Before the skeptic trusted that the Saint was a saint, he wanted assurance that she knew what she was doing.
“Can you teach me the goal of human life?"
"I cannot."
"Or at least its meaning?"
"I cannot."
"Can you indicate to me the nature of death and of life beyond the grave?"
"I cannot."
The skeptic walked away in scorn. The Saint’s devotees were embarrassed for their Saint to have been shown in a poor light.
The Saint said, "Light is reflected on the wall. Why venerate the wall? Be attentive to the light.”
This paraphrase of a story by Anthony deMello gets at some of the problems we have in preaching about saints: measured against a false, subjective narrative of perfection, they are mythologized until they are no longer perceived as human.
If they’re not human, they can’t offer the rest of us genuine hope and guidance. The gap created between our fallibility and their perfection is so wide a gap that it can’t be overcome—so why even try?
Let’s take on the myths versus the reality.
What Does Not Set Saints Apart
“Perfection”
Saints don’t behave perfectly in the way each of us decides a saint should behave.
For example, many saints gained a reputation for having tempers, including Theresa of Avila and Teresa of Calcutta.
For many, seeing a very human reaction of anger—or frustration, grief, disappointment, or doubt—disqualifies them because because saints who have perfect faith in God would not react with a “negative” emotion.
Or what about promoting justice which is as biblical as it gets.
Some saints devoted their lives to it, like Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero. Countless other saints didn’t.
Many arrived at their saintliness through admirable prayer and good works. Do they lose points for squandering their chance to have a wider impact?
No saint can achieve our personal pictures of behavioral or saintly perfection. Not only is that impossible, but we’ll never agree on the standard.
miracles
That extraordinary events that occur through and around saints is not what sets them apart.
It’s their backstories (see below) that had to set them apart for the extraordinary to be able to occur through them at all.
Extraordinary Sacrifices
Essentially the same as #2 above.
They wouldn’t make the sacrifice were it not that something had set them apart already.
What Does Set Saints Apart
There is something deeper and abiding about who they have become that manifests itself in what they do.
Their doings wouldn’t happen if not for their beings.
Intimacy with God
Saints are aware that they and God are “not one, not two.”
Saints may or may not feel God’s presence, but they know God as their breath and heartbeat. They know they carry God’s imprint which can’t be stripped away any more than their DNA can.
Understanding
Saints know there is something holy that is beyond their senses, beyond the physical laws of this world.
They know there is always more than what is right in front of us, that even when science advances to “explain” how everything works, it will not explain what is even more real: the Whole Holiness that is God.
Compassion, Forgiveness, and Zeal
It is because of their intimacy with and understanding of God that they have a capacity for compassion, forgiveness, and zeal that looks “crazy” to most people.
Having come to know God’s compassion, forgiveness, and zeal for them, they pour these out intentionally and unintentionally on those equally in need of this grace.
It’s the saint’s relationship with God that is the horse that pulls the cart filled with the gifts bestowed on others.
Those gifts can be so shocking that their reputations grow during their lives and in their deaths.
So how disappointing it can be to discover they have not been pulled out of their earthly bodies and the messiness of their humanity.
In effect, if we learned the truth of the humanity of a saint, we might just “cancel them.”
We Dehumanize Saints by Mythologizing Them
We do them a disservice by not allowing them to be fully human.
Think of how hard it is to be clergy or a preacher when people don’t let us be us.
Not long ago I held a frank conversation with my therapist when she apologized after swearing in front of me—because I’m clergy.
If she can’t be herself, how can I be myself, including when I swear?
Her myth of who clergy are supposed to be dehumanized both of us.
Most clergy have encountered similar circumstances; for saints its exponentially multiplied.
Why do we insist that saints must be perfect?
Why do we ignore their flaws or apologize for them as something shameful, faults to be hidden and tucked away?
Here are some possibilities.
Saints symbolize our aspirations. If saints crumble, so might our aspirations.
It’s risky to be in the minority and respectfully disagree with hundreds of years of myth, church history or sentiment—like the fact that there is actually no evidence that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute.
Our brains crave simplicity. Let something in this world not be so damned hard.
It lets us off the hook. Since perfection is unattainable we don’t even have to try.
Many of us don’t want to risk the betrayal we might feel: if the church “lied” to us about saints what else have they lied to us about?
Truth is always risky.
But truth always sets us free.
If They’re Still Just Human, Why Do Saints Matter?
To preach the truth of the humanity of saints means being freed from examining the messenger to embrace their message: love God, and forgive and love self and neighbor.
Saints are the embodiment of that invitation to transformation. They show us what is possible when we accept and dwell in the love of God.
They show us what the primacy of love of neighbor looks like in action: the disenfranchised, empowered; the shamed, valued; wrongs forgiven; justice generated; truth embraced; and genuine hope unfurled.
I have yet to be persuaded that miracles which suspend the laws of physics happen through saints in the ways often claimed.
But I am persuaded that by allowing saints to be holy and perfectly human we can be transformed to be more like Christ.
And that would be a miracle.
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