The idea of the Book of Saints
I was going to write a story once about a young man who was interested in the following fact: Of all the people who have ever lived at any time in history, more than half of them are alive right now at this moment. That means that there are more people alive right now as I am click click clicking away at my keyboard than have lived and died during all the time that existed on the planet earth since the cave men.
The man is a man who is interested in God and in the saints, and so he gets to thinking about all the saints that ever lived. In Catholic churches, there are over 10,000, he finds out, and so he figures that if you include the Hindus and the Muslims and the Buddhists and the Jews and everyone that there must be loads more that people found out about and wrote down over time. Maybe even one million, he figures.
So he is thinking about these two facts and he decides that by the numbers, since he is also scientific, that there must be at least one million saints living right now since logically speaking the percentage of saints in the general population would stay the same, if everything was fair and equal and right, which, as a man concerned with saints, he believes it must be.
He becomes very excited and hopeful, and he takes out a notebook and goes on a mission to record the Sayings of the Saints, so that in the future people can know what the saints of 2009 had to say about life on Earth and life as Human Beings. The problem is that he does not know where to look for saints, as they are probably scattered all around, and sometimes, living in secret.
But he is full of hope and so he begins right where he is, and he goes down to the local bar just to watch and listen. He begins writing down the things that people say. He continues by going to church and writing down everything that people say there, and he goes also to the mosque and he goes to the synagogue, and he goes to the VFW and he goes to the soup kitchen, and the to Kinkos and he writes down everything.
And he begins to become frustrated, because he cannot tell what is holy and what is not.
He begins to go back through the notebook and reread what he has written down in the hopes that by doing so he will discover something saintly hidden in the pages he has already. Every night he sits with his notebook open, running his pencil over and over the words he has already written, until they become like one long line in the notebook and the words begin to run together.
(This is the meaning of the way I write using one long line.)
He continues writing and continues writing and he becomes more and more worried that there just aren’t saints anymore, since everyhting he has written is so ordinary. He is thinking that the world has become ordinary, and that it has become too cold and too concrete for saints, and he keeps thinking that what he is up to is a failure.
But one day he is in a Walmart and he is writing and writing everything that everyone is saying. The checker lady and the customers talking about prices, he is writing it all down. And an old man comes up to him and watches over the shoulder without our hero noticing. And he sees what the young man is doing and he says
He says, “Hey there what are you writing down?”
And the young man says “I am writing down everything because I am hoping to find a saint.”
And the old man says “I think you found some.”
And the young man says “where?”
And the old man says, “All of them,” he says, “Seems to me that all you got to do to have someone be a saint is to believe they are a saint, and with the sort of records you are keeping here there ain’t no way a single person in that book of yours ain’t gonna have a decent shot at being holy.” He says, “Seems to me that all people need to be saints is understanding, and with a book like that I figure you’ve got more than enough understanding for them. Just gotta believe it now.”
And so that is the end I think. The idea is that everything in the world is holy, it is just opinions that divide things into good and bad, and most of the time the main character did not realize that he had to try hard to undivide things. It did not matter if someone went to church or even if they believed in God, it just mattered that they were “called to holiness,” which is the definition of a saint. What the main character realizes right at the end is that everyone is called to holiness, and the surprising part is not that everyone is a saint, the surprising part is that we don’t treat each other like this.
I wanted to start a book of saints on the internet where people could contribute small snippets of things they heard or saw and I would put it all up so that everyone could read what all the holy people were up to. Someday if there are an extremely high number of people interested I will begin this project and I think it will turn out just fine.