“Saints”—spiritual heroes of character and courage—are very elusive figures and not always all too comfortable ones either. They carry with them the ideals of ages often quite remote from our own, even, in some cases, psychologically suspect now. They seem to uphold a standard of perfection either unattainable to most or, at least in this day and age, undesirable to many. Their lives are often overwritten, their struggles underestimated, and their natural impulses underrated. They have become a rather quaint anachronism of an earlier church full of simpler people far more unsophisticated, we think, than ourselves and whom we think ought to be quietly ignored in these more enlightened times. I disagree.

We could use a saint or two, perhaps, to raise our sights again to the heights of human possibility and the depths of human soul. It might not even hurt to pass one or two of them on to children who are otherwise left with little to choose from as personal idols than what Hollywood, TV, and the music industry have already given them, of course.

I knew a saint once: He was a young man with an old grandmother, a sick mother and two brothers in wheelchairs as a result of a genetically inherited illness. He stayed home, unmarried and unpromoted all his life, to care for each of them, all the way to the grave. His inspiration didn’t come from rock stars of American glitterati. It came from saints, the heroes of the daily

—from Seeing with Our Souls
by Joan Chittister (Sheed & Ward)