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.