Can We Pray to the Saints?

Jesus Christ has made all the world a thin place between the living and the dead

All Saints

The door from this life to the life to come isn’t just narrow.

It’s thin.

In an essay for First Things, my former teacher, David Bentley Hart, reflected on his childhood friends Angela and Jacob. Fast friends through their teenage years, their contact became intermittent as the three went their separate ways for university. Two years after their last get together Angela was killed when a drunk driver struck her car in an intersection; she was alive for several hours after the collision, but never regained consciousness. Hart writes,

“I learned of her death three days after from Jacob. I won’t  bother to say how the news affected me, but I will remark that I had had what in retrospect seemed to have been a premonition of it. On the night of her death, Angela had suddenly, for no discernible reason, come into my mind, attended by an inexplicable sense of aching melancholy, which at the time I simply took for acute nostalgia. Jacob, though, had had something that seemed like much more than a premonition.

On the night of Angela’s accident, apparently during the hours when she was lying in the hospital unconscious but still breathing, he had had a particularly vivid dream in which she and he had spoken to one another in a strange house that, after the fashion of dreams, was also somehow a garden. Their conversation, which had been pervasively sad, concerned her imminent departure for somewhere far away; and it seemed to Jacob that it was understood between them—in that way in which, in dreams, many unspoken things seem simply to be presumed—that she was leaving on a journey from which she would never return. She told him, he recalled, that she had come only to say good-bye.

Now, these things—my vague intuitions, Jacob’s haunting dream—may have been merely coincidences; but, frankly, I can’t make myself believe that the universe is quite large enough to accommodate coincidences of that kind.

What was most extraordinary about our experiences, however, is that they were not that extraordinary at all. That is, it is rather astonishing how common these encounters with the uncanny really are. You may not recall any yourself, but it is quite likely that you need only ask around among your acquaintances to discover someone who does. I myself have had at least two others, one utterly trivial, one of the most crucial importance, and both together sufficient to convince me that consciousness is not moored to the present moment or local space in quite the ame way that the body is.”

The door from this life to life everlasting is narrow. Of course its narrow. It excludes every last one of your good works. But the door from this life to the life to come— it isn’t just narrow.

It’s thin.

We’re just too thick to recognize it most of the time.