The trouble with saints is that they can seem so alien. I was pregnant with my fifth child when we decided to begin reading through Butler’s Lives of the Saints looking for a name. We got to Rose of Lima and my husband read the story straight: the pepper rubbed into her face until open sores appeared, the crown of roses affixed to her head with pins stuck into her scalp. By this time, our oldest two were laughing so hard he had to stop. Then we started laughing too. We still loved the name, but Rose was off the list. And, in those years, if one of my daughters announced as Catherine of Siena had that “God satisfies me so in the Holy Eucharist that it is impossible for me to desire any species of corporal nourishment,” I’d listen, and I’d pray, but I’d also call a doctor.
Sometimes the 14th century doesn’t travel well.
So when I talked to my children about saints, I always included people they knew, people who helped raise them and people who greeted them each Sunday at Mass.
That’s the genius of these days, All Saints and All Souls, kept side by side. Because the faithful departed we know help us to better understand the saints of whom we’re told. My kids still talk about my mother’s friend Joni who used to take them to her trailer in Palo Duro Canyon, where she gave them Orange Crush and let them roast marshmallows over a fire they helped to start. Joni and Dudley married at fourteen and began sharecropping. They were born poor and lived poor, but Joni knew there was always someone in greater need than they.
I remember the day her neighbor came to the door. His baby was sick, and he and his wife had spent the grocery money on medicine and doctor visits. He needed money. Joni said, “I don’t have any money, hon, but come on in. I’ll give you half of all my food.” And that’s exactly what she did. Like Martin of Tours dividing his cloak, Joni divided the cans in her pantry and the eggs and produce in her refrigerator and the meat in her freezer, making herself the bridge from that hungry day until the next payday. Joni did it because she was a Christian and took Jesus at his word when he said that if someone wants your tunic, give him your cloak as well.
Joni also smoked and weighed somewhere north of three hundred pounds and teased her hair and wore long, brightly polished fingernails. She did not look like a saint, unless we envision saints wearing paisley polyester caftans and blue eye shadow. Her image wouldn’t travel any better than that of disfigured Rose or emaciated Catherine. But we saw Joni’s holiness with our own eyes. We knew it just as people in Lima and Siena knew the holiness in their midst.
And if Joni Johnson is ever formally recognized by the Church, her attribute will be a pantry, with half of the food gone, given away by a woman who wasn’t at all sure she could afford to buy her own groceries. But you won’t really need to look for her attribute; the eye shadow and the nails will lead you to her, every time.
Melissa Musick Nussbaum is a religious educator, speaker, and the author of numerous books, most recently The Catholic Catalogue: A Field Guide to the Daily Acts That Make Up a Catholic Life. Visit her website, thecatholiccatalogue.com.
[CREDIT] Melissa Musick Nussbaum, from the November 2017 issue of Give Us This Day, www.giveusthisday.org(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017). Used with permission
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