Saints

Watching a documentary about Johnny Cash. At the very end, one of his cohorts says, "maybe he was a saint." The phrase rang with truth. Could it be this is what saints really are? Not paragons of virtue, not religious messengers, but powerfully unique people, incapable of being anything but genuine, who shake the world where they walk? Full of doubts and flaws, but life expresses itself through them lucidly, uses them up to pour grace over all they touch? Bodhisattvas showing us a way forward, exploding our comfortable assumptions? Damned to be misunderstood and copied, when the real message is to find our own, particular, unmappable path?

I remember once asking a nun if any one of us, in our class, could be saints. She equivocated, I don't remember how she answered. But, I think we are all called, the sacred is just the other side of our fears and self delusions. If only we push through, willing to look, courageous enough to struggle to understand.

We are all capable of being saints. No excuses. It just takes everything we are.