At its best, life is a confusing complex of truths in tension.  What work demands of us often diminishes home life.  What governments call legal, the church sometimes calls immoral.  What conscience requires the world regularly calls foolish.   What was once called absolute by many is now seen as meaningless by most.  Where is the path through such uncertainties?  Where is the pool in such cross currents?  How do we chart a way through places we have never been before?

At time like that, there is only one place to turn.  In times of uncertainty and stress and tension, we look for people like ourselves, reachable figures who have lived well through situation similar to our own as proof that we too, in all our smallness, can stretch ourselves to the limits of the best of us.

For centuries the church has confronted the human community with role models of greatness.  We call them saints when what we really mean to say is “icon,” “star,” “hero,” ones so possessed by an internal vision of divine goodness that they give us a glimpse of the face of God in the center of the human.  They give us a sense of taste of the possibilities of greatness in ourselves.

The icons in this book are male and female, Christian and non-Christian, married and unmarried, religious and lay, pragmatists and artists, named saint by a process or proclaimed saint by the people who lived in the shadow of their lives.  They are people like you and me.  With one exception, perhaps.  In their eyes burn the eyes of God who sees injustice and decries it, sees poverty and condemns it, sees inequality and refuses it, sees wrong and demands that it be set right.  These are people for whom the Law above the law is first in their lives.  These are people who did not temporize with the evil in one system just because another system could have been worse.  These are people who saw themselves clearly as the others’ keepers.  These are the people who gave themselves entirely to the impulse of God for the sake of the world.

   —from the Introduction, A Passion for Life: Fragments of the Face of God by Joan Chittister (Orbis)