Saints
GOWER is a place of Celtic saints – Peregrinari pro Christo, as the Romans described them – pilgrims for Christ (peregrē – “having a tendency to wander, cross borders”).
Christianity came to Wales through the sea trade routes in the first centuries AD and South Walean Celts were taught by travelling desert monks. From Wales, Illtyd, Teilo, Dewi, Cadog, Patric and the others travelled to other parts of these islands and beyond, teaching and evangelizing, long before the Romans brought their empire version and “converted” the Saxons.
Extraordinary people have stood where we worship this morning and gazed at the marsh and the trees and listened to the birds, sat under a yew tree, contemplated and given praise for the beauty, for the breath in their lives, and received holy communion with the saints of all time, all space. Extraordinary people have stood also in our lives, holding the Christ light for us to walk a little distance or stepping gently at our side.
Today the church remembers all the saints who have carried the faith through the ages, given their lives to the God who called them. May we not forget them.
Let us not forget the saints of our lives. Let us not forget too that each and every one of us is called to be extraordinary even if history does not remember us. Saints do not expect such things and are certainly not motivated by them. Saints are all too aware of their own ineptitude but they give themselves anyway. Saints are people just like us. Please God, may the peregrinari pro Christo find our way through the brambled paths of this time.
Tonnau Duw ('God's waves') Fr Tim Ardouin 