Who's your Favorite Saint?

The mind boggles at the options.  The saints had messy curious lives which makes them oddities populating a strange world.   I had the paperback books of saints as a child preparing for my communion.  I never understood Catherine who was tortured with a toothed wheel and beheaded or Lucy, depicted with her eyes on a plate. It’s amazing these stories were given to impressionable children to read.  Knowing nothing other than the name Teresa, (Therese) Little Flower, I chose her.  She looked gentle enough.  She fit in with my love of the Jesus of a blurry painting of the blond man with the red pulsating heart. At the age of 7 I proclaimed I wanted to be a nun.  “You’ll have to sleep on a bed of nails.”  I was told.  I don’t care, I’ll do it, was my answer. Years later in a film depicting  Teresa’s life, she drank the tubercular sputum from an infected lung.  My connection through name was permanently severed. 

    These days I have a book of the saints (Saints, A year in Faith and Art)  with golden pages and short biographies.  I discovered the namesakes of all the street names I knew in Barcelona, like Saint Anthony Mary Claret ( a confessor to the king and therefore suspect) or Sant Roc, a hermit and healer who was miraculously cured by an angel and nourished by a dog.  There is the dramatic, the outrageous about the saints. I like the layer in the religious hierarchy they represent though I couldn’t imagine praying to them to intercede to God for me.  Why would I, when, like a good pagan, I believe God is everywhere, within or without.  How would they serve as a model?

     That brings me to Teresa of Avila, another namesake.  In “A Tremor of Bliss, Contemporary Writers on the Saints”, Francine Prose writes “ Teresa claimed to hate writing, to be unable to write, her work is full of self-doubt, of excuses for procrastinations and apologies..Whys is she not-for these reasons alone- the patron saint of writers?”  Indeed.  So along with my inusuk, budda, ganesh statue, dirt from Latvia, the black virgin of Aglona, and other icons, I try to cover all the bases.  I need that statue of Teresa next. 

 

And an old poem, as I’m clearing out papers…

                       Apolonia Painted

 

 

We pointed out the flaws,

Look, a dog as big as a house

in the background,

no perspective here,

But Apolonia painted

and danced,

Her wig askew

after vodka shots,

Apolonia painted

and promised love