Revelation 7:2-14
Psalm 24:1-6
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12

The Patience of a Saint

St. John reminds us of our high vocation, our identity, and our future life, for we are nothing less than God's own children and, by that fact, are heirs to the Kingdom. Over and over again, we are told throughout the New Testament that our salvation lies in understanding ourselves to be God's children. From the beginning the Lord Jesus teaches us that we must think of God as our Father. St. Paul echoes this saying that we are adopted that we might cry out to God, "Abba! Father!" We must have the hearts of children, filled with wonder and inclined to love, in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet, we know that a child's responsibility is to mature that we may advance to solid food (1 Cor 3:2). For

Yes, maturity, coming to fullness, becoming the abundance that God planned for us from the beginning, and by that fact, finally seeing God in His abundance ... this is our vocation and our salvation. This is holiness itself, for the only definition of holiness is "closeness to God," Whom we call the Holy One, the One Who alone is Holy, and the only One Who is good.

The early Fathers understood this very clearly. Coming to maturity is Christian life, the way of the saints, and our only path to Heaven, maturity. Christ's saving acts on our behalf, which we call "the atonement," were understood in this light. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The word atonement is actually a contraction like don't or won't. In its long form it is AT-ONE-MENT. Through atonement we become at-one with God again. But what united us in the first place? And what separated us from God that we need to be atoned for?

God is our Father, our parent. He is the One Who brought us into the world (as my mother was fond of telling me), the One Who nursed us, the One Who made future plans for us, the One Who continues to rear us, to forgive us, and to love us. (If these are not the marks of a parent, I do not know what is.) As with all parents, we bear His Image, the family resemblance. And we know that if we obey Him and return His love, that we will eventually come into the fullness represented by Him. In a certain sense we will become Him just as we become our earthly parents .... but in a sense, not entirely. The path of the child, therefore, is one of trust that God does indeed love us and is preparing a place for us in His World and in His Life. Our part is to be disciplined and to strive to please Him and yearn for His blessing as any son or daughter rightly would.

The story of Eden, which mysteriously is the story of everyone who is born into the world, is a story first of the nursery, then of the adolescent coming into fullness, and then .... the story breaks off. For God's children have caused a rupture with Him, losing relationship with Him, and needing atonement that their lives might be holy and whole again.

What happened? Certainly, God's nature is always to have mercy. The Hebrew Scriptures are about nothing if not the story of a long-suffering God. The Bible, after all, is not the story of a faithful people, but of a faithful God. No doubt, Father God's relationship with Adam and Eve was an up-and-down affair for that is the way with closeness to humans, on account of their freedom. The Scriptures teach us that again and again, God forgives and tenderly understands. So what could have happened to effect so deep a rupture between God and His children?

God had planted one tree in the Garden which was off-limits: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Good and evil ... this is the basis for all morality, the most basic rules for all human conduct. And this was not only about good and evil but something much deeper than that: it was the locus for the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote, this tree represents the regulation of all good and evil, the source and authority for good and evil, the theology of good and evil. In essence, this tree is the sole lifespring for human morals. Here alone is decided what the rules for right and wrong will be and who will define them. It was at this point, where God's human creatures decided that they would define what was right and wrong supplanting God's place in the natural order. Thus, a deep and irreparable rupture occurred. This is not something that can be amended through compromise and negotiation. Either God defines right living or humans do. There can be no in-between.

No question, the general scene around us today — where the most basic rules are violated, where new moralities are proposed, where the existence of morality is debated — replays the Eden story for each of us as each of us is in it. Each of us begins as children with God's law, and many of us will discard that law (at least momentarily) and decide on a new set of rules for him- or herself.

We might explore these issues through the lens of family life, as well. After all, Adam and Eve were created to be children and then teenagers and then young adults and finally mature people. Thirty years ago, I would travel to a research center in Chicago once of twice a year to lecture. I would always drop in to visit a family I knew there. In those years, single mothers were not so common. And this mother was special, heroic, you might say. The family was constituted of a mother raising two sons. Early on, the boys were affectionate and dutiful, and this worked out well in a household that was run by the rule. But as time passed, the boys began challenging their mother who was now several inches shorter than they were and who lacked that certain something that a tall, husky father brings to the conversation. During one visit I noticed a sign that my friend had posted near the kitchen table:

I do not make light of the scene in Eden, for changing God's rules of what is right and wrong is no laughing matter. God's moral law is inviolable, changeless, and only true. (We may believe that morals "evolve," but no evolutionary scientist does.) The point here is that the Eden story is universal — that each of our life stories is a Garden of Eden story, for we begin in innocence and wonder, and then most of us lose that special state of being and then become forever separated from the Garden. Who does not long to return to it? — the place of simplicity, the place of purity, the place of goodness, of peace, and of renewed friendship with our only true Father, Who is God.

In the mystery of Eden, we draw nearer to understanding God's nature, His purposes, and our own identity, which is closely tied to the point of our lives. So let us go to the center of this story. What was the essence of Eve's transgression and then Adam's? The serpent promises Eve that she will be like God. But from our distance of theological reflection, we see a cruel irony. Adam and Eve were to become like God all along. The story is a bit like the man who paid everything in order to buy what he already owned. The sisters knew a certain monk in Haiti whose shovel was always being stolen. He had to go down to the only hardware store in town and humbly buy it back over and over again .... his own shovel. Adam and Eve paid everything to get back what they already owned. But this is the nature of the Devil's bargain, you see, for he is the Deuce, the Double, the Counterfeit, Duplicity itself.

Bearing God's Image, Adam and Eve were God's own children. They were to grow into their Father's fullness as a matter of destiny and due time. Jesus is their brother, the first-born of Creation and their exemplar. He and and the Father are One. Who has seen Jesus has seen the Father. And so the younger siblings also are to advance down this path. As every child is, Adam and Eve were in the midst of a process, a process of growth and maturity. Over time, they would have come into their fullness, but they seized it prematurely .... as the Prodigal Son would in Jesus' parable: "But I want my inheritance now!"

Four centuries after Jesus, St. Augustine defined the sin in Eden as being pridefulness. And certainly that first of the Deadly Sins is relevant. But the Early Church Fathers saw a deeper strain: they saw that the sin of Eden was impatience. For if Adam and Eve had been patient, they would have come into a fullness of knowledge that included depth in understanding in morals. And is not this the case for most of us? When we are young we are apt to commit moral errors that the converted mind and heart will always remember with a sense of regret. In later years, temptation to these same errors not only fails to attract but are downright outlandish, even repulsive. This is called conversion to the mind and heart of Christ. It is all a matter of time, coming to maturity, which requires trust, yes, and patience.

The Eden story holds an additional lesson. It suggests that there are those who do live into a trusting obedience from the start and do not fall from grace. This is anathema to St. Augustine and to the Protestant theologians who followed him in his fifth-century conception of "original sin," which holds that all humans are wretched and helpless and cannot succeed in virtuous life. Without question, I have seen this principle of original sin ... in the people I have met and in myself.

Nonetheless, I have also met people, some in this world's remote corners, who are the living saints. The privations they have accepted long ago, but more important, the unfailing charity and remarkable patience they exercise in the midst of this every day, have astonished me. There are moments in this life when you wonder if somehow you have not shaded seamlessly into Heaven, for you do not know where you are and what you are seeing has never seen before. Yes, I have met the patient saints, who trust in God as children (in devout households, I should add), who devoted themselves to God as teenagers, and who gave themselves to God as young adults and then stayed the course until the end of their lives. We read their Beatitude today: Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.

I have met the saints, who have been faithful in their prayer life, tender in their personal love for God and others, and perfect in their daily service to the Apostolate. They never went through that "loss of innocence," that rupture, as I did, for example. They continue living in this world with a sense of wonder. And they have matured over the years understanding God in their fullness as they could not have as children and teenagers. That is, they became a personal abundance and by that fact were able to see abundance in their God (John 10:10), deep calling unto deep (Psalm 42:7).

I have met the living saints. And through them I finally came to understand in my advanced years what is meant by the phrase, "the patience of a saint." I realize that they are not the general rule. But they do not have to be; the mere fact of their existence has shown me the vestiges of Paradise, what life was supposed to be before the rupture of our common parents from God. We all grieve to see a world of seven-and-a-half billion souls with so many separated from God. The life of Jesus, Who has stepped in to complete the process of maturation that Adam and Eve had left off is precious and essential to heal the world and to atone for our sins. You see His taking up where they left off atones for our sins.

The Greek Fathers reflected on this atonement in two ways. First, they understood Jesus to be a ransom for many. He had laid down His life for His friends (John 15:13), interned in the House of Death, which was to be our fate. But Death learned a horrible truth: it had interned the Lord of Life, the Creator of the Universe, and in His sublime greatness He shattered this House. By entering it with His death, He destroyed death.

Second, the Fathers saw that Jesus is the perfect Son, the perfect exemplar and brother of God's adopted children. By taking up where Adam left off, Jesus completes the life-unto-maturity (St. Irenaeus liked the word recapitulates .... Adam's life). Do you know that upon the Cross, which is the compass and crossroads of the world for all time, we see upon it etched the compass letters, N, S, E, W. and that they spell (in Greek) Adam? It is ours now to gaze upon that Cross and to emulate this mature life in its perfect trust and obedience.

The theological word for this process is theosis, the process of, in some mysterious way, becoming God, the process of coming to a full maturity from which we see God. And this was why the saints began their journey in the first place: to follow Him. "Follow me!" He calls to each of us. And they did. It was that simple.

For the rest of us, who are not yet saints, let us take up our crosses that we might be crucified to the world of skewed morality, which was unworthy in the first place. Let us fix our gaze only upon the world, the only world that truly is, where Father God awaits at a roadside in all his forgiveness and tender understanding.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.