A Saint of the Sinners

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I’ve always enjoyed the Catholic idea of saints. I can’t say that I ever understood what an angel was or why they might be important, but a saint was something that I could get behind. We could get deep into the nitty gritty of the canonization process, but to keep things simple and direct, let’s just say that a saint is someone who went above and beyond the expectations of a mere mortal in the practice of their faith. I remember a priest in school once quizzed us on what we thought made a saint. When some of us gave answers about the steps the church took to bestow sainthood on someone, he shrugged them all off and told us that a saint is just simply someone who gets to heaven. I liked that.

Saints were with me from an early age on Staten Island where it seems like just about everyone is Roman Catholic.

This fifth borough of New York City is divided into neighborhoods like Huguenot, Rossville, Annadale and Great Kills, but you could just as easily divide it into Parishes. A Parish is your local church and spiritual community. Everything that I did growing up revolved around the Parish of Our Lady Star of the Sea. Not in a cult-y way, just a community way. I went to the school. I went to the Church on Sundays. I played for the basketball, soccer and baseball teams. I was an Our Lady Star of the Sea Dolphin through and through. 

There are a lot of Parishes on Staten Island dedicated to The Virgin Mary. Our Lady Queen of Peace, Our Lady of Pity, and Our Lady Help of Christians to name a few. Other parishes are named after saints. St. Clare’s is in Great Kills, St. Charles is in Oakwood, and St. Patrick’s is in Richmondtown. The teams I played against, the gyms that I went to, the playgrounds that I loitered in, all of them were dedicated to saints.

Even as my faith in the institution known as The Roman Catholic Church has waned, my belief in saints has not.

One of my favorite saints is Saint Francis of Assisi. He’s probably best known as the patron saint of animals, but to put him into that small container of getting your pets blessed on his feast day (October 4th for those of you keeping score at home) is to do him a great disservice.

Francis grew up the spoiled son of a wealthy businessman. He took little interest in the cloth trade of his father, but enjoyed traveling with him and picking up stories and songs from the places he visited. To his friends, he was known as Rex convivii, Master of Revels. He had some faltering attempts to join the Crusades, as he had a rather romantic notion of what it would be like to be a knight, but was taken prisoner and spent the better part of a year living in a cell, getting sicker by the day. When he was ransomed out by his father, the master of revels had died, leaving a somewhat sickly and depressed shell of a man. Until one day, something fairly amazing happened. The story goes that he was returning from a small business trip, when he sought shelter from the heat of the midday sun in the Chapel of San Damiano. The building was in shambles, but up on the wall hung an intact linen cross. At that moment, Francis heard the voice of God:

‘Don’t you see my house is being destroyed? Go now. Rebuild it for me.’

Saint Francis then went on to do some incredible things in the service of the God who called out to him. One of the reasons that I am so captivated by his story is the complete 180 that Francis makes when turning to God. As a young man he loved the fine silks that his father would bestow upon him, and at the end of his life he had taken to wearing a roughspun tunic and rope belt. There’s nothing more captivating than a story where our hero is able to correct his tragic flaw and is completely reimagined from opening to closing image. But for the rest of us, maybe it’s not really about the history-changing moment in the life of a saint, so much as it’s about the little every day acts of regular people. 

I listened to a podcast recently where two people discussed their time growing up in the Christian Church, and experiences that they had later in life as well. One of the overriding themes of the episode was that it seemed while the church preached acceptance and charity and loving and helping people, that only really applied to the people that were within a certain homogenous population of that specific church. You drink or smoke? Maybe you shouldn’t be here. You hugged a girl in the bushes at church camp? You are evil and lustful and sinful and will be ostracized from this community.

You’re different? God has no place for you here.

That’s really the bullshit of the whole thing. The church seemed to be a pretty good idea, but it is in fact run by people, and people do what people have always done. They make mistakes. Before Jesus died, he passed on his teachings to the apostle, Peter and promised that whatever he held true on earth, he would hold true in his Father’s Kingdom of Heaven. In this way, Peter became the first Pope and the hierarchy of Catholicism was established. The leaders of the church then started making decisions on what is wrong and right and how someone should be punished if they did not abide. They started dividing up people into the damned and the saved.

But if you look at Jesus as the rabbi or teacher, and nix all of the ‘son of God’ stuff that most likely came later as a way to speak to a more Greek audience, then you’ll notice that Jesus was all about the social pariahs and outcasts. Jesus healed lepers who were considered “untouchable”. When a woman who had committed adultery was thrown at his feet for judgment, he answered that anyone there who had not sinned in their life was more than welcome to throw the first stone. He befriended Mary Magdalene, who may have been a prostitute, which would have been a simply unheard of thing for a rabbi to do. Then when he came in contact with the actual ‘church people’ of his day and age, what did he do? He threw them out of the temple for selling merchandise in the Lord’s house. He told stories of rich men burning in hell because they could not be bothered to help the beggar at their door. Over and over again, he preached forgiveness and a willingness to try to do better.

From prostitutes to prodigal sons, Jesus wanted everyone to be welcomed into his flock.

So while I admire and somewhat idolize Saint Francis of Assisi, I don’t aspire to be him. Saint Francis wound up starting a brotherhood that then went on to cause great schisms in the church because of the differentiation of who was in and who was out. The problem there is that if you only hang out with people who are already in the circle, who are you going to save? Who are you going to help? Doesn’t it stand to reason that the people who could really benefit from a kind word or a bit of charity are those on the outside of the church looking in? I think that divinity is more often found in the gutters than in the holy houses that we put so much emphasis on.

In creating the so-called spiritual purity of a religious community, we inevitably draw lines around the outside that denote who is in and who is out. Then the ‘in crowd’ will do everything in their power to protect that boundary as a way of staying squeaky clean. Should anyone want to enter their space, they sure as hell better wipe their feet at the door, but to steal a line from the late great poet Valerie Dana, ‘God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt.’ And I think there is a lot of wisdom in that.

The squeaky clean saint will never really convince those playing in the mud that they should take a bath, and the story of a man living in poverty to serve his Lord won’t seem accessible in any way to most people who are just trying to pay their rent. We’re far more likely to be inspired by those we can relate to. Maybe the saint that we should all pray to, the saint that we could all aspire to be, is the Patron Saint of Sinners. The one who is at home in both the bar and the church. That’s the kind of saint that I would want to be.

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