Anglican Saints.
I had a friend, who, for a while, was responsible for proposing people of the past to be commemorated as saints in the Church of England.
In the Church of England we have a number of saints that have not been recognised as saints by other churches yet. Among them people that were not even Anglicans or people that left the Anglican church as part of their saintly journey: Julian of Norwich (8 May), John Henry Newman of Littlemore (11 August, still awaiting final confirmation in the Roman Catholic church!), Martin Luther (31 October) and John & Charles Wesley (24 May), Samuel Johnson (13 December), William and Catherine Booth (20 August) and Dietrich Bonhöffer (9 April).
As we don’t have a Pope in the Church of England, it falls to the General Synod to confirm the status of sainthood. But it fell to my friend to allocate dates on which these new saints might be commemorated. Invariably he did this by choosing the day on which they died. The saints go before us (official ones and unofficial ones). Saints are people who have been perceived to be profoundly close to God during parts of their lifetime. But saints are especially people who have gone before us through death. And for them death, the moment of their dying, is a new birth. For them death has truly opened the gate of glory and through them we can glimpse what might await us.
In the end only God can ‘make’ saints, and it is likely that we would be thoroughly surprised by who appears to be included. Who knows, it might even be ourselves and – even more shocking – the neighbour whom we have never noticed before! But the discussion about who might or who might not have been a saint is actually irrelevant when it comes affirming the deeper truth: there is a connection between our life here on earth and our life awaiting us beyond the grave.
And though we do not now know any details, we do know that the saints have gone before us and that they accompany us with their prayers on our journey.
Bernhard Schünemann
5 November 2017
