Communion of Saints doctrine gives big picture

By Monica Perry

I love bed-time. My youngest daughter doesn't, so she tends to prolong it. Every night my husband and I tuck her in. First dad gives her a hug and a kiss and says, "Good night, I love you, God bless you, see you tomorrow." It must be said in this order. No part of this fond adieu may be left out.

Olivia then requests that her dad "do the beard thing." My husband always enjoys this comment and dutifully rubs his scratchy beard against her cheek.

Then comes my turn. While Olivia often finds 8:30 unreasonably early to call it a day, I could easily turn in at the same time. When I tuck her in (although I love her madly) I am usually feeling tired and somewhat desperate to have a few minutes to myself.

My "Good night, I love you, God bless you, see you tomorrow," can come out a bit rushed. Olivia doesn't seem to notice. She throws her arms around my neck and we kiss and hug. When I try and stand up, her arms are still locked firmly around my neck. This is hard on my back.

"Do the beard thing," she then says. She's funny. She knows it.

I'm not a night person. Keeping my grumpiness under control at this point takes effort. Managing to do so out of love for God and my daughter can help to affect not only my salvation, but hers. This is a doctrine of the Church that we profess every time we say the creed, and it is called the Communion of Saints.

The doctrine of the Communion of Saints refers to "the intimate union and mutual influence among the members of the Church on earth, in heaven, and in purgatory" (Catholic Encyclopedia). The members of the Church on earth (us) and the members of the Church in purgatory are called saints in this doctrine, by virtue of their destination (I used to think it only referred to the saints in heaven).

We humans do not live in a vacuum. Our actions influence for better or worse all of humanity, since we are all members of the same race, the human race. As members of Christ's body, the members of the Church are even more connected.

"The work done by another who is one with me," says St. Thomas, "is somewhat mine."

Likewise, therefore, the merit for the work. I can help others on earth get to heaven by my prayers and sacrifices, and they can do the same for me. My work is somewhat theirs, and theirs mine. When we ask the saints in heaven to intercede for us, we make somewhat the same demand on the ear of Our Heavenly Father as a St. Therese, or a Mother Teresa, or a Pope John Paul II. In Christ we are one even with these great saints.

In an introduction she wrote to a book called A Memoir of Mary Ann, Flannery O'Connor, the 20th-century Catholic writer, gives a wonderful example of this connection between the members of the Body of Christ.

Mary Ann was a young girl with terminal cancer who, in 1949, went to live with a Dominican order of nuns called the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. This congregation of sisters was begun in New York at the end of the 19th century by Rose Hawthorne, the daughter of the famous author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

While reading the description of Mary Ann sent her by the sisters who had charge of her, and studying the enclosed photograph of the girl, O'Connor was reminded of something she had once read about Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In notes published after his death, Hawthorne tells the story of a rather grotesque and dirty little child who attached himself (or herself; he could not determine the sex) to him when he and his wife were visiting a home for foundlings. Though his fastidious nature disinclined him to the act, he forced himself to return the child's affectionate advances. Hawthorne was afraid he would not be able to forgive himself if he did not do so.

O'Connor draws out the connection between this not unheroic act, the conversion of Hawthorne's daughter Rose to the Catholic faith, Rose's subsequent founding of her charitable order of nuns, and a little girl who lived nine years happily among a later generation of these sisters, though she was missing an eye and a tumour covered half of her face.

Enough of my prose. O'Connor's is incomparably better. Of these Dominican sisters, O'Connor writes: "Their work is the tree sprung from Hawthorne's small act of Christlikeness, and Mary Ann is its flower. By reason of the fear, the search, and the charity that marked his (Hawthorne's) life and influenced his daughter's, Mary Ann inherited, a century later, the wealth of Catholic wisdom that taught her what to make of her death. Hawthorne gave what he did not have himself."

"This action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead, is called by the Church the Communion of Saints."

The doctrine of the Communion of Saints gives us the big picture. It puts our life in the context of the lives of all the other members of Christ's Body who are united in charity: those who came before us, those who will come after us, those who are already rejoicing in heaven.

"O blest communion, fellowship divine! We feebly struggle, they (the saints) in glory shine; yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine!" (from the hymn: For All the Saints).