The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
November 4, 2007
Vol. 10 no. 40

Everything But...
           Saints are easier to celebrate and enjoy than the ghosts and goblins of All Hallowed Eve. The ghouls can be fun, especially dressed up as a child, but let’s face it, they lose their pleasantness after October 31st. Saints, of course, may be just as annoying as the denizens of Halloween, for they too like to startle us out of our routines. Perhaps the saints scare us to heaven.
           Doing some idle reading this summer I came across a wonderful description of saints that seems to fit. Karl Barth identifies saints as “disturbed sinners.” They know that they are still sinners, far from perfect, but now they know what “perfect” is and it bothers the Hades out of them. Their sinful life is compromised by their saintliness. Saints are not people who do not know how to sin anymore; they recognize and are painfully disturbed by how much they sin in little ways.
           On All Saints’ Sunday, we catch Zacchaeus up a tree, another despicable tax-collector who made a business of short-changing everybody - a really bad pun considering he was “small of stature”! Was he trying to be a saint, or simply catch some saintliness as Jesus walked by? We really can’t be sure, and of course, the office of the saint was not a term in use in the first century. There is a difference which applies more to us than to Zacchaeus.
           Trying to catch some saintliness is a popular pastime whether going on a pilgrimage or retreat with a supposedly holy teacher, entering and touching a sacred location, or simply seeing a living saint in the flesh past by, Zacchaeus’ first option. Is saintliness a sort of holy virus that once you have been in contact with it you are safely immunized? That way you never have to worry about becoming a real saint, a much harder and much better option.