“She’s a saint!”. We often say this about people who are particularly good or self-sacrificing, or who endure suffering or poor treatment without complaint. But the Christian definition of a saint is not necessarily someone particularly good, though many saints were. It’s someone who shows particular holiness in their life, a particular closeness to God, which might manifest in all sorts of ways. And this holiness tells us that they are now in heaven, praying for and with us to God.
Weirdness and holiness
Many saints’ lives, particularly in earlier centuries, are actually quite bizarre. Their holiness can be demonstrated in odd ways. The Rev’d Richard Coles in his entertaining book Improbable Saints lists, among many others, St Rumwold, who died at three days old but not before preaching ‘a charming sermon on the fleeting character of life’, the Frankish cephalophores who ‘took their severed heads for a walk while singing a hymn’, and St Joseph of Cupertino, known as the ‘flying friar’, who was so overcome after kissing the feet of Pope Urban VIII that he had to be ‘crossly summoned down from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel’.
As Coles says, it is hard to take such legends of the saints seriously, let alone literally. I suppose we might see the first two as ways of trying to make sense of, or find good in, traumatic experiences of infant mortality or the execution of friends. And people still feel overwhelmed in the presence of the Pope today, to explain the latter.
Being touched by God
But in a way the unbelievable nature of these stories as given is the point. Saints are people whose lives God has closely touched, and these legends attempt to make sense of the dislocation and surprise that we might feel when God touches us. They also remind us that our faith is not only about things it’s easy to believe or hold onto, but that it contains things we can’t begin to imagine or make sense of rationally. Faith is about embracing the surprising, unexpected, the plain weird.
Nobody is required to believe any legends of the saints in order to be called a Christian. But, in Coles’s words: ‘I do think that all these stories, legends and lives enabled people remote from us in time, place and custom to experience the reality of God coming into focus, experiences significant enough for them to be preserved, if sometimes hapazardly’. So we remember all Saints, the weird and the wonderful.
Rebecca Lloyd
