By Gary Topping–
“Have you been saved”?
Growing up, as I did, on the southern Oregon coast in an environment heavily dominated by fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants, I have heard that question, phrased in a variety of ways, more times than I can remember. Confronted by it, we Catholics tend to become a bit flustered because it asks us to define our relationship with God in terms that we ordinarily would not use. Even worse, it implies that if we are not “saved,” we are not even Christians. “On such-and-such a date,” I have also heard people say, “I became a Christian,” suggesting that whatever their previous religious affiliation might have been, they were not truly Christian.
The theology behind this thinking is that, in order to become a true Christian, one must undergo some sort of Damascus Road experience, a cataclysmic turning point in which one “gets saved” by committing one’s life to Christ once and for all. Once you’ve punched your ticket and joined the club, you’re in! You’re “saved,” once and for all! Heaven is guaranteed.
Once I moved to Utah, I realized that what those people were asking was, “Are you a saint”? Once you’ve been baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you’ve made that cataclysmic decision. You’re a saint, just like those Evangelicals who “got saved” by being “born again.”
The Catholic Church is certainly not opposed to such “born again” experiences; in fact, St. Paul’s Damascus Road experience is the archetype, and Catholic history affords many subsequent examples, although most were not as sudden or dramatic as St. Paul’s. Attending Mass last summer at St. Monica parish in my home town of Coos Bay, Oregon, my wife and I grinned during the final song, the solidly Evangelical “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus.” If any of my erstwhile Evangelical friends had been there (I didn’t see any of them), they must have felt vindicated.
But I have decided to celebrate All Saints Day this year by renewing my resolve to become a saint not at one time by one experience, but rather the slow way, the way I think most Catholics approach it, through a lifetime of lesser transformative moments. The Confessional is one way: “I firmly intend, with your help, to do penance, to sin no more and to avoid whatever leads to sin,” and the Mass is another: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.” Nor do we need to confine such experiences to weekends. The Letter of St. James, in a familiar passage in Chapter 2, admonishes us to express our faith through our works: if we let the poor remain hungry and without clothing or shelter, merely wishing them well, “What good is that”? Failing to do that (my own idea this time, not St. James’s) we are no better than the passersby who moved to the other side of the road to avoid the traveler who had been beaten and robbed, before the Good Samaritan came along.
All Saints Day, then, reminds us that sainthood is the goal. But how to get there?
Well, I can see two ways. One is the Damascus Road, the once-and-for-all commitment to “get saved.” It works; I’ve known many very saintly people, Protestants, Catholics and Mormons, who got there that way and made it stick.
Others, though, may want to join me on the low road and the slow road, running, walking, falling, getting up again, and stumbling forward, learning from the times we blow it and doing better the next time. In the end, I think we all get to the same place.
