The first Sunday after Pentecost is the Sunday of All Saints, which the Church placed after the Sunday of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, because the saints are proof that Pentecost is an ongoing event in history, and that the Holy Spirit is ever active in history, as Metropolitan Paul Yazigi says (1). The saints are the fruits of the human struggle shared with God, and the proclamation of the holiness of persons in the Church is a proclamation of God’s presence in His Church and His activity within it, and, on the other hand, a proof of the strength of the work of the institution of the Church on the spiritual level and the depth of its fruitfulness with God. The proclamation of a saint is the realization of the evangelical work the Church undertakes: it has borne fruit and it is reaping.
Whenever a saint appears, he points to the effectiveness of the Church’s work among people. The saints are one of the most important signs by which we say to the other: “Come and see” what we proclaim and say is true, for here are human beings who have tasted its fruits and become partakers of God’s holiness.
They are one of the pillars we use in any defense of the Orthodox Christian faith in the face of many heresies, from Jehovah’s Witnesses and others, for the proclamation of saints is proof of vitality and effectiveness — not of the Spirit alone, but of the effectiveness of the human evangelical work. Therefore not a year passes without the other Orthodox Churches (Constantinople, Greece, Serbia… and others) proclaiming many saints. It is noteworthy that the Catholic, Coptic, and Maronite Churches proclaim or beatify saints for themselves every year.
But the Spirit does not work in a magical way among them, nor is the proclamation of saints done in a miraculous manner. That is, the Spirit does not intervene to make saints according to His desire, nor does He transform people whom He chooses over others for this matter, nor is the proclamation of saints done through some apparition to one of the monks, clerics, or believers to say that so-and-so is a saint, so proclaim him. Rather, it is done through the studies of a conciliar committee that examines the lives of persons (laypeople, monks, martyrs, clerics…) whose lives were marked by purity and chastity. After examining them and confirming their conformity to many criteria (uprightness of conduct and faith, the local or universal popular acceptance of this person as a saint…), the saints are then proclaimed. But despite the importance of the proclamation of saints in the other Churches, the absence of the local saint proclaims and confirms the absence of the role of the local Church, and it has a special character (from my village, my parish, or my region there is a saint). His absence means that holiness does not come from us, but from others, and that holiness among us is not possible. Hence the question arises:
Where does the Antiochene Church stand in this regard? Why do we not search the lives and the accounts for persons whose fragrance has spread, and proclaim them? Why are there persons whose fragrance has spread, but we insisted on keeping them under the bushel of history and in the pages of ancient books, and we do not place them upon our mountains so that they might light the paths of people weighed down by injustice and toil? Is the crisis a crisis of desertification? Perhaps not, because there are faces that have emerged in our days and before them, faces of light in their conduct and their way of life. But the cause is the deviation of the compass of the Church’s administration and its preoccupation with many matters that divert it from the essential work without which the ecclesiastical institution becomes an administrative institution with no taste, no color, and no scent. We affirm that there is a divorce between the institution and its Gospel, and that what we preach is but theoretical talk, or an ideology like any other. This is what makes the Church appear as a dead Church with no spirit in it and producing nothing — an institutional Church that only takes and does not give, that consumes and does not sow or reap, that lives in rigid worship and cold rites, and that busies itself with struggles and scandals. Matters of holiness have become a subject placed on the margin and are no longer raised, and perhaps have become undesirable because the lives of the saints expose our own lives and their faults.
The last saint proclaimed is Joseph of Damascus, after long years without the proclamation of saints. And since his proclamation until today, the news of the saints has once again disappeared from our pulpits, the work of the Committee for the Canonization of Saints has disappeared from the Synod, and the fragrant scent of holiness has faded, and we smell nothing but the scent of disputes, scandals, quarrels, factionalism, and favoritism. So division increases and hope diminishes among people, and the faithful lose their trust in the Church and its Lord, and they stumble instead of being a hope for them in a world of crises. Nothing strengthens people and empowers them in the world except the lives of the saints and the manifestation of their works. What image do we give today of the Church? Patriarch Ignatius Hazim says: “If you want to read about the Church, you must read about her saints, and not about political persons. A Church without saints has no Holy Spirit in it, and it is consequently not a Church” (3). So what do we call the Antiochene Church today?
The subject is not whether the saints have disappeared from our land, for God is present and does not disappear; but why do we, as a Church, disappear from our role? The question is why we no longer proclaim new saints, as though the saints have become part of the ancient heritage and in the lines of history, as though we have told the people that the Spirit worked in the past, and now He has gone to rest; or we say that God, in the past, created and then stopped creating, and the Church is satisfied with its past; and we declare that everything that was true is nothing but the weaving of imagination and myths. Or do we say that in the Church we resemble a party or a religious institution like other religious institutions whose role and work are limited to performing religious rites and issuing fatwas? Is not the failure to proclaim saints a declaration of failure on the paths of history, and a resignation of the ecclesiastical institution from its role?
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References:
1. Metropolitan Paul Yazigi, The Book of the Word: Homilies on the Gospels of Sundays and Feasts (Part Two), Publications of the Greek Orthodox Metropolitanate of Aleppo, 2006, p. 147.
2. Patriarch Ignatius IV, Breezes of Antioch, p. 146.