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3 The Lives of the Saints John Woolman, Simone Weil, and Dorothy Day Introduction Michel de Certeau, a postmodern commentator on sainthood, notes what he calls “the Franciscan dream”—“that a body might preach without speaking, and that in walking around, it might make visible what lives within.” Such integration is beyond our imagination—to actually live, to be, to embody what one believes. What integrity, what joy, what absence of guilt and anxiety—one imagines that such an existence would indeed be “salvation,” full health and wholeness. Edith Wyschogrod, another commentator on sainthood, suggests the analogy of performing versus merely appreciating music: the difference between saints and most of us is that saints not only appreciate but also perform. It is not enough simply to know and admire the good life; the goal is to do it. Moral theories, even the best ones, do not result in moral actions. Would it make a difference if we paid close attention to some stories of people who have actually “performed” the good life? Could such lives serve as parables, disorient our usual worldview, open up other possibilities? And could our study of their lives, with a focus on the process by which they came to be performers, help us become performers as well? Fifty years ago, when I first began reading the lives of the saints, these possibilities both frustrated and fascinated me. I was frustrated because I sensed that, for people like Francis of Assisi, the process of turning belief into action was hidden within their bodies, within the daily and ordinary actions that made up their lives. The center of our contemporary dilemma—of turning belief into action with regard to the economic and ecological crises— appears seamless in the life of Francis. He does not agonize over “theory” and “practice,” calculating the next steps in his journey toward total love of God and neighbor; rather, he embodies it. And yet, it surely must be a process: no one is born a saint, as Dorothy Day insists. And John Woolman, who remarked that “conduct is more convincing than words,” actually lived his words of radical love. No one does this, we say, or at least we know that we do not. 39 40 Blessed Are the Consumers And we also know that the embodiment of right thinking, of thinking that is good for the planet, is necessary if we are to survive, let alone prosper. But my frustration with the saints is matched by my decades-long fascination with them. The way they communicate—by living rather than preaching—certainly holds a clue to our central problem of moving from belief to action. How can they do it when we cannot? What is the process whereby they overcome constant and overwhelming self-centeredness so that they can actually see the pain of others and act on it? Again and again, as I have noted, analysts of the economic and ecological crises come up against the solid wall of a worldview that puts each and every one of us at the center—a worldview supported by the institutions of our society, especially market consumerism, but one that we also embrace with a combination of delight and denial. How to break through this all-encompassing picture of ourselves so that we can imagine other possibilities and perhaps then act on them, at least in some measure? Can the saints help us here? Strangely enough, I believe they can. In this chapter, I would like to suggest some of the important stages on this journey from paralysis to action, how the saints “walk” their beliefs. This is merely my reading of the lives of the saints; it is not meant to be a contribution to the scholarly literature on them. My focus is solely on how one moves from “here” to “there,” from knowing the good to actually doing it. As I understand the lives of the saints, there are four main stages of this movement. First, parables, voluntary poverty, and other forms of “wild space” open up the possibility of something different; the “bubble” of conventionality is burst so that one might contemplate another way of being in the world. Second, this awakening allows one to practice paying attention to others, focusing primarily on their material condition, their bodily needs. Third, this practice results in a much broader view of the self, one that involves loving the neighbor as the self and thus calls for kenosis, sharing, restraint, self-sacrifice...

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