The liturgical year has always been a veritable roll call of people who gave their own lives to follow Jesus. The church called them saints. And that’s unfortunate. The word has a foreign ring to it. As Dorothy Day once said, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily!”

There is something about the word saint, obviously, that dampens the meaning of the mission. People like these were not marshmallow figures in stained-glass windows. They were the models, heroes, icons, stars of their times whose lives made real what Scripture could only talk about. They were the worthy and the brave, the simple and the centered ones, who saw the truth and lived it, whatever the cost.

By their very lives—in every era and every age—they prove to us that it is possible to be other than those around us who live to exploit life here rather than to grow in the light of the hereafter. They are about living wildly rather than living flamboyantly.

The problem is that what society holds up as success, the Christian life often decries. When sexual excess is sold on every channel and mobile phone on the globe, what can possibly be used to dissuade the world from the notion that the violation of the other is normal? When greed is the basis of business, how can we ever teach the world another definition of enough? When society creates peer celebrities for teenagers out of addicts and criminals, thugs and dropouts, where will the young go to satisfy the high ideals of the soul? The answer is a simple one: they must be able to see something even better somewhere else. The question is, then, what does the Christian community have to put in their place?

Only those whose lives shine with the interior light that comes from refusing to waste themselves on nonessentials is any kind of adequate rebuttal to the prostitution of the human faculties for goodness. Then witnesses like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton and Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day become the road signs of the age, living maps to another way of being alive. No institution can possibly succeed, however theologically or philosophically astute, without its models and heroes.

No theological treatise is any kind of substitute for the sight of a life well-lived. No surfeit of incidental pleasure, debilitating and cloying, is, in the end, an acceptable alternative to basic goodness. Instead, persuasion rests, in the last analysis, on the presence of living witnesses to what it means to live well, to be productive, to make a difference, to grow to full stature as a human being.

The question to us, then, must also be, what kind of witnesses are we ourselves being to those who come after us—searching for heroes, looking for models?

—slightly edited from The Liturgical Year by Joan Chittister, Thomas Nelson