A serious PR problem

Why we don't REALLY like "The Saints"

Dear M,

Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine, and Mother Theresa all have one thing in common (other than loving God) and it’s that I don’t want to be like any of them. Who wants to be like St. Francis of Assisi, with his shirt made out of goat’s hair and his moldy bread and cheese? Who wants to spend all day washing a leper's feet? Who wants to never get married like Pope Francis? Let's take it one step further: who wants to not have any balls?

I understand them for moments, and hell — sometimes I even admire them. Augustine’s “Lord, make me chaste — but not yet” should be taught at every Christian high school. St Thomas Aquinas had a rare moment of clarity when visiting Rome: he said that maybe the Pope was the richest man in the whole world — but could he raise anybody from the dead? Insight and bravery combined, there, especially for a devout Catholic.

Even St Francis has his charms. Who doesn’t just see the hustle and bustle of everyday life and want to throw it all away? Who doesn't dream sometimes of tossing out his phone, quitting his job, and just running off to some free-room-and-board mountain getaway where he can make beer and wear a robe and talk Big Ideas with his friends? Or if the other guys are sports fans, just having them take a vow of silence?

But being a Big-Name Saint comes with a price, and that is to be as boring as possible every single hour of the day: to never have a rascally moment (on record), to abandon jokes and horsing around almost entirely, to be unappealing to women on a sexual level, and (worst of all) to be incapable of laughing at the story of Elisha and the bears*. No — the requirements of "sainthood” (as it's presented) are too strict and too many and too demanding: an asking that you give your all, no questions asked, and keep nothing for yourself; a vibe that's too clean, too single-minded, and probably whitewashed. They say a saint is someone who really believes in God. Okay, well first you have to get me to believe in saints.

Yes, I know: please go easy on me you guys

P.J. O'Rourke, a man whose theological points are less valuable to me than the average cat lady, nevertheless spoke truthfully (and maybe even accurately) about the way Americans perceive God. He said, in his 1991 book Parliament of Whores,

I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.

Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.

But in my opinion he has it almost backwards. It is God who created cuteness. It is God alone who gave you the ability to be cheery. Santa loves animals? God made bears and ducklings. God lets you off the hook for absolutely every thing you ever did if you just ask Him for forgiveness — far beyond seventy-times-seven, as you’re well aware. He doesn’t give you what you want: He gives you better, and more of it — free of charge, before you even knew you wanted it. And certainly well before you deserved it.

He is exacting, of course: but only in the sense that He knows beauty better than you do and His tastes are hard to keep up with. No matter if you can’t keep up because you're a philistine and a douche — He’ll show you. He'll knock your socks off with surprises every day if you’ll pay attention. He doesn't work hard for charities: He’s charity itself. He is overflowing with good things and you’re so inundated with them that you forget they exist and you almost never say thank you.

When someone falls in love with God they might throw everything away. Or they might keep it and make it all better. Maybe they might wear goat hair out of penance. Or maybe they’ll dress smartly because they realize how beautiful God made them. Maybe they'll run away to a cloister. Or maybe they'll make a beautiful family and make everyone at work sad when they clock out. Maybe they’ll wash the poor's feet. Or maybe they'll have you over for a nice steak and a few cold beers and some encouragement.

There is nothing wrong with sainthood, but we’ve gotten it all wrong. We weren't born to have nothing. We were born to do everything, just better. We were born to have everything and not ruin it. We were born to learn and that means we were born to fail** — no big deal. He picks us up when our knees get scraped. We are disgusting and dark at moments, but the general trajectory is towards the light, like the sunrise.

I want to be a saint now, but not like The Saints. I want to be saintly in the way God made me — to have everything and improve everything and be everything (even if only for moments): to love, and fight, and cry, and sing, and grow, and yell, and drink, and shine: to notice God in the air I breathe, in the grass I tread, in the books I read, in the smile of my kids. And yet I want to know that this is nothing compared to what He's giving us someday, and to hang on: waiting, through the dark moments, through the disease and toil and death and pain and sin, and feel that what we’re becoming is even better than what exists right now — better than anything we’ve ever dreamed. I want to feel this, and spend my life, whatever happens, just saying thank you.

This is a tall order, and one I don't think any of us can fulfill in entirety. But I think this is what sainthood really is. And I believe it’s what we were made for.

Yours,

-J

P.S. Consider the great difference between secular and religious heroes. Winston Churchill, for instance: too smart for us, too energetic, born into too much money, and even though he was fat, too beefy. We can admire him without ever having the chance of being him. But it just wasn’t in the cards. The opportunities to do what he did are gone, first of all; and we wouldn’t have made the most of them anyway.

Mother Theresa (on the other hand) is praised by everyone for doing the possible. Quit your job and join an order? Check. Get rid of your stuff? Easy. Feed the homeless instead of keeping things for yourself? Come on. Don't have sex? Surround yourself with lepers.

With a secular hero, you want to do it but you can't. With a religious hero, you can do it but you don’t really want to.

And now the big question. Is this sincere veneration? Or is everybody pretending?

*We miss out on the comedy of the Bible because we take it too seriously. For instance, notice John being referred to as “the disciple Jesus loved" maybe six times in the Bible — that is, only in his own book. And maybe the time he just threw in, for good measure, that he beat Peter in a race to Jesus’ tomb. If it’s taken seriously, it’s weird — a vanity that doesn't fit well into the Gospels. If it's a joke, John is a fun-loving prankster. If that's how he is, I would have loved him the most, too.

Beyond this, the Jews insist the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses. They have yet to explain how he records his own burial, or how he’s described, by himself, as a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. A hilarious prank to everyone except the Bible scholar.

But the best of all these is 2 Kings 2:23-25 — a passage so perfect, so delicious, so hilarious, that I refuse to even paraphrase it. The New International Version says,

From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys

If you take this passage seriously, I can respect you. I can even love you. But I'm not going to invite you to my birthday party.

**Luke 2:52 says that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.

Grew in wisdom — that's the first thing. You have to believe that Jesus was God and still didn’t quite know what He was doing. And growing in favor? That means the longer He went, the more impressive He was. Not just to us: it says to God.

What this means is simple. The thing that made Jesus divine wasn't actually the exacting, menacing thing we know as "perfection” from the beginning: a toddler warning about sin and changing His own diaper. It was that (as the chapter implies) He sought God out every moment, even as a child, more than He sought His own mother — a connection which proves much more than even his know-how. He was not a “good boy,” in the sense we see it today; He was good in the sense that He saw true goodness in a Person, and He loved it and chased it until it made Him a sometimes-troublesome kid and a public enemy.