Vigils: Weekday

THE SAINT AND THE CHRISTIAN
From “The Faith and Modern Man” by Fr Romano Guardini 4
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We associate the word saints with the idea of exceptional persons. In the New Testament, however, it signifies Christians generally. Being a Christian at all was extraordinary. For the Christians stood out sharply from the environment; either one lived in the Old Testament world, or in the Hellenistic-pagan world, and by both they were regarded as something strange if not hostile. The experience of conversion lifted them out of the environment. A sense of the reality of God not learned from natural religious experience or from the teaching of the Old Testament had shaken and, at the same time, blessed them.

In the existence of Christ, God’s countenance had been unveiled. The life of Christ had made them aware of how God is minded toward us. These experiences had changed their whole lives. They had acquired new ideas of God, new standards of judging the world. The “renewal of mind” of which the Gospel speaks and which they had begun to fulfill, now consisted not only in a conversion to a good and pious life, but in a change of direction in their whole way of thinking. Thus for them, actually, “all things had become new” – and with all these “new things” they found themselves still in an old world, a world which regarded them with distrust and hostility. All this is, in itself, extraordinary – indeed the very essence of the extraordinary, and the “saint” was one who led this existence.

But the spread of Christianity and its increase in members tended to obscure its unique nature. Time went on, the Gospel grew familiar, and the sense of newness wore off. Christianity became the state religion and, as such, the official order of society. Thus the fact that being a Christian at all was in itself extraordinary faded out of people’s consciousness, and Christianity grew to be regarded as normal and usual.

4
The Faith and Modern Man, New York 1952, 128-133.