A reflection on how the language of sainthood can describe ordinary acts of heroism and goodness, blurring the line between sacred and secular lives.
To acknowledge the idea of a saint is to acknowledge a profound question: what does it mean to be a good person? We rely on titles an awful lot.
They serve as context clues for how we should respond to someone upon meeting them. Sometimes a title indicates marital status, other times it signals a feared teacher or a respected doctor. If a barrister insists on the honorific esquire, you might think barrister-at-law or you might think what a nightmare. But what about when someone's title is saint?
Many people's baseline understanding of saints and hagiography, the study of saintly lives, is that these people were exceptionally good. This is not always the case. Paul was a reformed murderer, and Augustine famously struggled with chastity: God, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet. Imagine your friend sets you up on a blind date with only the context: I have heard he is a saint, the religious kind.
What would go through your mind? What would you wear? You might not list many deeds of the saints. Could you enumerate what St Giles did, or St Teresa of Avila, St Julian of Norwich, St Jerome?
An exhaustive list of their deeds and misdeeds is uninteresting and misses the point of this peculiar Christian tradition. The existence of saints reminds us that people can be remembered for doing incredibly good things, that people can be reformed, and that their lives add up to more than the weight of their worst day. In our culture, we are often punitive and exacting. A person's distant mistake looms larger than their efforts to change or to articulate something new.
Most often, a saint is remembered for one or two remarkable endeavors. It is my conviction that every human being has the capacity for a couple of heroic efforts. So I began to think about hagiography and biography and the fine, ultimately artificial line that separates them.
With a latent interest in saints, thanks to being half-raised in my maternal grandmother's house, which my late uncle called the monastery due to its religious iconography, I began to pore over records of saints' lives. They are written in an austere prose style that coasts over decades of life in a half-sentence and can spend a thousand words examining the fostering of a new convent here or a commitment to exile there.
Like most Irish families, I know many excellent storytellers who could transform a minutes-long incident about sneaking across the border into something worthy of permanent saintly record. Consider two stories. The first man lived an honest life and used his hands for the betterment of the world. As he was beaten down by a horde of people, he forgave them.
The second lived with certainty of goodness. As a child he suffered violence and his hand was placed onto a flame by authorities; he wept and did not lash out. One is my father, one is St Stephen the first Christian martyr. The point is clear: while saints do remarkable things, the language we canonize them with is also available to describe those not officially recognized by the Church.
As I was writing my doctorate on North American AIDS poetry, I was struck repeatedly by the power of language. So many poets, ill and dying, sculpted and rendered their lives in glittering, dignified ways. As they used language, so they were remembered. With these concerns in mind, I began to write poems that blurred the lines between the secular and the sacred.
I wanted to use the vocabulary of hagiography to see what would happen if I wrote about a youth worker I know in the same terms as I would about St Francis of Assisi. Icons of saints are less about signaling my piety and more about a very human desire to be approximate to awe-inspiring, ordinary people. The central kitchen-table dispute in my relationship happens to be the value of icons.
My partner, a breathtakingly intelligent ex-theologian, might contend that the Byzantine icon of Mary by our bed is nothing close to Perpetual Succour. But I think of my grandmother's house and the atmosphere of goodness those icons brought. Icons hang in many Irish homes not just for pious virtue-signaling or aesthetic pops of glam, but because these people mean something. By bringing them into your home, you bring what they signify into the rooms you live in.
Icons of saints remind us that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary goodness, and that the sacred is found in everyday lives
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