Marching Saints

Last week I heard an English professor elaborate on Frederick Buechner’s definition of a saint.

"A saint," according to Buechner, "is a life-giver. A saint is a human being with the same hang-ups and dark secrets and abysses as the rest of us. But if a saint touches your life, you come alive in a new way."

The interesting thing is that all of us have brushed up against saints in our own lives, people that inspired and encouraged us, perhaps even enabled us to do better and be better. If saints aren’t different and better than we are, then we each have the capacity to be saintly on any given day.

Because I associate the word saint with religiosity, piety,and sanctimonious behavior, it makes me slightly uncomfortable. We already have too many holier-than-thou individuals who publicly flaunt their righteousness.

Still, the definition life-givers touched my imagination. I began to take an inventory of people in my experience who clearly gave life to others. My first thought was a friend who started a program to educate girls in far away Nepal (boys are part of the program now too) ten years ago. I viewed this person as a real life “saint” before I read Beuchner’s definition, but he would never accept that mantle because he genuinely believes in doing what is possible to help people because they are part of the family of man. Then I thought of a free-thinking minister I was fortunate to know, a man who had a great mind and built a large congregation that he inspired to think and imagine and become. He would certainly meet Buechner’s criteria for sainthood.

Next I asked my husband to share the life givers in his experience, and his first answer was, “My parents.” Wow, I loved that answer! I immediately had two more people to add to my own list. As an abandoned infant, raised by maternal grandparents whom I always called my parents, I was blessed with life-giving in its purest form. It was becoming clear to me that saints are all over the place, and that it is always possible to become a part of the process of touching lives in a positive, life-giving way.

It seems that you don’t have to undergo a great conversion or change the lives of multitudes to qualify for membership in the ranks of the marching saints on any day. It’s really much simpler than that. You can help a child learn to read, listen to the stories of an elderly friend, prepare warm soup for an ailing neighbor. These small gestures are life-giving actions, and the immediate payback is richer, more satisfying living. 

The Power of One

A piece in the New York Times on Sunday by Susan Cain suggests that we may be suffering from an overdose of “Groupthink,” and I think she has it right. Education, religion and business are currently all convinced that cooperation and collaboration are the quickest ways to creatively problem-solve and arrive at new insights. However, Cain states “people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.” As a writer and a painter, I heartily agree. I cannot write or paint successfully without chunks of uninterrupted time. And I can’t begin either kind of endeavor without privacy. I need time with myself to get underway.

It occurs to me that in this age of personal technology it is harder and harder to get uninterrupted time alone. With cell phones and tablets, laptops and emails, GPS and Bluetooth, and those comfy old dinosaurs, radio and television, we are seldom, if ever, alone. People are connected while walking, running, driving, biking, sailing, boating, fishing and just plain being. We are NEVER alone. Unless we turn everything external off, and start looking, listening, touching, smelling, tasting, and feeling our own experiences internally.

Original ideas are possible for everyone, but the creative process involves responding to stimuli with new ideas, incubating the ideas, testing and then expressing the ideas. With so much technological interruption at younger and younger ages, could it be possible that eventually our children and grandchildren may never even experience existence firsthand? I think we need to re- introduce the creative process of interpreting personal sensory stimuli, forming original concepts, incubating and testing new concepts, and expressing them.

As an art education professor, I taught cooperative learning to classroom teachers, and I still believe this teaching strategy is effective for certain kinds of learners. However, I observed that in my own studio art classes at the high school level, students were silent when they were engaged in a creative process. It is simply not possible to cross over to a right-brained activity when one is chatting and interacting with others.

Everyone needs to feel a sense of connection with other human beings, and groups can be stimulating, reassuring and fun. But solitary time is important too, for learning and imagining and creating what comes next.

Honor and Remembrance

For me, Martin Luther King Day is a time for honor and remembrance. I am especially privileged to remember hearing Dr. King speak at Albion College in 1963, during my undergraduate years. In 1964, Time magazine named King Man of the Year, and that same year he became the youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Peace prize. At the time I was attending student civil rights rallies held around bonfires where we held hands and fervently sang "We shall overcome." Some of my friends even travelled to Selma to participate in the marches. It was a time when we still believed change could happen, and that with our help, it could happen quickly.

Although I grew up in a small Midwestern town where there were less than a half dozen African American students , and attended a small Midwestern liberal arts college where there were not many more, civil rights made perfect sense to me. I attribute my enlightened and confident attitude to my father, a small town physician who agreed with me that one’s value as a person, and one’s intellectual capacity could not possibly be diminished or enhanced by one’s skin color. As chairman of the county Medical Society, my father extended an invitation to a Christmas open house in our home to a black physician and his wife. It was the ‘’talk of the town,” because, at that time, it was unusual for a Negro, even a professional one, to be included in a social gathering. I was a little girl of about seven or eight, and I was charmed by the black doctor’s glamorous wife, who wore her hair in a stylish bun tucked under a large, black picture hat. She told me that their daughter was a concert pianist, a fact that inspired me to practice my own piano lessons harder. Children are so impressed by the attitudes and actions of adults, especially adults they admire.

Watching a film of the recent dedication of the King Memorial in Washington, D.C., I found comfort in the thought that huge changes can take place in the span of a single lifetime. Today our country is being served by its first black president, and no one would dare to challenge his qualifications because of his skin color. Still there is still plenty of covert prejudice in our society, not only for blacks, but also for Hispanics, Muslims, gays and lesbians, and even for women.

In its youth, each generation believes that change for the positive is possible, and that, with a little help, it can come swiftly. Older adults must encourage young people, offer support and provide examples by their actions. Then, in time, they too will be able to look back with honor and remembrance.