qualities that arise from the image of God in us?

Another metaphor is the one used by Jesus when he says “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). Is the Kingdom of God the deep essential nature of all human beings, made in the image and likeness of God, waiting to be made visible through action? This dimension of self is not relative but absolute for it finds its source in the infinite. Awakening to the absolute self within us, the image of God, the Kingdom of God, is a key part of the spiritual life and journey.

It seems good to remember not only the ‘official’ Saints but those who have been ‘saints’ to us in our own lives. People who have affected us profoundly; those who have loved us, taught us, inspired us, and been compassionate towards us. We may put some people on a pedestal and call them ‘Saints’ but typically they are people who would want none of that – people who have found a way to express all that is best within humanity, usually with humility. Maybe these people are those who have been able to transcend the relative self which can so often hold us back, and have lived out of the absolute self, the self that finds its source in God.

If we want to know what the image of God is like, or how the Kingdom of God manifests itself in human life, or what the self-absolute looks like, as Christians we need look no further than Jesus, who Paul described as “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). One of the problems with Christianity, though, is that Jesus has often been understood as the unique Son of God sent down from heaven – the only one who could possibly be the image of God. I tend to think about Jesus as a unique and extraordinary human being who realised (made real) his own divinity, who expressed the Kingdom of God within him and who invites us to do the same as daughters and sons of God. The apostle Paul speaks of this when he says “you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. (Col 3:9,10). Deep down we are All Saints, for the holy – the mark of saintliness – rests in us all; we are all expressions of God, a manifestation of the divine, as are all species and all things.

But there is a problem, isn’t there? Our default way of living seems so often to be out of our relative self. This is so true for me: I am so much influenced by my perception of my weaknesses that they have a profound effect on how I live my life. For me this often means I live it in an anxious way, a cautious way, and often this is tinged with sadness. The sadness is partly because I also experience another way of living that too often escapes me – that makes me sad. This other way of living, from the absolute self, in my experience is quite different. It is characterised by profound love, joy and peace and also with energy, desire and freedom to act in creative and compassionate ways. I move between these two dimensions of myself, the constricted relative self and the joyful freedom of the absolute self. Do you recognise this in your own life? How do we make the shift between these different dimensions of the self and these different ways of being in this world? This is a big question. To some degree it’s through cultivating our choosing faculty – recognising what is happening and making the choice to connect with our absolute self.

In this short series at St Brides, starting today, we focus on another part of the answer: renewing our minds by reflecting on the beatitudes of Jesus.

The beatitudes of Jesus are remarkable sayings that sum up the ethics of the Kingdom of God. To read them, to hear them, to contemplate them and to measure our actions by them, is a way of inviting ourselves to live out of that absolute or true self. Author and Christian activist Dave Andrews calls them the Be-attitudes – the ‘how to be in this world’ attitudes and he speaks of the need to try ‘Plan Be’ as a foundation for being the change we want to see in the world. You might like to take a look at his book: PlanBe.

Q. What do you think of Saints? Are there people who you recognise or honour as saints? Q. Do you recognise different dimensions of your own self, eg relative and absolute, and is it possible to make a choice? Q. What do you think of memorisation as a spiritual practice eg memorise the Beatitudes? Resources/references: ​jjelfs Oct/2011