Woodeene Koenig-Bricker - Facing Adversity with Grace: Lessons from the Saints

I 've long been intrigued by the lives of the saints. One of my earliest memories is reading A Picture Book of Saints (I think it's still on a shelf in my library). However, even as a child, I must have been a bit of a skeptic because I can remember thinking that many of the stories sounded like fairy tales. In particular, Simeon Stylites (ca. 390459 A.D.), who lived on the top of a tower for thirty-nine years, sparked my incredulity. Just how did he go to the bathroom? I'd been camping often enough to know that all the possibilities I could imagine didn't bode well for anyone unlucky enough to be standing under his tower. Clearly, the lives of the saints were missing some important details!

When I became an adult, I realized that when it comes to saints, biography and hagiography aren't the samenot by a long shot. Biography is the historical recollection of an individual's life, while hagiographyliterally holy writingis the specialized form of biography that deals with saints, and saints only. Unlike biographers who want to get to the truth of a life, no matter how scandalous, hagiographers often want to ensure that their subjects are portrayed as truly deserving of sanctity, so anything unbecoming or unseemly (unless it is gloriously redeemed) is glossed over, and, in fact, actual events are sometimes massaged a bit to fit the overarching pious message.

This came home to me on the day that Mother Teresa of Kolcata died. Her doctor, who was being interviewed on television, said that her last words were I can't breathe, something perfectly reasonable for a person who is dying of congestive heart failure. However, it is now widely reported that she said, I love you, Jesus. Of course it's possible that she said both things and that her Indian doctor, being more in tune with the medical aspects than with Christian prayer, only remembered and reported the part that had to do with the cause of her death. But I'm also pretty sure that anyone wanting to guarantee that she be remembered as holy and eventually canonized wasn't going to have her talking about lack of breath in her last statement. A biographer would want to know what she actually said; a hagiographer wants us to remember what she said that contributed to her sanctity. If this sort of discrepancy can happen in the twentieth century, imagine what might have been remembered about earlier saints. It's not surprising that some of them appear to have had no real human characteristics at all!

That's why, in all my writing about the saints, I've tried to take St. Thrse of Lisieux's words to heart: We should not say improbable things, or things we do not know [about the saints]. We must see their real, and not their imagined lives. I've always tried to find out the real story behind the legends, not what people might have wanted the saints to be, say, or do, say.

In Facing Adversity with Grace, I've taken a few liberties with what the saints might have been thinking because I've had to tease out lessons from their lives. But I've done my best not to credit those I've written about with improbable things, nor to create fantasy stories out of whole cloth and pious desire. Because of that, you might not find some of your favorite saints or most cherished stories here. My criterion has been simple: If the reports of a saint raise my eyebrows and sound too good to be true, I tend to think they may have been dressed up a bit with pious imagining and holy hopes.

One other thing about the saints: I believe that some of them may have walked the tightrope between holiness and madness. (Maybe coming that close to the face of the Divine does that to you. I don't know since I'm not in any danger of canonization!) However, that's the reason you won't find much talk of saints in this book who appeared to take pleasure in suffering for suffering's sake or who induced suffering by extensive self-punishment. If a saint's approach to suffering would not be considered emotionally healthy today, I haven't included it as a contemporary lesson.

That doesn't mean that I don't appreciate people like Rose of Lima, my own patron saint, who destroyed her beauty by tossing lye on her face. I understand that the saints who did such things were doing what they believed God wanted in the context of the spiritual practices of their time and place. However, if I don't find their way of approaching suffering to be very helpful for my own life, I assume that you, the reader, probably won't either.

The saints in this book, even though they come from a variety of eras and cultures, are men and women who can teach us how to live with adversity and the inevitable pain that comes from being human. They also show us how to cope with some of the more common types of adversity todayfrom financial stress to family issues to struggling with addictions or weight. It is adversity that most of us will be familiar with in one degree or another. I have included questions for your reflection at the end of each chapter as well as a prayer, often from the saint.

My goal here is not to glorify pain, nor is it to make anyone feel guilty if he or she isn't as enthusiastic about suffering as some of the saints seemed to be. I firmly and absolutely believe (as I will discuss in the ) that God does not want us to suffer but wants us to live abundant lives. While we all will experience some pain on our life journeys, becoming entrenched in suffering is not honoring God, nor is it living abundantly. So my hope for you is that as you read how the saints faced suffering and adversity, you will discover not just words of spiritual consolation but genuine, practical measures for your daily life in order to eliminate unnecessary pain and to claim the abundant life that God has promised each one of us. After all, this life in the vale of tears may not always be easy, but it is always good!