Robert Ellsberg is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Orbis Books. He has written numerous books on saints, including All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Times, Blessed Among All Women, The Saints’ Guide to Happiness, Modern Spiritual Masters, and Blessed Among Us: Day by Day with Saintly Witnesses, which is based on his daily entries for Give Us This Day. A former managing editor of The Catholic Worker, he has written extensively about the life and legacy of Dorothy Day, and has also edited anthologies of writings by Gandhi, Flannery O’Connor, Thich Nhat Hanh, Charles de Foucauld, and Carlo Carretto, among others.
In this interview, along with telling us some of his life’s journey – especially concerning the important role that Dorthey Day played in it – Robert emphasizes the importance of recognizing everyday sanctity, the impact that stories have on moral imagination, and the relevance of saints in modern times. The discussion also touches on themes of faith, courage, social justice, and the universal call to holiness – all providing valuable insights into living a life inspired by gospel values in today’s world.
Names mentioned in this interview:
St. Alban, Dorothy Day, Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Simone Weil, Edith Stein, Ignatius of Loyola, St. Augustine, St. Dominic, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Franz Jägerstatter, Thomas Merton, Mattie Stepanek, Jimmy Carter, Daniel Ellsberg, Peter Waldo, Thérèse of Lisieux.
Books:
All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time (Robert Ellsberg)
Blessed Among Us: Day by Day with Saintly Witnesses (Robert Ellsberg)
The Saint’s Guide to Happiness: Practical Lessons in the Life of the Spirit (Robert Ellsberg)
A Living Gospel: Reading God’s Story in Holy Lives (Robert Ellsberg)
The Pentagon Papers (Daniel Ellsberg)
Radix: Robert, this is an absolute pleasure. I’ve read a couple of your books, and you’re kind of like a walking dictionary, or Mr. Saint, if you will. I’m thrilled to be able to talk to you. For people who don’t know about you, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are now?
Robert Ellsberg: Well, Matthew, it’s my pleasure to talk to you. I am the publisher and editor-in-chief at Orbis Books, which I guess you could describe as a kind of progressive, ecumenical religious publishing house owned by the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers. I’ve worked there for, gosh, this week it’ll be 37 years—a pretty long time. The path that led me there probably began when I took a leave from college for a year. I intended to take a year off and went to work with Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker in New York City. I only planned to stay a few months, but I ended up staying there for five years. I served as managing editor of The Catholic Worker for two years. Dorothy Day died in 1980, just after I returned to college, and I set out to edit a volume of her selected writings. That turned out to be one of six volumes of her writings that I’ve edited. I guess you could say that much of my life has been spent promoting and remembering her life and legacy and its relevance for today.
So, that’s something we might get into because it has a lot to do with how I got interested in saints, which is a topic you’re particularly interested in discussing. After I had been at Orbis for about ten years, I came up with the idea of writing a book called All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time. It’s a big book, around 600 pages, and it’s really a collection of stories about holy people, moral exemplars, or spiritual masters. This book reflects my experience at the Catholic Worker and my exposure to the stories of saints through Dorothy Day, who had tremendous dedication and reverence for saints. But she also had a very eclectic, wide-open perspective. She didn’t just focus on canonized saints; she also included people who functioned as saints in her life, such as activists, peacemakers, writers, and even fictional characters from some of her favorite novels.
I brought that perspective into this book, along with my experience as a doctoral student in theology at Harvard Divinity School and the global world of faith I’ve been exposed to through Maryknoll and my work at Orbis. This book became the first of a whole series of books that I ended up writing about saints, but also about the whole idea of holiness. At a certain point, I was invited by Liturgical Press to write a daily column for a periodical they were launching called Give Us This Day, which is a resource for prayer with liturgical readings and prayers. They asked if I would, in the spirit of my book All Saints, contribute a daily column called Blessed Among Us that would again focus not just on official saints of the Catholic Church, but on a much wider array of figures. So, not all Catholic, not all Christian, and not all candidates for canonization. I’ve been doing that now for about 14 years, and a couple of books have come out of that. In fact, I’m working on another one now. So, I guess, in a nutshell, that tells you how I got to this conversation.
Radix: I think, coming from more of a Protestant background, I’ve been increasingly impressed by and have developed a great respect for the Catholic tradition. In my background—and I don’t know, maybe it’s different within the Catholic Church—but it seems like saints weren’t something that was too much focused on. I mean, you kind of know of them and know their names, a few of them, but I don’t know if the average person thinks enough about saints. They might not think enough about why they’re important. I wonder—and it’s a hard thing to do in a short period of time—but what would be a primer? What would be some of the reasons you’d say it’s important for us to consider and reflect on why saints are important to know about?
RE: Well, I think one of the things that really distinguishes Catholic and Orthodox traditions from Protestant churches is this emphasis on saints. I think that Protestants, in general, rebelled against the idea that saints were some sort of intermediaries between us and God or Jesus. They believed that saints did favors for us, performed miracles, or had some kind of spiritual power. Because of this, there was a wholesale deemphasis on saints as a living tradition of people who are officially recognized in that way. Of course, I think Christians generally recognize the apostles—St. Peter and St. Paul—and the evangelists, as well as some of the early fathers of the church, but they don’t necessarily view them as part of a living tradition.
Now, Catholics place a lot of emphasis on saints. All the churches are named after saints, and when people are confirmed, they’re often given the name of a saint. I was not raised as a Catholic; I grew up in the Episcopal Church. So, I was familiar with the concept of saints, but I didn’t know people who had any kind of devotion to them or thought of them as particularly relevant. Saints were more like a hall of fame—great figures from Christian tradition.
I grew up in a parish church called St. Alban’s Church. During my time there, I never heard a sermon or any kind of explanation about who St. Alban was. I just assumed he was some sort of English bishop or something—like the kind you see in stained glass windows. I was amazed later on to learn his story. He was the proto-martyr, the first martyr of Britain when it was a Roman colony. He wasn’t initially a Christian himself, but during a time of persecution of the church under Rome, a priest on the run apparently found his way to Alban’s door. Alban took him in and spent the night listening to him. By the end of the night, as soldiers were approaching, Alban was so impressed and persuaded by the story of the gospel that he’d heard that he exchanged clothes with the priest, presented himself to the soldiers, and was arrested in the priest’s place. He went before a judge, who was outraged at this kind of trickery and sentenced him to be beheaded.
I thought, wow, that’s a whole different concept of what a saint is than what I had imagined—not just a great churchman or something like that, but someone who really lived out the gospel message, laying down his life for another. That was an amazing message that I wish I had heard, because I frankly didn’t really understand what it meant to be a Christian in terms of living like Jesus. I thought being a Christian meant you were a good person, you went to church every Sunday, you listened to the Bible, and you followed the Ten Commandments. As a child, I didn’t think that was all that hard. But I didn’t really think of faith as something that could involve risk or require laying down your life.
By the time I was in junior high and high school, I was more inspired by the example of people who, in the spirit of Gandhi and nonviolence, were going to jail to resist the draft or the Vietnam War. People like that seemed to me to be really living out that message. So I kind of drifted away from practicing Christianity. It was really by accident that I ended up with the Catholic Worker. I wasn’t attracted by the Catholicism, but by the fact that this was a community where people were living with the poor and trying to live a consistent life of nonviolence. I knew that Dorothy Day had been arrested many times in her life, and that was what attracted me. It was only after I had been there for five years that I decided to become a Catholic myself.
Now, about saints: In the early life of the church, saints were those who, in some heroic way, reenacted the gospel. They imitated Christ in a heroic way, which usually involved martyrdom. The martyrs were the original saints. Jesus had predicted that his followers would meet the same fate—carrying their cross if they wanted to follow him. Those who laid down their lives in the arena proved their faithfulness in this heroic way. So originally, martyrs were the seeds of the whole idea of saints. “Saint” just means a holy person, someone who emulates the holiness of God—not to the same degree, obviously, but in a way that points in that direction. The saint is a marker, a pointer toward something else—not toward themselves, but toward what they’re devoted to, what they live for, their faith, the object of their faith.
After the age of martyrdom, other recognized forms of heroic faithfulness emerged, whether as evangelists, missionaries, ascetics, or people who devoted their lives to service or prayer. Around the anniversary of their death, their graves or relics were believed to be sources of sacred power, capable of miracles or divine assistance. Over time, the emphasis began to shift away from their lives as examples to others and toward devotion to them as miracle workers or sources of holy power. This is the aspect that Protestants revolted against, and I think for good reason.
Over time, we begin to lose track of their living faith, their story, their humanity, and the way they challenge all of us. The idea that to be a saint is what we are called to be—not to be canonized officially or to have churches named after us, but to put off the old self and put on Christ. Our own lives should be a visible reminder of the gospel, of the Beatitudes. So, I don’t know. I’m going on at length here—there’s a lot to say on this subject.
Radix: Yeah!
RE: Let me just say this. In the Catholic Church, there’s a formal process for recognizing someone as a saint, and it’s very restrictive. But it can give us the idea that those people who are canonized—named official saints—constitute the whole cloud of witnesses or the entire body of saints. That’s not what the church is teaching. Those who are canonized are a very selective number of rather exceptional cases. This should not distract us from the idea that there are countless other saints whom we encounter in our everyday lives, or who remain anonymous and are known only to God. We are called to be among that number.
Radix: In The Saint’s Guide to Happiness, you say that “among history’s vast company of holy people, the canonized saints represent only a small portion. Most saints remain anonymous and unrecognized, apart from their own neighbors or immediate family.” I think the idea that they would be anonymous and not well-known speaks especially to our North American culture, where we really expect, respect, and look for the big, the boom, the bang, the exceptional, the superior. We don’t often look for the mundane and the everyday. In one of your interviews, you talked about two things: that saints can sanctify the mundane, and in general, we may not recognize saintly behavior in many people because we’re looking for the big and not the small.
RE: Well, you know, even in the case of so-called great saints, most of their lives were spent in very ordinary ways. We tend to focus just on their great achievements, and we don’t see the life of faith, struggle, and perseverance that lies underneath that. Their faith is often expressed just as much in their everyday encounters with other people as it is in great moments of choice or decision. For example, in the case of a martyr, we might focus solely on their death, which might be at the very end of their life, and we don’t consider how they lived. We also don’t think about the countless other people who lived just like them but didn’t happen to be martyred.
We also tend to think of saints as finished products, clothed in an aura of sanctity and heroism. We don’t realize, or don’t recognize, to what extent their lives involved a long journey—often filled with searching for their vocation, moments of confusion, doubt, or even despair. That’s not just in certain cases; it’s in almost all cases. I’ve written about many saints, and many of them began in very ordinary situations in life. They looked at the options available to them and felt called to something more. And that “more” often involved serving their neighbors or responding fully to the gospel in some way—giving up the safe path for something completely unknown and unfamiliar.
Again, we tend to focus on the finished product and not on everything that went before it. Even in the case of great saints, like Teresa of Avila in the 16th century—the reformer of the Carmelites, a great mystic, and founder of communities and author of many books—she was a mediocre nun for a long time. She felt no particular devotion to religious life, and then, one day in her convent, she looked at the crucifix in a different way. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a piece of decoration. She had a deep feeling for what it represented in terms of the love and sacrifice of God and Jesus, and she underwent a conversion.
So, we often think of converts as people like Dorothy Day, who decided to become a Catholic at the age of 30, or Thomas Merton, who underwent a dramatic conversion. But what do you say about someone who has been a nun or a faithful Catholic for decades, or most of their life, and then suddenly feels called to something deeper? They find their deeper vocation, and that is just the beginning of a whole process of living into the meaning of that and going deeper and deeper. So, I think that aspect of turning toward God is a very important part of what it means to be holy. In one of my books, The Saint’s Guide to Happiness, I talked about how, instead of talking about saints, maybe we should talk about those who walk the path of holiness. That gives us a sense of their continuity with our experience, rather than setting them off in a deep chasm that’s completely separate from us and anything we can relate to.
Radix: Do you think, maybe, there are misconceptions or, not misconceptions, but a lack of understanding of what holiness means?
RE: I think that if we think of holiness as the “churchy” part of our lives, or the pious part of our lives, and we think, “Well, gosh, I don’t really spend a lot of time in church; I’m not like a monk or a nun,” we would have that idea. I mean, I think the devotion to saints, unfortunately, has often reflected this kind of two-tiered idea of spirituality. On one hand, you’ve got the really holy kind of people whose job is to be holy—like nuns, priests, bishops, missionaries, and so on—and on the other hand, you’ve got the ordinary kind of people whose job is, you know, just to go to church, raise a family, and try to live a good life.
So, yeah, I think that we have all too often thought of holiness as something that is not really pertinent to the life of ordinary people in the world. The church, at least the Catholic Church after Vatican II, teaches that all of us are called to be holy, and the ways, manners, and means of achieving that are completely different. But holiness is just as much the job description of someone in a family, or someone who works a job, or someone who is a neighbor and member of their community, as it is for someone in a monastery. It’s a different kind of challenge, but that’s why I find Dorothy Day to be such an interesting example of holiness. She was a layperson, a single mother, who started the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s—a community effort to live out the radical message of the Gospel in both its personal and social implications. That meant living with the poor, practicing voluntary poverty, and engaging in the works of mercy: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and also getting involved in social and political activism to challenge and change a society that creates so much poverty.
She lived a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience—like a nun, but in a completely lay and secular context. She famously did not like to be called a saint. People would say, “I could never do what Dorothy Day does, or what those at the Catholic Worker do—they’re all saints down there,” which implied somehow that they had an aptitude for this, that it came easily for them, that it was just doing what came naturally. But she was very aware of how much effort it took, how much perseverance it required to renew her commitment every day when she got up. That kind of thinking also lets other people off the hook. It’s not necessarily everyone’s vocation to live exactly like Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, but it is everyone’s vocation to find their own way of living where the Gospel is calling them—to live in a way that is more loving, more charitable, and braver in showing solidarity and support for our neighbors, responding to the challenges of history, the call to social justice, and the call to care for the earth.
There are innumerable opportunities to do all these things in our daily lives. We let ourselves off the hook if we think, “Well, if I were a saint, I’d be doing this or that,” instead of seizing the small opportunities that come our way.
Radix: You have a quote from The Saint’s Guide to Happiness. You say, “According to Thérèse, each moment accepted and lived in a spirit of love is an occasion for heroism and a step toward the path of happiness and holiness.” So everything has the opportunity for that.
RE: That quote is from Thérèse of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun who died at the age of 24. She devised this “science of holiness” that she called the “Little Way.” It is the basis for her popularity and why she is celebrated as a saint. She showed that holiness can be achieved anywhere, in any context. You don’t have to be in a monastery; you don’t have to be a martyr. Everyday life offers opportunities to restrain your judgment, your anger, your impatience, and to be more loving, more forgiving, and more charitable.
Dorothy Day experienced the relevance of that in her life at the Catholic Worker. She came to believe that Thérèse was actually the most important saint of our time. Dorothy even wrote a book about her. She believed in not just practicing charity in everyday life, but also in the social implications of the “Little Way.” It meant that we have no idea what the power of our everyday encounters and deeds might be. The small protests we make, the things we do or don’t do, are all like tossing a pebble in a pond—we just don’t know how far the ripples will extend or what their consequences might be. Thérèse seemed to live a very different life than the activist Dorothy Day, but she was Dorothy’s inspiration.
Radix: Interesting. In one of the interviews, you were talking about Dorothy Day and mentioned something along the lines of her wondering why so much was done by saints to remedy evils like poverty, sickness, or destitution—dealing with those affected—but why there weren’t attempts made to change the social structures that created those conditions.
RE: I said in the introduction of one of my books, you know, I quote a line from Simone Weil, a French philosopher who died in the 1940s, who said that it’s not enough just to have saints, but we have to have saints or a holiness demanded by the present moment. So, you know, different times call for different kinds of models or different understandings of what holiness or sanctity might mean.
In Dorothy Day’s case—this is in a couple of her autobiographies or memoirs about her conversion—she cites this insight or question that came to her as a child. She said she was very moved and impressed by stories of saints who cared for the sick, the poor, and lepers, but she asked herself, “Why was so much done in responding to these needs rather than preventing the injury in the first place?” She wondered, “Where were the saints to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?” Now, I’ve remarked to myself that, well, that was a kind of question Dorothy answered with her own life, you know? She didn’t just spend her whole life looking for a saint who would show her how to do that. She invented that response herself so that, in the future, people wouldn’t have to ask, “Where are the saints to change the social order?” You could look at the example of Dorothy Day.
In other words, the saint is not somebody who just walks in the footsteps of holy examples from before, although many do. Many Franciscans or members of religious communities take the pattern of their founder as a paradigm for discipleship and live that out in a very specific way. But then there are these trailblazers who really invent a new path. It might not just be about changing the social order; it could be other ways—like the Franciscan path itself. St. Francis created this new model of religious life, not living in a monastery, but living in poverty, imitating Jesus in his poverty, in solidarity with those who are poor, living out this Gospel witness of non-violence, universal brotherhood, care for the earth, etc.
Even that Franciscan model could be enlarged today by people who say, “Okay, well, that has very specific relevance, let’s say, to care for creation in this era of climate change,” or his act of crossing a battlefield during the Crusades to meet personally with the Sultan. That is a model of dialogue and encounter across religious lines, or his care for women, his care for animals, his care for the poor, his model of non-violence, his option for the poor—all of these things can be seen as an expanding conception of how we might apply that to the needs of our time.
Dorothy Day, though, I think, did open up this new model of holiness that combined charity—the works of mercy—with work for justice. That is to say, not just addressing the victims of unemployment and the Depression, but really asking these challenging questions about a social system and the values that create so much poverty and the need for such works of mercy. She did the same thing with rediscovering the peace message of Jesus, which had been essentially lost for centuries, except in certain peace churches like the Anabaptists and in religious orders like the Benedictines and Franciscans, where non-violence was seen as an evangelical value—not to kill—but not something that applied to Christians as a whole or as a challenge to the war-making state.
So, many of the saints that I’m interested in are precisely those who are inventors of a new path. What interests me is not just that we should venerate their example, but that they raise the question for us—not about how we should be like them, but how we can find our own path, and the ways that might involve new invention or creativity on our part. There are examples all around of people who’ve done that.
Radix: As you’re talking, using the names of these various saints, I’m being incited towards goodness, which of course is a very good thing. You said in another interview, “Generally, we learn more from living examples of saints than we do from reading a book about ethics.” I think you’re proving the point as you’re talking about these things and I’m feeling moved towards this. I think it speaks to the power of story, because story is something that we can actually see lived out, something that can be replicated. You mentioned something about this in the introduction to Blessed Among Us. You said Edith Stein was reading, I think it was Teresa again, and she said, “One lamp lights another.” She read it all night and just lit up to this. So we hear about these stories about people and it incites us towards wanting to be that. Can you talk more about the power of story?
RE: Yes, I wrote a whole book about that called A Living Gospel: Reading God’s Story in Holy Lives.
Radix: Ah, okay.
RE: I’ve written a lot of stories about saints, but I hadn’t thought more generally about that question of reading the kind of gospel that’s written in the life of a saint. It inspires us to look at our own story in a new way. I write a lot about this in A Living Gospel and elsewhere, about the focus Pope Francis and the Catholic Church have given to the idea that the gospel is not just given to us in a codex of principles, truths, dogmas, or doctrines. It’s given to us, first of all, in the example—in the story—of Jesus.
And it’s significant that Christianity is rooted in those narratives where Jesus’s message is not just the Sermon on the Mount. It’s also in his traveling along the countryside, gathering disciples, encountering people who are suffering, sick, or in need, and contending with confrontation, challenges and criticism. Ultimately, it’s in his betrayal, suffering, death, and resurrection. You might ask, “Where’s God in this story?” Well, it’s the whole story. That includes the fasting and temptation in the desert, the misunderstandings with his disciples, all the times he is fed up and has to go out on a boat to get away from them—the journey toward Jerusalem where they are all arguing about who’s the greatest and missing the point of what he’s been teaching. It’s only when Jesus encounters the disciples on the road to Emmaus and tells them the whole story of faith, the whole history of salvation – but it’s a story! – that they finally get it, and their hearts burn within them.
I have all kinds of stories of saints who trace their conversion or vocation to their encounter with another saint. Now, that might be someone they met in person. For example, look at all the early followers of St. Francis who were challenged and so moved by the way he lived—not just because he was filled with authority, unlike others, but because he taught by example. His example wasn’t just about the good things he was doing but about the spirit of joy and freedom he exhibited, which was attractive and made people want to be around him to learn more about the secret of his joy. It’s like when the disciples are tagging along after Jesus, and he asks, “What are you looking for?” They don’t know how to answer, so they ask, “Where are you staying?”—a pretty lame question. They don’t know how to put their desire into words. And Jesus says, “Come and see.” The point is that you understand who he is and what he’s about by following him, by walking along the path with him.
Pope Francis talks a lot about what he calls a “journey faith,” in which we encounter God along the way—not in what he calls a “laboratory faith,” which is just a compendium of sacred truths and syllogisms, where there’s no doubt, no uncertainty, and everything can be worked out from first principles. In a journey faith, there’s searching, wondering, being on the path—that’s where we meet God, in our uncertainty and doubt, and where we take the risk of faith.
Take people who were impressed by St. Francis or Dorothy Day, or any other saint. It’s amazing how, when someone starts a little community, others come to join them and work with them once they see the example of how it can be done. But in a lot of cases, it’s through reading a book that people are moved. There are people who discover the gospel through stories—like Peter Waldo, a forerunner of St. Francis. He wasn’t as lucky as St. Francis in getting approval from the Church, but he paid a priest to translate the gospel for him and was astonished to discover that Jesus said things like, “Sell what you have, give to the poor, come follow me.”
So, the idea that the gospel story itself can be an invitation—but often, we think that’s all in Bible times, like 2,000 years ago. We think, “If we’d been there, if we’d seen Jesus with our own eyes, healing people or raising the dead, that would make a big impression on us.” But then there are people who read a book about a saint—like St. Augustine, in his Confessions, when he’s wavering on his conversion. He writes about coming across the Life of St. Anthony, this early Desert Father who lived 80 years before Augustine. To Augustine, that was like someone from his own time, not from hundreds of years ago. And he thinks, “Here’s this guy living like that,” and it made him think that the gospel life was for now.
And you mentioned Edith Stein reading Teresa of Avila—another famous story in the annals of the saints is Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. He started off as a courtier and soldier who was wounded in battle. While recovering from a very bad injury—he was hit by a cannonball in the leg, which shattered his leg—he asked for something to read. He was hoping for some courtly romances or stories about knights
Radix: [Laughter]
RE: But instead, they gave him a book of the Lives of the Saints. As he read these Lives of the Saints, he found his heart burning and started thinking, “Gosh, there’s a whole different concept of heroism and glory than I had previously assumed.” By the end of it, he was asking himself, “What if I lived like St. Francis or St. Dominic?” He didn’t become a Franciscan or a Dominican, but he went on a retreat, laid down his weapons, and became a soldier of Christ, which eventually led him to found the Society of Jesus.
Now, it’s one thing to talk about examples of saints, but I think that all of us in our own lives, if we look at what has really challenged us, can find similar examples. You can read the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for instance, but it’s the story of Bonhoeffer—how he started as a proud young intellectual pastor and went on a path of self-emptying, learning, as he said, to see the world from below, from the side of those who suffer—that truly impacts us. He could have run away from it, but he stayed, embraced the cost of discipleship, and was ultimately executed.
One story that has had a big impact on me is that of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian Catholic peasant who was executed during World War II for refusing to take an oath to Hitler. He believed that doing so would be blasphemous, that the Nazis were an idolatrous, satanic movement, and that compromising by just saying some words would imperil his immortal soul. His story is very much like that of the early Roman martyrs who were considered guilty of blasphemy because they wouldn’t burn incense in honor of the Roman emperors, the “god-men” of the empire.
But in the case of Franz Jägerstätter, he was the only lay Catholic in Austria to take this stand. It was a very solitary witness. He did it with no expectation of making the news, testifying in court, or changing people’s minds. It was simply something he felt he had to do, with no expectation that anyone would know about it or that it would have any effect whatsoever. It meant leaving behind a wife and children, who suffered all kinds of consequences because of his example.
There was a movie made a couple of years ago called A Hidden Life by Terrence Malick about him, but his story was only rediscovered in the 1960s. I came across that book during the Vietnam War, and it had a big impact on a lot of people like me who were wrestling with the question of what to do about the draft and our response to the war.
To take this back to something more personal—my father, who died a year ago, was Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense analyst who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to The New York Times and other press outlets. He was arrested and put on trial on espionage charges, facing 115 years in prison. He ended up getting off scot-free because of government misconduct—a long story connected with Watergate that ultimately contributed to the downfall of the Nixon administration and the end of the Vietnam War. A lot of people say, “Wow, what a heroic thing he did.” When he was arrested, a reporter in Boston asked him, “What do you think about going to jail?” and he responded, “Well, wouldn’t you go to jail if it would help end this war?”
Radix: Wow.
RE: The answer is, well, no—most people would say no. But a lot of people do those kinds of things, thinking it’s just what someone should do. But the important thing that people don’t necessarily recognize is the direct line between what my father did and the influence of an encounter with a young man, one man in particular named Randy Kehler, who he heard at a conference announce that he was about to go to jail for refusing to cooperate with the draft. And it raised the question in my father’s mind: “What could I do if I were willing to go to jail?” Because he’d been doing everything else he could think of to help end the war. It gave him the idea to copy the top-secret documents in his safe and make them available. I’ve seen in my own life that very direct connection—how one lamp lights another—that this kind of contagion of conscience.
I started by talking about the story of St. Alban, that Roman martyr in Britain who exchanged his cloak with a priest and died in his place. There’s another interesting aspect to the story—the executioner who was supposed to cut off Alban’s head was so moved by his example that he declared himself a Christian, and he too was executed, sort of baptized, as they say, in his own blood. So, you see this kind of chain reaction, where the example of someone—not necessarily giving their life, but simply living in a way that seems authentic, true, and attractive—compels others. It opens our minds and hearts to think in a new way: What could I do? Not necessarily to end a war or anything so grand, but what could I do if I were to take my faith as seriously as that? If I were to take my faith out of just Sunday observance and into my everyday life—maybe even into my civic life, my relationships with my community, and the world around me?
The challenges of history are at all kinds of different levels, and it doesn’t have to be on a heroic scale to matter. It begins, in all these cases, with just a single first step. For St. Francis, that first step was encountering a leper along the road. He was giving the leper some coins, and some impulse in him moved him to kiss the leper’s hand. He had always had this abhorrence of leprosy—of anything ugly or diseased—and this was the beginning of shaking him loose from his conventional life, his culture, his status, and his relationship to upward mobility and his class. It set him free to allow the gospel to take root in his heart and to live accordingly.
In my own life, I’ve been affected by those kinds of examples, and it’s one of the reasons I felt it was worthwhile to use the talents I have to collect, share, and tell these stories. Recently, my book All Saints was released in a 25th-anniversary edition, which is amazing to me. I wrote a new introduction for it and began by reflecting on the importance of how we are shaped by what we love—what we find beautiful, both morally and aesthetically. How that enlarges our imagination, informs and feeds our conscience, and increases our capacity to heed our conscience and act on it.
But I ended by telling the story of St. Ignatius, who asked, “What if I should live like St. Francis or St. Dominic?” I write a piece called Blessed Among Us for Give Us This Day, and one of the stories I wrote about was a little boy named Mattie Stepanek, who died at the age of 13 from a congenital illness that had also caused the death of his older siblings. He knew all his life that he was going to die young, yet he lived in a very full and generous way. He became a catechist in his parish, wrote bestselling books of poetry about peace, and befriended Jimmy Carter, who gave the eulogy at his funeral. He was on Oprah, and she said he was the most remarkable guest she’d ever had. He communicated to everyone a spirit of love, peace, and the importance of making every day matter—of using your life to the fullest in the spirit of Christ.
After writing about him, I received a message from his mother, who was very grateful that I had noticed Mattie’s story among all these other great people I write about. She said she recognized my name from somewhere and sent me a picture—it was the cover of my book All Saints. She said Mattie read this book every day and would check it out of the library every two weeks when he couldn’t afford a copy of his own. I thought, “Here’s a child saint who found inspiration in a book of saints that I wrote,” and it reminded me why I write these things. He didn’t need my book to be who he was, but there’s this idea that we are all part of a community of people united in their effort to truly apply the gospel to their daily lives.
The title of my book A Living Gospel comes from a line in a spiritual classic by a French Jesuit named Jean Pierre de Caussade, where he says, “The Holy Spirit writes no more gospels except in our hearts. All we do from moment to moment is live this new gospel of the Holy Spirit. If we are holy, we are the paper; our sufferings and actions are the ink. The workings of the Holy Spirit are His pen, and with it, He writes a living gospel.” The point of my writing is that we first see this gospel written in the stories of holy people, and that it inspires us to reflect more deeply on our own lives, our own journeys, and to see the ways in which grace, God’s love, or truth has been present in our stories. Not just in holy moments in church, but in moments of inspiration, challenges, vocational calling, and in times of trouble, doubt, and confusion. Often, we can only see it by looking backward, because in the moment, we don’t know where we’re going.
There’s a Disney movie about a Mormon missionary called The Other Side of Heaven. I don’t know if anyone’s seen this movie, but it moved me very much. The hero, who is a Mormon missionary on a South Pacific island, goes through all kinds of ordeals and suffering and comes to love the people, and they come to love him. He writes back to his fiancée in the United States that what he’s learned from all of this is that there’s a thread that connects heaven and earth. If we find that thread, everything is meaningful, even death. If we don’t find it, nothing is meaningful, even life.
Radix: Hmm.
RE: And that’s kind of, you know, what a lot of my writing is about—people who found that thread and held on to it. It endowed everything they did with a kind of purpose and transcendent meaning, and it inspires us to reach out our hand and search for that thread ourselves. That’s a lot of what I’ve tried to do with writing about saints and holiness.