“May God protect me from gloomy saints.” St. Teresa of Avila

My childhood piety was of the unquestioning kind, seasoned by the rhythm of the rosary, the regular confession of venial sins and the stories of the saints. These sainted lives became the fabric of a faith peopled by the mysterious, the martyred and the mystical. My mother possessed a tiny silver-encased relic of St. Maria Goretti, the patron saint of girls, and I would gaze at it with a mixture of curiosity and alarm, drawn into another realm of story, worlds away from Dick and Jane and the adventures of the Secret Seven.

At school at Genazzano, we would walk across to the grotto where Our Lady stood in mystical visitation in front of the young Bernadette. We would then proceed to the chapel where the flicker of votive candles and the potent swirl of incense and imagination fuelled my wonderment. Our supplication to the saints depended on their stories and the grislier the better. There was no room for the neat deaths of gentle expiration or graced last moments or celestial dormition. The stories of scourging and gouging and lions’ dens and glorious unbowed, unflinching martyrdom took hold. This was faith of the lion-heated variety. I loved it from the safety of my own unchallenged freedom to believe. I still have a copy of Miniature Stories of the Saints (volume 4) held together with sticky tape and hope, its pages well-thumbed over the years. First published in 1946 by the Rev. Daniel. A. Lord, SJ, these small books still sell well in parish porches, a sort of Golden Book of the saints.

Saints cover a lot of holy ground. My mother was especially devoted to Saint Gerard Majella, the patron saint of expectant mothers. St Anthony, as the patron saint of lost things, has many calls on him for missing keys and misplaced credit cards. We now have our own home-grown Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop, who knew that poverty of the soul started with the poverty of the streets. It was she who taught in a humble classroom and founded an order of nuns who understood the drover and the cockie, the harried wife and the homeless man. It was she who understood that things needed to be done and did them in her no-nonsense, sleeves-rolled-up, practical Australian way.

I love the fact that there are patron saints for practically everything. St Crispin is the patron saint of bikies, and leatherworkers, tanners and cobblers. St. Drogo is the patron saint of coffee houses and must be especially active in a Melbourne whose coffee culture started in the boom times of the 1880s with coffee palaces promoted by the Temperance Movement to ward off the evils of alcohol. Drinking coffee at the time meant you were seen as more saint than sinner. I have only just learned that the Keep Cup was invented in Melbourne a decade ago and is now available in 65 countries. Perhaps, next time you enjoy that frothy cappuccino, short black or soy latte, you can say a prayer for all the baristas who have kept us going during the lockdown. For some of us, the prospect of a coffee out while walking puts an immediately brighter spin on the day.

And then there are the saints of early times with names such Symphorianus, Zeno and Gwinear. And I was fascinated to find out that the phrase, the bonfire of the vanities originated from St. Bernardino of Siena, a popular 15th Century preacher who encouraged his flock to burn objects of temptation or material vanities. Apiarists have St. Ambrose and lawyers have St. Thomas More and undertakers have Joseph of Arimathea, the righteous man who provided the burial tomb for Jesus. And for all those whose computers have crashed or whose work has been lost in cyberspace we now have St. Isidore, the patron saint of technology and the Internet, to whom desperate invocations may be made at any hour of the day or night, anywhere on Earth – truly a universal saint for the 21st century globally connected village. Dear St. Christopher, beloved of travellers, and to whom we dedicated many a family car trip on the slow Sundays of the past, has since been delisted by the Vatican, but he still holds a place in popular imagination.

Now, in my middle years, the saints are as alive to me as they ever were. This special Catholic cavalcade makes me marvel at the downright goodness and charity and perseverance of those who put God and good first, often at great personal cost. Pope Francis reminds us that we all have the capacity for saintliness and that there is no place for gloomy-faced saints or those lacking good humour when we have the joyful witness of the Good News to buoy us.

Saint Paul in his Letters often greeted the early Christians as saints as they went about their ordinary lives. If we choose to, we can be one of those everyday saints who do our best wherever we find ourselves. We will not make it to the big list of the saints, blessed or venerable, but we will have done a little of God’s good work in our own small daily spheres. We can be Saints Alive!

By Ann Rennie

This is an edited version from Blessed: Meditations on a Life of Small Wonders now available from Laneway Press.