Prayables - Psalm 27:4 - Scripture

Blog: Saints Were People Too

My patron saint, St. Lawrence, was a bit of a wiseacre. When commanded by the Roman authorities to gather up the riches of the Catholic Church, St. Lawrence instead rounded up the poor, sick and crippled of the town and presented them to the Romans. "These," he said, "are the true riches of the Church." The Romans were not amused, and sentenced Lawrence to die on a giant barbecue grill. The saint's last words? "Turn me over; I'm done on this side." Smart alec.

It is easy to forget that sainthood, the highest state a human can aspire to, is in fact a state comprised entirely of, well, humans. Humans like Cornelia Connelly, who prayed for increased suffering in her life, only to watch her child fall into a vat of boiling sugar and die. (That Cornelia took the caramelizing of her offspring as a sign from above boggles the imagination somewhat.) Or St. Teresa of Avila, whose favorite childhood pastime was playing "religious hermit" in her parents' garden.

The college I attended, St. Mary-of-the-Woods, was founded in southern Indiana in 1840 by a small group of French nuns led by Mother Theodore Guerin. From a wilderness, they carved out the first Catholic liberal arts college for women in America, a paradise of 300 acres of certified natural forest land, filled with magnificent buildings, some brought stone by stone from France. The sisters have educated generations of women there, dating back to the days when the idea of women getting a higher education was not only frowned upon but forbidden by members of the medical profession: Women's delicate constitutions could not handle the rigors of prolonged study, it was said.

To do what Mother Theodore and her compatriots did took a will of iron. Sister was no pushover. Her letters, which still survive today, show a gal who knew how to get things done. Her clear impatience with the local bishops and her students' ignorant parents speak volumes for the capacity of the human spirit to persist and succeed.

And now she's a saint, canonized by the Pope just a few years ago. Saints like Mother Theodore give us something to aim for — a level of holiness that seems possible to attain purely because it has been attained by an honest-to-goodness, flesh-and-blood person. St. Mother Theodore Guerin is very real to me. I hear her voice in her writings. She, like other saints, opens a door and allows us a view to the other side. Maybe I can never be as holy as she was, but I can try. After all, she was just a woman, too.

-Lori Strawn