There is, however, a part of me that chafes at being content with “good enough.” I have heard quoted more than once the saying, “The only great tragedy is not to have become a saint.” This haunts me. What makes a saint uniquely qualified to wax about Heaven? What inspires him or her in magnanimity? What leads people who have never met them to invoke their intercession hundreds of years after their death? And what makes me think I can join their lot?
The saint, on the surface, may be all the things the respectable man is not—a holy fool, or a man of contradiction and uncouthness. He may be obsessive with the things of Heaven at the expense of manners and convention. He would rather die than commit a mortal sin. He is always “a bit much.”
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