Washington National Cathedral

Lloyd: Good morning, and welcome to the Sunday Forum, as we continue this series of weekly explorations of faith in public life, the various intersections and interconnections with some of the liveliest minds in Washington and beyond. I want especially to welcome today our guest Robert Ellsberg. Robert is publisher and editor-in-chief of Orbis books, a very important publishing company, certainly in the religious world. But more to our purpose, he has become something of an expert on saints. On this All Saints’ Day, as we think about all the saints that have sustained Christians along the centuries, we have someone who has written three important books. One entitled All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time. The one I found especially intriguing was The Saints’ Guide to Happiness. And one called Blessed Among All Women: Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time.

Robert’s interest in saints goes back more than thirty years to the time he was involved in the Catholic Worker community, something founded and guided by Dorothy Day, one of the saints of the last generation. And someone now in fact a candidate for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. He’s now editing Dorothy Day’s diaries and letters, to be out next year. Robert, thanks for being with us on All Saints Day.

Let’s start with a big question. What is a saint? And is the idea of sainthood actually relevant anymore in the 21st century?

Ellsberg: I think it’s more relevant than ever. I think there’s a lot of interest in saints growing as we are moving away from the idea of the saint as some kind of a quasi-supernatural hero. There was a long period when people tended to think of, associate saints, just with stained glass window images or statues, heroes of the past who were close to God but not exactly human in some way. We asked for their intercession for us. They were kind of our heavenly patrons or centers of divine power. I think we’re moving more back to the original idea of saints from the first centuries, where saints were people who walked faithfully, heroically in the path of Christ, who showed us in some vivid way what it really means to be a disciple, and draw us, encourage us on our own journey to become saints.

Lloyd: Let’s stay with that for a second. If I had talked to a lot of people I’ve served through the years, a lot of them would say about the last thing I want to become is a saint, or at least not till I’m almost ready to die. Because it doesn’t look like much fun. They get themselves in terrible situations. They often die early. They starve themselves to death. They cloister themselves in monasteries and convents. Is that a good life? Is that what a saint is really supposed to be?

Ellsberg: I was at a church recently where there were stained glass windows, depicted all these saints, each one of whom was holding the instrument of their mortification, or martyrdom, I thought, who would want to be saint? But I think the actual saints were people who stood out among their contemporaries as people who showed some aspect of the divine, and not in a way that took away from their humanity, but showed, really set a standard for what it means to be a human being. I think holy people I’ve known—like Dorothy Day whom I worked with—they were incredibly fun to be with. They were attractive. They were fully alive. They had a vitality. And I think they attracted people on their own time, people wanted to be with them. They showed some aspect of the love or compassion of God and made that real for people.

Lloyd: Do you think saints are more worldly and engaged now than they used to be? Or is it we pick out different ones these days to pay special attention to?

Ellsberg: Well, I think there has been some change in our thinking about what is the kind of holiness that’s appropriate for our time. And I think that there were models of holiness in earlier times that did put a great emphasis on the supernatural and the other life, and seemed to deprecate bodily existence and existence in this world. And I think now we are seeing a need for a saint that, a kind of model of holiness that affirms our humanity, affirms material life and history in engagement of God’s love in relation to the challenges of our time.

Lloyd: Now you’re a Roman Catholic,but if someone is wise enough to pick up your compendium of daily reading on a saint every day they’re going to stumble into a lot of non-Roman Catholics, people who are Protestants and others, in fact, who aren’t Christian at all. Are you broadening the definitions of saints a lot more widely than it has been before?

Ellsberg: That’s one of the things I wanted to do. One thing I wanted to do was to make the saints real, to put them in their historical context to show them as people who struggled over their vocation and how to be faithful in their own time. But I also wanted to expand the idea of sainthood. And one of the ways I guess I approached this was, instead of a deductive method of a lot of books of saints where you—here’s a list of saints, and then we talk about why they’re relevant for today. I started by thinking of what are the kind of spiritual needs of our time and who are the people who embody that? And just instinctively I came up with a list that is obviously a lot broader than just the official list of Catholic saints. It included artists and mystics and poets and peacemakers and other people I think speak to the whole range of what it means to be faithful today.

Lloyd: Vincent Van Gogh as a saint? Great painter. Committed suicide. A man lived with a lot of despair a lot of his life. And yet a saint. Why is he a saint?

Ellsberg: Well, if you take him sort of out of context, I don’t think there would be any St. Vincent Van Gogh Church or something, that’s unlikely. You kind of, well you open the book, you see there’s a kind of aesthetic sensibility that unites all of these people who simply took the deep questions of life with utmost seriousness. And I see Van Gogh as a deeply religious artist. Also a very neurotic and tortured person. And I’m happy to show to be a saint in my book—at least, my literal book—you don’t have to be a cheerful and happy and a perfect example of mental health. But someone like that who was deeply concerned with trying to depict a certain religious view of reality, to show ordinary reality imbued with kind of sense of wonder and mystery and love. And he suffered greatly for that vocation. Nobody understood what he was trying to do. And in that he has quite a lot in common with great saints as well. But he wanted to show what was in his heart, and it ultimately was a vision of compassion.

Lloyd: So would you say that Vincent Van Gogh would not only be a saint in your book, but he’s a saint in God’s book?

Ellsberg: Well God’s book is a lot larger than my book, and a lot larger than the list of canonized saints. One of the things I think, talking about saints we tend to think of that as a kind of finite number. And of course, at least in the Catholic tradition, a saint is someone who has been officially canonized by the church after a long bureaucratic process. But on this weekend, this is the Feast of All Saints, that recognizes that the full number of saints is known to God alone, and is much larger than any official saint, and includes, well, all kind of anonymous people, people who have lived out their faith in a true and heroic way. And sometimes those are people we meet every day or know. Sometimes they are people known only to God.

Lloyd: And so Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, or Albert Camus, an atheist, French existentialist writer, they belong in there too?

Ellsberg: I have a viewpoint that’s large enough to include all these people. I had a letter from someone who had bought my book on the Internet and was very disappointed to discover that it was not just Catholic saints, and he wanted his money back, as a matter of fact. And I said, “Well, I’d be happy to send your money back if you send me the book,” and I thought I would shame him and he wouldn’t have the guts to do it. I said, “Surely you don’t believe you can only learn about God through Roman Catholics?” And he said, “Well, I’m sure other people have good things to teach us, but they can’t teach us how to be a saint.” Well, no, they can’t maybe teach you how to be Roman Catholic saint. That wasn’t Gandhi’s motive. His effort was to live, to follow the truth deeply, and he did so in a heroic way, and I think there are many Christians, myself included, who have learned something about the gospel, learned how to live out their faith and spirit of non-violence more deeply, because of someone like Gandhi.

So I included people like that who have intersected in some way with the Christian tradition. The book is written from a Christian perspective. I didn’t try to be inclusive in the sense of representing all holy people of all holy traditions.

Lloyd: You’ve known one public saint very well, Dorothy Day. You worked with her for five years. Tell us a little about Dorothy Day’s work. Not everyone may know the story of Dorothy Day, but also what it was like to be up that close to someone who by most all public accounts was a saint.

Ellsberg: I was attracted to Dorothy Day because of her famous record of anti-war witness. This was in the ’70s. I’d dropped out of college after my sophomore year when I was nineteen. It was 1975 when I went down to Catholic Worker. And I got very hooked and ended up staying there for five years.

Lloyd: That was in the Bowery of New York.

Ellsberg: The Bowery of New York. Dorothy Day had been a radical journalist and activist who underwent a conversation in the 1920s and ended up founding—after becoming a Catholic—founded this movement called the Catholic Worker. It was an effort to live out the radical message of the gospel. And that included performing the works of mercy, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, but also protesting, resisting the institutional forces that create so much suffering and violence in the world.

But the Catholic Worker canon of saints was also very large and included people like Dostoevsky and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and people like that, Thomas Merton, that we talked about all the time. And from that I kind of got into this habit of continuous dialogue and conversation with people that I felt had something to teach me about what it means to be a human being. And from that experience I can’t ever really think of any decision I’ve made without some sort of reference to that cloud of witnesses. So that informed the kind of book I did.

But Dorothy was somebody who also not just taught me about saints, but made me feel that saints were people who were utterly human. She was funny. She was fun to be with. She was intensely curious. Even though she was in her late seventies, early eighties, by the time I time I knew her, there was a youthfulness about her. A spirit of adventure. And she attracted young people to her because she never seemed jaded. She never seemed as if she held over you the fact that she’d been doing this for fifty years. She loved literature. She loved listening to the opera on the radio. She loved beautiful things. And she had this incredible sense of making you feel when you were with her that you could be a better person. And that would be a great adventure. It would be a lot of fun to do.

Lloyd: I understand that she said—in fact, I think I read this in your book—had said at one point that she didn’t want people to call her a saint because she didn’t want to be dismissed so easily.

Ellsberg: She said, when people call you a saint, it means basically you’re not to be taken seriously and… She was referring to that attitude we have toward saints, which was not her attitude, that saints are perfect people, they’re not really like us, and it was a kind of letting us off the hook. You know, when you have the saints, there’s this division of labor. You have the saints out there to do the great things, and we are just ordinary people.

One of the great themes in her writing, for years and years, was that we are all called to be saints. Not just called to be good people, but called to give up everything and follow faithfully wherever that might take us. This was a constant journey. It meant you’d have defeats. You would have moments of doubt, and you’d have moments of weakness. But that was your goal. And this was a vocation for everyone, not just the spiritual prodigies.

So I have no difficulty what so ever regarding her as a saint, but she didn’t like it when people in her lifetime would say, “That’s Dorothy Day. Those people are saints. They can do that kind of thing. I could never do what they do.”

Lloyd: We have a different job description from saints. Is that the idea? It’s a way of writing off what we see in front of us.

Ellsberg: You know, there are people who are amazing athletes or amazing musicians or composers. And no one would say, “Well my vocation is to be another Mozart or be another Van Gogh. And I should not even try to appreciate music or something because that’s not what I am.” I think this idea we have of sainthood as the finished product, rather than as a life-long journey, we see, instead of talking about the saints, if you talk about people who are walking the paths in the holiness, then you get a sense of what unites us rather than the big chasm that separates us from the official things.

Lloyd: And now you’re involved in the canonization process for Dorothy Day. That’s a fairly lengthy process, isn’t it, deliberation on the way to deciding first to beatify, and then to canonize someone?

Ellsberg: In the Catholic Church it’s a rather long and bureaucratic process. On the centenary of Dorothy’s birth, which was in 1997, Cardinal O’Connor, Cardinal in New York at the time, announced that he wanted to form a group to talk about this. And I was invited to be part of that conversation with other people who had known her. And at the end of that he announced that he was intentioned, and he followed through on that, it was one of the last things he did before he died, was to submit her what they call “Cause for Canonization in Rome.” And it was accepted. So she’s now officially called “a servant of God.” What happens beyond that? It may be years or decades. I don’t know if I’ll be around to see it. But I think even just the church’s acknowledgement of this person who, you have to remember, through most of her life, was regarded as a fairly marginal figure in the church, kind of way out. A lot of people thought she was a Communist. She certainly did not have the acclamation of a Mother Teresa in her lifetime. Even at the time when she died. But I think her reputation and her influence continues to grow, and she is actually regarded more as a person who speaks very much to the kind of holiness we need in our time, but combines that concrete charity and love for the poor and the individual next to you, but also an awareness of having to deal with the social structures that create so much poverty.

Lloyd: You mention Mother Teresa. We’ve been, as we watched the news, seeing a discussion of Mother Teresa’s own faith crisis that actually surfaced, I gather, as part of the canonization work, of bringing together her writings and publication of some of them. What do you make of the discussion of Mother Teresa’s decades-long sense of God’s mysterious absence from her life? Is that a disqualifier for sainthood?

Ellsberg: Well, the experience of darkness or doubt or even despair, I don’t think is something inconsistent with deep faith. It’s something you see a lot in the annals of the saints. I mean Saint John of the Cross even wrote a book called The Dark Night of the Soul, where he talked about this as a very essential part of some of the mystical journey. People who are intensely close to God also wrestle with that possibility of despair. But I think what interests me about someone like Mother Teresa is it shows that… I’m interested in the narrative of peoples’ lives, and that the message their life or what their life stands for can’t be just summed up in a formula like “love your neighbor; love God, practice charity,” whatever. That her holiness was expressed in a lifetime journey. Just as the gospels come to us in a story, a story that can’t be reduced to certain formulae or glorious mysteries. It’s a story that also included darkness and dejection and abandonment of Jesus by his friends and dejection on the cross and weeping in the garden. And all that is part of the story too. So where is God in that story? Is God only in the moments of the transfiguration and the glorious mysteries? Or is God part of that whole story?

And I think if you look at the story of Mother Teresa, this view we have of her struggles and even the darkness that she experienced over a period of fifty years and nevertheless that she kept on doing this, following Christ, and living out her love in this amazing way, makes her more complex and real and compelling figure.

Lloyd: I agree with you. I found as I tried to read a lot about this whole Mother Teresa story, something very moving about the fact that she stayed in the toughest of possible living conditions, living with the most pain and suffering imaginable all those years. If she were looking for experiences of consolation and closeness to God and beautiful green fields and beautiful oceans, she could have left and reclaimed her vocation someplace else. But it almost seems as if she gave up the experience of consolation and God’s closeness in order to stay close to the lepers she was serving. That that became in a way part of what she gave to God.

Ellsberg: It’s possible Mother Teresa was in her lifetime one of the most celebrated people of our times. She was for many people the paradigmatic living saint, living saint. She was on the cover of every magazine, up there with Princess Diana, as a kind of holy celebrity. She met with heads of state. She was a friend of the pope. She got the Nobel Prize. I think it would have been shocking to me to read in her diaries, you know, to have her say, “They all loved me. I’m great. God loves me. I’m doing a fabulous job. I can prove it because I’ve got all these rewards.” I think in a way, that the fact that she was stripped of that consolation, so that none of that celebration, none of that celebrity kind of stuck to her, but it went right over her, I think was kind of essential to the purity of her vocation.

Lloyd:You have a book called The Saints’ Guide to Happiness. That’s something we’re all mildly interested in: finding a way to be happy. You quote one of my heroes, Dostoevsky, in it, saying, “all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.” What on earth do you mean?

Ellsberg: Well, if you think of happiness as a kind of smiley face or “I’m always on top of the world” kind of feeling, then yes, honestly a lot of saints didn’t experience that all the time. But what got me into this was thinking these books that tell a lot of stories about saints, I wanted to get to how to they speak to the deepest yearnings of our hearts? People don’t wake up in the morning and say “I want to be a saint today,” but if you take seriously every magazine that you see, everybody is concerned with how to be happy.

So the question I began exploring was whether there was some relation between this yearning we all feel, the desire we all have to be happy, and the vocation we all experience to be holy. And I began to see them as two sides of the same coin. Which means changing a little bit how you think of holiness, but it also means coming to different understanding of happiness. Not as a subjective thing about how you feel today, but something more objective, being on the right track, being who you are meant to be, being your true self. And the happiness is the kind of theme that comes through the lives of the saints is not something that depends on outward circumstances or even the possibility of suffering or death. But you look at someone like Martin Luther King. You know, the night before he died, he gave this amazing speech. He was in Memphis. He was facing violence. He was facing all kinds of difficulties. And probably his death. He probably sensed that. And he said, “I’m happy tonight. I’m happy because I’ve been to the mountaintop. I may not get to the other side, but we as a people will get there.”

And that kind of happiness, I think that has nothing to do with whether everything is coming up roses, is really the kind of happiness that I’m trying to get to in that book. And I outline a kind of sequence of lessons about life, about learning to sit still to work, to love, to suffer and to die, that are all kind of dimensions of that, and I think relate to just the problem of being human. If I’d written a book called The Saints’ Guide to Holiness I don’t think anybody would have wanted to read that book. But I want to relate it to something that people instinctively feel…

Lloyd: And if you’d written the seven steps to being effectively happy and holy, that might have sold really well too. So, if you were to summarize what the journey to happiness is about, a Saints’ Guide to Happiness, summarize for us what that set of steps toward happiness might look like.

Ellsberg: We’ll reduce it to seven secrets or lessons of happiness. Well, I thought, what is the opposite of happiness, first of all? And I began by saying I don’t think it’s depression or being sad. It’s really a kind of deadness. And the start of this journey is really the kind of yearning or the quest for something more. You see it so much in the lives of the saints. A lot of them went through this conversion experience. It wasn’t from one religion to another, or discovering religion. It was more a feeling what really engaged their full humanity and talents in relation to the needs of their time. And a lot of them were living in a kind of state of mediocrity, a kind of dullness, deadness. But they had this feeling inside them, there has to be more. There’s more to life. There’s got to be more to it. And that I think is where I think it all begins. And you see it in the lives of so many of the saints who, from feeling that, and kind of responded to the call of Jesus to the rich young man. The rich young man didn’t say exactly “How do I be happy?” But that was sort of the subtext. How can I achieve eternal life? And Jesus says, “Follow the laws. Do this, that and the other…

Lloyd: “How can I be fully alive?”

Ellsberg: Exactly. I think that is what motivated so many of, say, for instance the Desert Fathers in the early centuries, who went off into the desert. They lived lives of great self-sacrifice and asceticism. But what they were really trying to get away from was the deadness of their society. And we experience that so much. So much of the time you feel, “I wish I just felt more alive.” And the Desert Fathers, so many of the saints, saw the gospel as some kind of energy, some kind of source of life that they wanted to plug into. And it’s beginning that journey, beginning the search, you might say, that I think is the beginning of the road to happiness. It leads to all kinds of…

Lloyd: Okay, you got us wanting to go there and be fully alive. What do we do then?

Ellsberg: You know it’s not as if there’s step two is this or that or the other thing. One of the next chapters I have is “Learning to Let Go,” and obviously letting go of, not just material things, as a lot of saints have done, but first of all letting go of the illusion that this, that, or the other thing is what’s going to make me happy. And it’s not just even letting go of those illusions. It’s also letting go of all the other things we hoard, such as our resentments, our ambitions, our pride, our desperate need to always be right or in control of things. That was another thing you see in the life of someone like St. Francis of Assisi, letting go not just of material things but of his fastidiousness, of his sensuality, all the things that prevented him from really encountering other people, and encountering the face of God in other people. But there, you know, I go on talking bout work and talking about learning to sit still. Pascal wrote the Pensées, the great Roman Catholic apologist and scientist in the Age of Reason, who said that what prevents us from being happy is that we can’t sit still in our own room. That constant need for distraction, to keep anxiety at bay.

So all of these are kind of lessons in how to become more deeply in touch with our own true inner depths, listening to the still voice within, instead of being caught up in distraction and anxiety and the kind of rat race of life.

Lloyd: We’re going to invite some questions from the audience now. Deryl Davis, our producer, is going to look for people raising their hands and people will come with microphones for you. But before we do that I want to offer just one more question.

You got us wanting to be fully alive, and you’ve got us letting go and looking at different parts of life like our work, our family life, and presumably the rest. My guess is most of us here carry pretty complex lives, and we have some pieces of our lives that are looking better than others. How do we know when we are on the path that leads towards being a saint? I didn’t say sainthood. I think most of us aren’t gunning for being Mother Teresas. But my hunch is a lot of us would like to be saints and have a sense that God’s life is in our life and we are fully alive. How do you know when you’re on the way?

Ellsberg: Well, one of the things it’s important to realize is that we don’t have to go to some special religious place to begin this. We don’t start by having to become completely different people. But that that is a path that begins where we are. And that there are innumerable opportunities to practice forgiveness, patience, charity, love, understanding, wherever we are.

Lloyd: I think you said your monastery is your home with your three children.

Ellsberg: When I became a Catholic, a lot of people said, “well what are you going to do now? Become a monk? A priest? If you’re going to go all the way, that’s what you should do.” And I didn’t go that way. I ended up becoming a publisher and a writer, and I have a family and I have children. And suddenly, the realization that this is the arena where, if I may become a saint—which I may not—this is where it’s going to happen. It’s not going to happen on some mountain top. I’m not going to read the books of Thomas Merton and kind of fantasize about, “Well, it’s easy for him; he was in a monastery,” though if you read his writings you realize what a struggle that was. Or Dorothy Day. No one would think, “Oh well, it’s easy for Mother Teresa. She’s down there in the streets of Calcutta. Of course she can be a saint.”

I think all these people have the same message that that fantasy that there’s some other perfect religious place where this happens instead of the moment, the place where you are today. Teresa of Lisieux was actually a Carmelite nun who was Dorothy Day’s favorite saint, and she died at a young age. In her autobiography she wrote about what she called “the little way”, which was the idea that the kind of school of holiness that consists of simply doing all of your ordinary day-to-day routines in performing those duties, but with a spirit of love and in the presence of God. And when you enter into that, it’s not easy at all.

But you do at least begin to experience that you can find a kind of serenity even in the midst of chaos. You can find a sense of being close to God even with all the distraction. And you can find arenas for heroic charity even in just sitting at the kitchen table with the people you supposedly love the most.

Lloyd: Let’s go to questions. Any questions out there?

Q: Hi. You’ve addressed the question of Mother Teresa. She’s been beatified. Pope John Paul II said he didn’t want her to become a cult figure and he wasn’t even going to beatify her until the fifth year after her death. And you’ve mentioned Thomas Merton who’s another very famous writer and worker for the church and a very spiritual leader. The other two people I want to mention who should have been saints is one woman who has been beatified by, she’s a Native American. Her name is Kateri Tekakwitha, and she’s been beatified and she’s got somebody, the bishop of St. John de Quebec, who’s still working on her sainthood. The other person that has never been beatified is Oscar Romero, and I’ve been told by priests and people on the faculty of Catholic U., where I’m an alumna, that he’s still too political. Why would the church want to belittle these people that have put their lives at risk and died as martyrs for the church? If they’re too political, why would the pope want to prevent their sainthood?

Ellsberg: I don’t think the church wants to belittle the witness of Oscar Romero, and I haven’t the slightest doubt that he will be beatified. Even Pope Benedict said that he saw no obstacle to that. And it certainly will happen. Oscar Romero was the heroic, prophetic archbishop of San Salvador who was shot, assassinated, while he was saying Mass in 1980. He is, I think, acclaimed and recognized by the people of Latin America certainly as a saint, according to the more ancient tradition in which saints were simply recognized by the people before there was any kind of bureaucratic process like this.

But Romero, to be sure, was a very controversial figure. And he was very isolated among his fellow bishops who were always denouncing him for being a Communist. These were bishops who were much more close to the military. And I think there was a lot of resistance to holding up someone like Romero because that’s in effect saying Romero was the model of what a bishop should be. Whereas, judging from a lot of the bishops that have been employed in the last decades, that’s very different from the ideal the church seems to hold up for a bishop.

But here’s an example a little closer to home because his time has come. An Austria peasant named Franz Jagerstatter was just beatified last month in Austria. He was a Catholic layman, a peasant, who was the single Catholic lay person executed by the Nazis in Austria for refusing to serve in the German army during World War II. And he did this on the basis of his Catholic faith. Even though he had consulted his local priest and even the local bishop, asked what he should do, and he was told by everybody, every authority in the church and the wisdom of the time, that “your job is simply to serve your fatherland and defend the country and to be a good Catholic and live on for your family and your children, and to leave these kind of political questions to others.” He didn’t believe that was what Christ was calling him to do. And so he acted on his conscience against the advice of all the church authorities of his time. He was executed, beheaded by the Nazis, and was for many years a kind of source of embarrassment for his neighbors and for the church in Austria. Because if someone like Franz Jagerstatter was a saint, well then what does this say about everybody else?

You have to take the long view sometimes, and in this case, here 50 years later, 60 years later, Franz Jagerstatter was finally beatified for a step on the road to canonization.

There have been many saints who in their time, their own lifetime, not everybody thought they were saints. They made people feel very uncomfortable. Often they were prophetic figures who raised a lot of questions and challenged the authorities of their time. And maybe you could say it’s a problem in the process of canonization that we get so far away from them over time that we forget what challenging and difficult and contradictory and problematic figures they were in their own time. But that’s why I want to not just put them up on a stained glass window, but remember the context of their lives and the struggles they went through.

Q: Many saints have renounced wealth and power and yet there have been political rulers who have made it into the canon. But some would say the exercise of political power and sainthood are inherently incompatible? Having a Christian president who likes waterboarding a vivid example of that? Do you think that political power and sainthood are at all compatible? Can you do both and be a saint?

Ellsberg: Well, there’s all kinds of power. I think one of the most powerful people of our time was Gandhi, who had no possessions and renounced political power, and yet compelled the rulers of the greatest empire of his time to sit down and talk with him. I think Martin Luther King exerted great power. I can’t talk about exactly what’s involved in achieving political office, being elected and that sort of thing, and whether that’s compatible with holiness in the deepest sense. Certainly there are a lot of canonized kings and monarchs and princes and whatnot.

One of my favorite saints is Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, who was a princess who became a Franciscan and renounced all her wealth. Finally her family turned on her and kicked her out of the palace and she supported herself just fishing. But I think that it is a great challenge for anyone to combine power and holiness which involves, certainly, humility and letting go and, I think, is not compatible with violence and force. It’s a difficult challenge, but there are certainly great leaders of our time.

I would say someone like a Nelson Mandela, let’s say, who experienced tremendous suffering, imprisonment for over twenty years, somebody who could have been tempted to hatred and a spirit of revenge, but who then, when he achieved power, used that in such a generous way to promote reconciliation and healing in his country. So, although he was not likely to be a canonized saint, he’s certainly the kind of person I would have included in my book.

Q: I’d like to know more about the speaker and the writer. I’m just curious, why did you become a Catholic? What does that mean to you?

Ellsberg: As I said, I spent five years at the Catholic Worker, and people could assume, “Well, you were there with the Catholic Worker, of course you became a Catholic.” It wasn’t as easy as all of that. I think I was attracted originally to Dorothy Day’s pacifism and her non-violent witness. At a certain point I realized that all those things I admired about her were sustained by something deeper, a very deep spiritual life, that I could see from the outside, but I didn’t really experience it firsthand.

It was while I was working as a hospital orderly in a home for terminal cancer patients that was run by an order of Catholic nuns. And I had a lot of time on my hands. And I began reading things like The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and The Confessions of St. Augustine and the writings of Dostoevsky. It was writers like that that really opened me up to the idea that Catholic faith was not just a matter of just belonging to a certain club or organization. It wasn’t a matter of believing certain things. It wasn’t even a matter of doing certain things. But it was really a way of seeing the world through different eyes. A different kind of seeing. And it wasn’t so much that I, although I was raised in the Episcopal Church, I didn’t think “Okay I’m giving up the Episcopal Church and becoming Catholic.” It was within the kind of Catholic tradition and the Catholic viewpoint, a way of looking at reality, that I came to experience a relationship with God in a new way. And I wanted to be part of that tradition and that community. So that answers that.

Lloyd: We have time for just one or two more questions.

Q: Thank you so much for a fascinating discussion. Not being Catholic, it was my understanding that saints performed miracles, and that they can’t be sainted until they’ve performed miracles. So I have a twofold question. And the first is about the miracles. But the other one is, so what’s the point of being beatified and sainted? Is there something that you get for it?

Lloyd: A big merit badge.

Ellsberg: Well, first of all, naming someone a saint doesn’t do anything for that person. And it’s not exactly like being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or something like that. When does somebody really become a saint? That’s a really good question. Is it when the pope signs off on this piece of paper? I remember being struck by one of my kids showed me on the back of a cereal box there was a question, “What was the tallest mountain in the world before Mt. Everest was discovered?” The answer was Mt. Everest. I think saints are known and recognized by God, and it has very little to do with when human beings sign off on that piece of paper.

John of Arc was canonized 500 years after her death. Well, when did she become a saint? Even looking at their lifetime, when did St. Augustine become a saint? Is it the moment when he died? Is it the moment he converted? When he was a great bishop and wrote The City of God?

I see it more as a journey. And our death kind of forms a frame around a life so you can say it’s definitive in some way. But even our reflection on what the meaning of what that life is and its impact and its legacy continues to grow and affect the world in all kinds of ways. There are some people who are maybe very great saints. No one’s ever heard of them, and no one ever will. There are people like Franz Jagerstatter, who died in complete obscurity, 1943, reviled by most of his countrymen, and neighbors and family couldn’t understand what he was doing. And it’s only decades later that we can see there’s a witness there that speaks heroically and very vividly to our time.

So it’s not a posthumous medal of honor or something like that. It has more to do with us than it does with the saint. It’s every saint is not just another beautiful piece of glass in that stained glass window up there. It’s something that opens up our moral imaginations, enlarges our sense of what it means to be human, and ways of being human, and ways of being faithful. So each one of those saints adds a little bit to that mosaic that gives us an enlarged sense of who we can be.

So now as for the question about miracles. Now again, the Catholic list is restrictive. It’s saying: at least these people are saints; we’re not saying whether other people are or not. Not at least these people are bona fide saints, examples, witnesses, reliable guides to Christian living. And they set the bar very high by saying it’s not just a matter of what they did in their life, but miraculous signs that show that they are in heaven now and able to communicate benefits to us through their intercession. It’s a little bit of a vestige of a kind of ancient and primitive I think sort of concept of the saint as the center of sacred power. That, to me, is not all that meaningful.

But yes, to be officially canonized, you have to have least one certified miracle, which in our scientific age now, tends to be reduced entirely to whatever is beyond the frontiers of medical explanation. It has nothing to do with maybe the fact that we have not blown the world up by now. Or there’s still a little window where we could raise our consciousness about global warming and do something about it. Or the fact that women’s vocations are recognized and celebrated in the world; or that, decades of slavery, or torture, or we’re still struggling against these things. I think all around us you see doors opening, windows opening, chains falling loose, and there are signs of grace and the miraculous all around us. I think it reduces the saints somewhat to reduce them entirely to very technical medical, scientific kind of criteria.

Lloyd: This has been a great conversation. I hate to stop it. I hope you all will join us next week as we have one of the living saints of our era with us, Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, will be with us to talk about the work of forgiveness and reconciliation, which is one of those cutting-edge pieces of our humanity. He’s led the way in that in so many ways. So come join in the conversation then.

And now, please linger for some coffee at the west end of the church. Robert Ellsberg will be back there to continue the conversation.

The service here begins at 11:15. Everyone is welcome to come and be part of that. Please join me in thanking Robert for today.