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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Family of Saints

The Family of Saints

If any one doctrine of the Church could be called more Catholic than the rest, it is surely that of the Communion of Saints. Its implications are enormous; for it implies that all members of the Church, living and dead, are part of a family, held together in bonds of love, in which Our Lord is father and brother to us all, and Our Lady mother and sister. There is no high wall dividing us from the holy Ones, the members of the Church Triumphant. Here is the great open secret of the Church, a source of pharisaical scandal to the half-believer and the unbeliever.

A human soul needs human helpers. Suppose each soul were confronted from birth to death by the naked reality and majesty of God. Inescapably drawn by His terrible Beauty, aware of its own hideous imperfections, it might so easily despair and perish. But God has not planted each soul in a desert by itself. He plants it in a garden, in the rich soil of human memories, feelings and associations, among creatures of a like kind. In the garden of the Church there are no walls except those we erect by our own blindness or lack of belief. The saints, the angels, and God Himself, are continually accessible to us.

Some faint reflection of this truth had entered my mind long before I was received into the Church. Like an adolescent burning a candle before thepage 386 picture of Jimmy Dean, I had constructed half-consciously my own gallery of ‘saints’ – Robert Burns, Boccaccio, Lord Byron, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, and some others – Bohemian literary men of the past and present; and there, like a sheep among the goats (it is where he would choose to be) St Francis, the poor man of Assisi. I have good reason to believe that he answered my timid devotion by bringing me to the baptismal font.

It was not so absurd, after all. The Bohemian writers I had chosen as exemplars had each some spark of unpredictable hunger that led them to the mountains and abysses of the interior life: a hunger for God perhaps. Misdirected, it can destroy the soul; as a lamp-flame turned too high will crack the glass chimney that contains it; but when the wick is trimmed by obedience, it becomes a light to lighten the whole house.

I suppose that each Catholic constructs some kind of private, unofficial litany to honour his chosen saints. My own was built up by degrees, and it is still growing. In ten years’ time I fear I may have to begin to prune it, in case it swells to contain the whole of the Church Triumphant.

First, there was St Joseph, whose name I took at Confirmation. He seemed entirely willing to look after the practical details which I so often, in a fog of absent-mindedness, had overlooked. He has helped me to catch a hundred trains, paid the grocer’s bill, hailed taxis, brought the children safely home from school, and staved off family quarrels.

Then there was the Little Flower, St Thérèse of the Child Jesus, who led me by the hand like an elder sister – ‘a very strict saint’, a new Catholic friend confided to me, ‘but very powerful’.

St Anthony also can be strict; and he has an excellent sense of humour. An Indian friend told me about a girl who had prayed for years to St Anthony for a good Catholic husband. At length, exasperated by his lack of cooperation, she seized his image and threw it from a top-floor window. It fell on the head of a young man passing by. So the introductions were made for a good Catholic marriage.

In India, too, I made the personal acquaintance of St Francis Xavier, whose mummified body still rests in Goa. He, too, can be strict in his dealings with the wayward Catholic: especially the man who is afraid to witness to the Faith in a pagan environment.

The Goan Government, relying on his intercession, has made him an honorary captain in the army – his salary is paid regularly as alms to the poor. One Governor decided to dock the salary, but his home (if I remember the story rightly) was immediately shaken by an earthquake, and next pay day the money was paid in full.

Then there is St John Vianney, whose image stands in the small Church of the Sacred Heart, in Madras. He comforted and healed me when I came there sick with dysentery. A small man in black robes, with a wrinkled, emaciated, gentle face.

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Then there is St Thomas the Apostle, whose tomb I visited at Mylapore. He gave me great peace and freedom from many doubts.

And among the all-but-saints, Holy Matt Talbot, the Dublin alcoholic, a good friend for an ex-drunk; and Father Miguel Pro, to whom my friend Rod Finlayson introduced me, a merry martyr, who liked to hold missions among taxi-drivers in Mexico City, and who is an expert at healing family breaches. . . .

The list is long, too long to set them all down. But I hope to see their faces in Heaven one day. A human soul needs human helpers, and the Church gives them to us in abundance.

1959 (189)