“…for the saints of God are just folk like you and like me…”
I sat captivated as they carried the casket of Ruth Bader Ginsburg up the steps of the majestic Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. I found myself thinking how appropriate, and how ironic, and how fitting, that such a diminutive physical frame, was coming to rest, and be honored, in such hallowed, majestic halls. Because, after all, she lived her life in what appeared to be, at least from this vantage point, some very majestic ways.
Unique, individual, and yet so similar, to the emotions stirred as I watched John Lewis’ funeral caisson pass gracefully over the Edmund Pettus bridge less than two months earlier.
These two lives, lived so fully, distinctly, humbly, and yet mightily, for the cause of equal rights, indeed liberty and justice for all. These two seemed to be able to think universally by first thinking relationally, individually, one to another. Their lives became majestic by what they could do where they were, individually, in relationship, to and with those who were not them. Both lived beautifully in the tension that is real love, somewhere between justice and mercy and grace.
I find myself wanting more of that kind of love, that love that knows how to exist in that liminal space. It is so easy to justify one’s place, one’s rightness, in either one or the other. But to exist ever so gently, and yet strategically between the two, that is the “saint-creating” place!
For the Ruth Bader Ginsburgs and the John Lewises of the world, it appears all too easy to occupy this place in time, especially now, as it seems our world is spinning out of control. How could I, any one of us, be majestic, saintly, in times like these? How could we possibly be saints of God who, on our last days, might have said about us, “Well done, good and faithful servant?”
I think their answers might echo through those great marble halls equally as majestically.
Live in that liminal space between justice and mercy and grace, in love, one relationship at a time. Relationships lived in this way cannot help but be life-giving to all those involved, and to the world. You build saints one relationship at a time!
“…and I mean to be one too!”
Yours faithfully,
Fr. Christopher+
