Translated by Gabriela Dragnea
Oh you saints,
Let me enter your society,
If only as a statistician.
You’re old,
Perhaps the years are
Getting you down by now,
Laying themselves over you
In layers of color.
Just let me take care
Of your dirty work in
All the nooks and crannies.
For example I could
Swallow light
At the Last Supper
And exhale your halos
After the devotionals.
At a distance of half a wall,
I could
Form my hands into a horn
And shout,
Now for the believers,
Now for the unbelievers
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Whimsical as it is, something in this piquant appeal to the saints touches my heart. I recognize in it the very human, childlike desire just to “hang around” with the people one admires, watch them, learn from them, enjoy their company. Any of us who spent certain school years on the margins of a particular in-group, not quite a member, though not entirely excluded, may remember the feeling of wanting to be accepted, but also of not being quite ready to be “one of them.”
The analogy occurs to me as I reread this 1991 poem by Sorescu, a courageous Romanian poet and playwright. The speaker, evidently gazing at a painting, imagines entering into the company of the saints, if only as a servant. He imagines what he might do for them and among them. He could be “a statistician,” perhaps documenting their miracles, keeping a census of their growing numbers, counting the churches, schools, and hospitals established in their names. He could hold their halos like hats, carrying their light in his own lungs, breathing it back to them in due time. He could be a kind of mascot or runner, a water boy, a cheerleader who sends up the shout to be echoed by millions, starting a wave of rejoicing with his own “Hallelujah!”
I am reminded, in these eager imaginings, of walking down the long aisle of Our Lady of the Angels, the Catholic cathedral in Los Angeles. Tapestries lining both walls are filled with images of saints, named and unnamed, representing many generations, many peoples, many stories told and told again. All of them stand in profile, facing the altar—visible reminders to contemporary worshipers to pause a little longer over these words in the Creed: “I believe in . . . the communion of saints. . . .” On any given Sunday, the faithful who have gathered there stand among them—Mary Magdalene, St. Joseph, St. Francis, St. Catherine, martyrs, teachers, healers, slaves. I stood among them alone that day, imagining, like Sorescu’s speaker, the questions I might ask them, imagining meeting them on another plane, finding my way into conversations that would lift me into a realm of divine intelligence and loving-kindness from which the pollutions of petty resentments, distractions, half-truths, and adulterated motives had been filtered, leaving only air and light and laughter like music.
I didn’t grow up praying to saints. Even the term “saints” was used cautiously in my home. A conversation with a kindly priest in my early years helped open me up to the notion that we might address those who have gone before us in the long lineage of believers as friends and fellow travelers, seeking their help, recognizing them as our elders whose wisdom might serve us now.
The saints we name and remember from Christian history as particular models of faithful living are worth “hanging around.” It’s worth reading their stories—not, perhaps, the sanitized hagiographies, but the well-researched biographies that allow us to see some of the warp and woof, the tensions and stresses and struggles and surprises of lives informed by faith. It was from Catholic friends who were quite comfortable with prayer to saints, and with their membership in that wide communion, that I first learned this energetic hymn, which has also found its way into Protestant hymnals: “I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true. . . .” The verses catalog them: “one was a doctor, one was a queen, one was a shepherdess on the green . . . and one was a soldier and one was a priest and one was slain by a fierce wild beast. . . .” Each verse ends with the intention and the prayer that, “God helping,” I might be one too. It’s not too much to ask, in hope and delighted anticipation, believing that “there is no competition in the kingdom of heaven,” where even “ ‘the least’ will be full of light” and gladness.