The veneration of the saints has always been a part of the fabric of the Church. It involves our own salvation as deification, catholicity and apostolicity, all types of martyrdom, and the partaking of the Eucharist. In the Book of Acts, a martyr means to bear witness to Christ all the way to our deaths, whether by persecution or by professing Christ through our virtuous deeds and repentant actions throughout life. The basic questions about life and death are answered by cultivating a veneration of the saints and embodying their example into our own practice of following Christ in His Church. There are ancient saints like Noah, Abraham, Rahab and Judith in the Bible. There are New Testament saints like the Apostles Peter and Paul. There are recent saints like St. Silouan the Athonite and St. Herman of Alaska. Local churches did not coerce each other into accepting their own saints, but with the mark of catholicity and conciliarity, they would present a list that had to be mutually received into the diptychs of two churches before new saints could be venerated together as one Church. There was not always a systematized process of canonization in the Orthodox Church, neither in the West, which has developed a more rigorous process today in modern Roman Catholicism. In both East and West, there have been variations in how sainthood could be verified, usually through the laity’s prayers, a council and the abundant appearance of miracles through prayers by the faithful. The canonization of a saint involved the whole community, the bishop in communication with another bishop at the diocesan or metropolitan level. The eucharistic community led by one bishop in communion with his brother bishops was designed to produce saints and pass down sanctity.
According to the tradition passed down through the grace-filled Apostles and episcopacy, the resurrection of Christ is the true prosperity Gospel. The examples of the saints were crucial in building up and passing down holiness to the next generation of Christians as well as correcting Churches who had gone astray into divisions, as St. Clement of Rome had done by writing letters to the Corinthian Church’s hierarchs around the 1st AD, and who is said to have met the Apostle Peter himself. Rather than appealing to a formula that the Church is equated to authority, St. Clement of Rome, one the earliest of bishops at Rome, like Peter and Paul in their letters who preached the foolishness of Christ, advise with brotherly love the Church “sojourning” at Corinth by recalling and explaining the saints from the Old Testament to the New Testament to their own time.
The holy martyrs of every age reveal the reality of this world. That our desires are dead-ends, material goods and achievements fade. But spiritual gifts and the adornment of a virtuous life, which even pagans have praised, will endure in the resurrected life. All kinds of people of different rank and riches are remembered for their miracles, before and after their death. In Old Testament Law, the Jews were prohibited from touching or coming near to the dead or sick bodies because it would make them ritually unclean. But because of Christ’s resurrection and our participation in it through our deeds and in the Eucharist, the bodies of holy people today are now the opposite of disease and corruption. Their clothes, homes, belongings, images and even bringing up their names in prayer to God – all prayer and messages are addressed to and sent to God – have the power to heal and make us holy with them. Holiness, then, is not strictly an individual pursuit bound by the limits of this sojourning life. But intercessory prayer is a necessity to get a foretaste of paradise, deification and the life of the resurrection promised to us by God. Evidence of this belief and practice is found in the very earliest times of the Church. Christians celebrated the Eucharist in worship at places of martyrdom in and around the Roman Empire and universally pieces of the saint’s body were placed under the altars found in the dank catacombs of candle-lit liturgies in Italy. The Eucharist unites all Christians, whether in life or in departure of this world, whether in times of distance or closeness, persecution or secular peace. All holiness is in a sense foolishness to this fading secularism that exists in its own way in every age. But there is a unique category and tradition of saints called holy fools. Their lives can be so simple or so extraordinary that even the Church’s hierarchs need time to process their model, such as St. John of Kronstadt and St. Xenia of St. Petersburg in Russia. Holy fools may have started in Egypt and Syria, though rare in Byzantium. Yurodivy or the holy fool became an important example for Russian veneration. The veneration of the Most Holy Theotokos is the best example of a saint for all humanity. At the same time the Orthodox dogmas and feasts of the Hoy Virgin Mary may be one of the most difficult and misunderstood saints for other religions and Christian groups. The next chapter discusses why the Orthodox Church venerates Her as the Theotokos (God-bearing in birth). She is the fabric of the Orthodox Church.