Service of the Word & Sacrament: Sunday, November 3 at 10 AM
Sermon Title: "Saints Ain’t"
📖 Scripture: Isaiah 25:6-9 and Solomon 3:1-9 (adapted)
Leonard Cohen, from “Beautiful Losers” (1966), adapted
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if they did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for themself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of one person setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is their glory. They ride the drifts like an escaped ski. Their course is the caress of the hill. Their track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in them so loves the world that they give themself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, they trace with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. Their house is dangerous and finite, but they are at home in the world. They can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such people, such balancing monsters of love.
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