They walk among us
Except when icons like Mother Theresa are elected to the Hall of the Holy, most mortals don’t seem to pay much attention to saints any more.
Just this past Thursday there was – no doubt somewhere – a feast honouring Michael, the patron saint of warriors; a day later there surely was a similar toast to Jerome, the longtime champion of librarians; next week, Bruno, long thought to be the guardian of Calabria, gets his annual day in the sun; a few weeks ago masses were said and glasses were raised to laud Clare, charged by Pius XII, 705 years after her death, to look after television, well somebody should!
You can Google a whole lot more: Eparchius, a devout hermit; Oswald, an English monastic; George … well, he’s said to have something to do with dragons. Catholic traditions, including my own, count them in numbers no cathedral could possibly accommodate.
Yet, as time has gone on, and canons and conventions alter, the church seems more and more content to mildly extol only its “major” saints, many of them identifiable as early Christian apostles with names memorialized in hamlets, hospitals and hockey rinks, names like Andrew, Philip, Matthew, Martha, Paul – men (the occasional woman) in whose lives belief is rooted and custom built.
They’re the superstars of the faith, devout, honest, brave and humble players on a 2,100-yearold stage.
But, you know, for a lot of us, they’re fuzzy folk, like heroes in a book we sometimes thumb through, like characters we’ve cheered in movies but who remain distant bits of celluloid we can’t quite get hold of, out there beyond reality. That’s the way they are for me, anyway.
Except that I knew one, once. She’d have been the last one to take on the title, reckoning that anybody who thinks saint, ain’t.
Kathleen will never be beatified by any church; she’ll never be given a special handle or day of commemoration. You’re never going to put her plastic image on your dashboard, nor are you going to hang a medallion of her likeness around your neck.
But when I think saint, I think this woman and her selflessness, naiveté mixed with pragmatism, patience, trust, enthusiasm and a determination to shape her version of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Roman Catholics, in judging her godly credentials, might be attracted to the fact that she was party to at least one miracle – and she was it! She died several years ago in her mid70s; she was supposed to die in her mid-teens. Born to frailty, she survived decades of debilitating maladies on the wings of a compassionate and – she finally concluded – prayerful assemblage of others. Shunning self-pity, she pushed her way through a depression, a world war and alienating family tragedy to get her bearings, and a life.
Part of that life was to take on a job few would covet: counsellor and more-or-less chaplain to one of the cruellest female prisons in America, and for 10 years would work salvaging existences that were all too nasty, brutish and short.
When she eventually returned to her native Ontario, she conceived of, founded and almost literally built a halfway house for people similar to those left behind in Virginia… the druggies, the demented, the destitute… one after another the dispossessed who came looking for peace. She gave it to them.
Then she died, with a gentle smile on her face.
Nothing unique about our Kathleen. Most people know somebody of similar hue, not from a Bible story but from a school, a playground, a neighbourhood – sometimes even from a church – who defines tenderness and conviction, generosity and reliance, in a world frantically seeking the saintly.
Chances are that such treasures lie not with the Marys and Marks of ancient and stainedglass eminence, but rather in the presence of those going unnoticed in time, but in whose virtues lie reasons to keep heads up.
And eyes open.