They have cleared roadways/which are not smooth for fools:/before they came to the Kingdom/they suffered hardships.

  - Oengus mac Oengobann, Feilire Oengusso (Irish, 9th century)

As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight.

  - Psalm 16.3

The phrase "saints in the land" is perhaps better rendered, "saints in the earth", referring to the fact that they were dead. David delighted in the saints who had gone before him, who had made a way for him and his generation to follow in the covenant path of the Lord.

Oengus was also celebrating the saints who had gone before - "they" in this excerpt. He wrote that they cleared roadways in hard places and suffered hardships throughout their lives until they came at last to the eternal Kingdom. They made a way, he says, "for fools." He was referring to the believers of his own day who, by the ninth century in Ireland, were pretty much making a mess of what was left of the Celtic revival.

What about us? Do we delight in the achievements and example of the saints who have gone before us? Do we care how much they suffered or how hard they had to work in order to build the highway of faith to the next generation, and ultimately, to us?

Or is that just old stuff not worth thinking about?

I am always saddened by the paltry state of knowledge of Church history on the part of believers today. In our day we jettison ancient liturgies and the hymns of our forebears like so much ecclesiastical garbage, fit only for the dustbin of history. We have no time for the history of theology, for Christian biography, or for studying our way through important eras and developments of Church history.

That was all then. We live in the now. We are the now people. The people who finally, after two millennia, "get it" and can get on with being really Christian, you know? We have no need for all those dead saints and their old words and ways. We can figure it out quite well without their guidance, thank you.

And so you know why Oengus regarded his own generation as "fools." In his day believers were departing the roads prepared by their forebears, ignoring their sufferings, and refusing to learn from their achievements.

When the Norsemen eventually arrived to steal and destroy as much of Irish Christendom as they could, the wise men among them - such as Alcuin - knew that it was the judgment of God against those who had scorned their forebears and their ways.

"As for the saints who are in the earth..." Go on, finish the sentence. Do these people,the saints who have gone before, and their labors and sacrifice mean anything to you?

And what will the next generation of believers say about us, once we are "in the earth"?

T. M. Moore, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.