Learnings from a lifetime of studying saintly lives

Monday, July 3rd, 2023

I didn’t grow up knowing much about saints.

In the Episcopal Church in which I was raised, my knowledge was largely formed by stained-glass windows and a hymn that declared:

“One was a doctor, and one was a queen,/ And one was a shepherdess on the green:/ They were all of them saints of God, and I mean,/ God helping, to be one too.”

The list of these occupations did not lead me to think that saints were the kind of people you might meet every day, despite the assurance of the closing verse that there were hundreds and thousands more where they came from:

“You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea/ in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea.”

My parish church was named after St. Alban.

I don’t recall ever being told anything about St. Alban, who I figured was some sort of notable English bishop.

Only much later did I learn that Alban was the first martyr of the English church, a prominent citizen who lived in Roman-occupied Britain sometime in the third century.

One day he gave shelter to a priest who was fleeing persecution. Although Alban was not a Christian, he was moved by the faith of his guest, and after several days he asked to be baptized.

As soldiers approached, Alban exchanged clothes with the priest and sent him on his way, so that when the soldiers arrived they seized Alban, mistaking him for the priest, and brought him before a judge.

After revealing his identity and declaring himself a Christian, Alban was condemned to accept the priest’s fate — to be flogged and beheaded.

By the time I was in high school I longed to know that there were saints like that — maybe not the kind that you met in lanes or in shops or at tea, but who truly exemplified what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the cost of discipleship.”

Then one day, while perusing the shelves of my school library, I happened upon an old edition of The Little Flowers of St. Francis, a classic collection of legends about St. Francis of Assisi and his early followers.

As I skimmed over the contents of this little book, I was captivated by the picture of a man who tried faithfully, as the author put it, to be “conformed to Christ in all the acts of his life.”

I read about how Francis kissed a leper and afterward abandoned the affluent life of his parents to live in poverty and serve the sick.

I read about how he tamed a savage wolf with his gentleness and how he crossed a battlefield of the Crusades to meet in friendship with the Sultan. I read about his ecstatic hymn of praise to “Brother Sun and Sister Moon.”

Was a saint perhaps someone who reminded us of Jesus?

Even from a distance of many centuries, I experienced a sense of what had captivated so many of Francis’ own contemporaries.

His example was not simply edifying but also deeply appealing. He exuded a spirit of freedom and joy. People wanted to be near him to discover for themselves the secret of his joy.

It was some years after my encounter with St. Francis’ little flowers that I saw that vision put into practice—not in a Franciscan community, but while working alongside Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker in New York City.

I had been going through some hard years of wondering what my life was for, and it felt as if the questions I was asking couldn’t find their answers in college.

I had drifted away from church practice, feeling that in church I didn’t seem to come across the kind of moral witness embodied, for instance, by young people who were going to jail in protest of the Vietnam War.

I had discovered Mahatma Gandhi and his philosophy of consistent nonviolence, and it was in this spirit that I found my way to the Catholic Worker at the age of 19.

A famous picture of Dorothy being arrested in a protest with striking farmworkers in California struck me as an image of the Gospel in action.

Beyond that, I didn’t know much about Dorothy Day, except that her commitment to nonviolence was rooted in a wider practice of service and solidarity with the poor. Continue reading