Sometimes
you meet someone and you come away absolutely convinced of the existence of
holiness in the world. Sometimes you
meet someone and you come away absolutely sure that they’re either a saint, or
incredibly weird. “Maybe,” you conclude,
“they’re both.” I think meeting St.
Antony, whose feast day we celebrate today, was probably that kind of
experience. I mean, the guy did live in
a tomb for starters. People also flocked
to him, and St. Athanasius wrote a biography of him, because he was someone
whose presence convinced you of the fundamental goodness in humanity, the
fundamental goodness that God can draw to the surface.
Illiterate
and orphaned at 18 he was seized by the desire to sell everything, give the
money to the poor and follow Christ into the desert. He prayed ceaselessly, mastered his passions
and adopted a severe ascetical lifestyle.
In his youth he did manual labor while praying, brought a little bread
with his wages and gave the rest to the poor.
Later, he felt this need for more isolation and that was when he moved
into his tomb. Eventually, people would
flock from miles around to bring bread in the hope of hearing a word from this
holy man. His holiness, Athanasius tells
us, was just as obvious to his neighbors as to the devil who decided to fight
back and send demons in the form of beasts to attack him during his time of
isolation in the tomb. All night, Antony
fought with them, suffering blows and pains but never quite defeated. Suddenly, he had a realization and declared
to the demons: “Why do you disturb me?
Faith in the Lord is a seal and wall of protection.” After this rebuke, the roof of the tomb was
opened and a beam of light forced its way into the darkness, scattering the
demons. The next day, Antony finally left
the tomb and the people were shocked to see that his body had not wasted away
at all. Antony’s body gave us a preview
of the incorruptibility we are all destined for.
God
shows us this often. God, who Paul tells
us pre-knows and pre-destines people for glory gives us previews too. He keeps on showing us our future glory in
His saints. That beam of light is not
just an image Athanasius used in the distant past, it regularly punctures our
world today and it shows us what’s really real: holiness is the realest thing
there is.
It’s
hard to make it out sometimes, but the Spirit helps us in our weakness. God breathed life into us through our
nostrils, in a messy act of creative intimacy, and the spirit inhabits our breath,
inhabits our sighs still. And we need
that gift, thank God for that gift of the Spirit, because sometimes holiness
isn’t the first thing we see when we look around the world.
Just
over one month ago, we all sighed when we heard of mass murder in Sandy Hook. We sighed in anger and disbelief and sorrow
at the magnitude of evil that confronted us. And God was in those sighs. The Spirit prayed in those sighs. Keep sighing.
It may well be right to move to personal examination and reform or to
discern whether or not to push for structural change but before we can do any
of that: Sigh deeply. Sigh in
faith. Sigh in the Spirit. Because then, the light of God will penetrate
this darkness. And that beam of light
may not scatter every demon, but it’ll give us a preview. God will fix our eyes on Victoria Soto and
Anne-Marie Murphy, teachers who died shielding their students from bullets,
women who showed us a preview of the love and the courage that God destines us
for. That’s holiness. That’s what God is bringing us to. That’s how to sigh is a defiant act of hope.
May
grace come. Quickly.
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