If you enjoy reading biographies, a couple of basic facts may have become clear early on. The first is the difference between good biography and what we call hagiography. Hagiography is what happens often at funerals, a dressed-up and somewhat selective account of a person’s life, while knowing that some people present could tell alternative versions. Perhaps understandably at funerals, we usually draw a veil over anything discreditable or puzzling.
The other fact is what we find in good biography -- that most persons’ lives are replete with contradictions and shadows, and that includes the life of every sainted Christian leader I have read. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King, Hensley Henson the saintly Bishop of Durham, George Augustus Selwyn, John Betjeman, William Wilberforce, St Augustine, Desmond Tutu... the list is endless, and they are just a few of the males...! Episodes in their lives reflect St Paul’s as he reports in the Letter to the Romans: I do not understand my behaviour; I know what is right but I can’t do it... Or they fell into the abyss of depression, and the guilt of assuming they should be better than that. Or they allowed themselves to be led off somehow against their vows and promises.
Occasionally you do hear of someone who arrives on the western slopes of life, as it were, saying: I regret nothing, I would do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing... No regrets...? Yeah, right.
St Benedict warns his brothers: Do not think yourself as holy before you really are. The subtext there is that if you ever become truly holy, then thinking it is the last thing you will think. Benedict knew that we are all flawed, “mutilated” as Archbishop Rowan Williams dares to express it. The best way to find that out, actually, might be stay for a while in a monastery. Anyway, we shrink to think of ourselves as holy precisely because we know it cannot be so. It is Christ who is holy, and the truth is that our wholeness is in owning and acknowledging our whole past and present. This is our poverty, and it is what we bring to our prayer. It is also what unites us with the whole of humanity. We are not better than others, we are the same stuff. We may have done slightly better at times, but we know where the shadows are.
And so we come to prayer, not because we are good at it, and not because we have goods to offer or even things to ask... We qualify here, not because we have done well, and despite the fact that we did badly. None of that is relevant here. We are here because unconditional love and grace draw us. We have dignity because God in Christ bestows dignity on us as beloved daughters and sons.
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