This interview appears in Issue 20 of The Mockingbird print magazine, which is all about success and failure. Find out more here, or subscribe here.

When you think of the saints, what comes to mind? Likely, they’re stiff, haloed figures in stained glass, gazing up to the heavens, a soft light shining through their faces. They’re the superstars of the Christian faith, celebrated for superhuman acts of piety and discipline. But as awe-inspiring as such people can be, their sanctity can also feel sanctimonious and unfamiliar, especially to those who are tentative about faith in the first place. As the Catholic social justice advocate Dorothy Day famously said, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”

Karen Wright Marsh doesn’t want you to dismiss the saints, either. She employs the term “saint” generously, in the broadest sense, often pairing it with “sinner” to remind you that even the saints were hopelessly human. Marsh is the author of Vintage Saints and Sinners: 25 Christians Who Transformed My Faith, in which she writes about canonized icons like Augustine, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Mother Teresa, alongside figures like the fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and pioneer Mary Paik Lee.

For Marsh, these saints are more than their most pious acts; indeed, their acts of piety are inextricable from their muddier personal histories. Her favorite definition of “saint” comes from Thomas Merton, who said, “To be a saint means to be myself”— that is, the good and the bad, all redeemed in Christ. “It’s not about the things that you do,” Marsh explained when we met for this interview. “But it’s who God created you to be.”

Through her non-profit Theological Horizons, Marsh hosts weekly luncheons with college students, at which, over a home-cooked meal, she discusses lesser known “saints” in down-to-earth terms that the students can relate to. You can tune into her podcast, Vintage Saints and Sinners, to hear similar conversations. In this interview Marsh shares stories about some of her favorite saints, as well as why it’s important to study the lives of our forebears. She sheds light on some of their shortcomings and discusses what “success” might look like in the Christian life. Our conversation took place at a local restaurant near her home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Mockingbird

What inspired you to write about these saint-sinners?

Karen Wright Marsh

Early on, when my husband Charles and I first came here to the University of Virginia, a young woman asked if I would lead a Bible study for her and for her friends. She told me that her friends weren’t really Christians — they hadn’t grown up in the Church. And she herself had a very ambivalent relationship with the faith in which she’d grown up. So I got the idea that instead of doing a Bible study, which can be intimidating, we could simply explore readings from the Christian tradition.

M

Rather than the reading of the Christian tradition.

KWM

Right. The Bible, where you feel like your reading of it has to be “right,” because we bring a certain absolute respect to the scripture.

On the other hand, if you’re just telling somebody’s story, and you’re engaging with their writings, you can say, “What do you think about what C. S. Lewis is saying here?” And anyone can have an opinion.

M

It’s not like disagreeing with St. Paul.

KWM

Right? I mean, it takes a lot of confidence to say, “Romans is all wrong!”

And so every week we would get together, and I would tell the story of one of these old brothers or sisters in the faith, whether it was Dorothy Day or François Fénelon or Amanda Berry Smith — people I didn’t really even know of at the time.

M

You’ve written about so many saints. You’ve crossed continents.

KWM

Continents, centuries, ethnicities. I started looking more broadly, because I wanted to read about more women, and meet people from other countries who just don’t make it into the basic Western canon.

What this has become for me is a way of talking about Christianity, about spirituality, in a way that is, hopefully, very welcoming. My intention is to remove any barriers to the conversation. I can say, come, hear the story about Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was a Mexican woman who was born as an illegitimate child, so she couldn’t get married, so she had to become a nun — but she was also a great intellectual who had the biggest library in Mexico in her convent cell. Like, come check this out. Who is this female theologian you’ve never heard of? And what does she tell us? So it’s an invitation to hear stories. To me, it feels quirky and inviting. But it also puts everybody on a level playing field, because soon it’s clear that these people are human, like the rest of us.

M

It’s good for someone like me, because I would never sit down and read a full-blown biography of anyone. I would get bogged down in the details and never finish.

KWM

Honestly, if I said, “Here is a riveting biography of Catherine of Sienna,” most people would be like, “Give me the short version.” My goal is to boil these stories down and deliver them for maximum effect. And I’ve been working with university students for so long that I’m always looking for the funny angle, asking, when these saint-sinners were 18 to 21, what were they doing? Okay, Augustine? The original party boy. It was crazy the way he was in college. He arrived at UCarthage with a reputation for drinking, stealing, and promiscuity; by eighteen, he’d fathered a baby with his girlfriend, and he was studying the Roman philosophy of Cicero — you never would have seen him at a Christian Bible study, ever.

Some of these people are well-known — but there are many whose stories have never been told widely. There’s one woman, Pandita Ramabai, born in the 19th century in India, who was a Brahmin, part of the highest caste in Hindu society. Her father was a scholar of Sanskrit, and he taught her how to read their sacred texts, but at some point she discovered the Gospel of John, and she was really intrigued by it. It’s a long story, but she became widowed very young and lost her place in society, because widows were considered cursed. She ended up going to England in the company of missionaries and began teaching at a seminary there. And then she traveled across America, where she met Sojourner Truth, and then went back to India to start an orphanage and school for abandoned girls. Along the way she became a Christian, because she saw Christianity as a religion of liberation for women and as a faith of respect for all people. I just think that’s remarkable.

M

You don’t hear many Hindu-to-Christian conversion stories, not in a normal Bible study.

KWM

I never did! But I do think we all long to hear stories. We need to learn about our brothers and sisters who went before us, to see what it looks like to inhabit richly varied expressions of faith and human experience.

And on this issue of success and failure, we’ve inherited powerful ideas from our own culture and from our peers and our parents and our bosses. But it’s an interesting experiment to imagine all the different ways and different circumstances in which Christians have lived. What does success mean in the jungle of India? Or in a cloister in France? Or in the Dark Ages?

M

I’m thinking of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who lived an extremely small life. As a teenager, she tries to go to a convent, gets rejected, finally gets in, kind of hates it. She writes this little journal, then she dies. Right?

KWM

Right. And when she died, the nuns literally said they could not possibly write an obituary because there was nothing to say. It appeared to them as if her life was a total failure, and now she’s the patron Saint of France. It’s just so weird, poignant and funny, in a way. Poor Thérèse.

M

When you were a kid, didn’t you want to be a nun?

KWM

Well, we all experiment with wild ideas of how our lives could be different. Looking back, I realize I didn’t really want to be a nun. Maybe a Sound of Music nun, but not a real nun. The simplicity of it seemed attractive; I wouldn’t have had to make many decisions. I’d have known that, okay, you have to get up at four in the morning for prayer. But beyond that, a nun doesn’t have to think about, What is my calling? What is my job going to be? How am I going to get my health insurance covered? You just sign up, and you’re there for the rest of your life, until you die. But clearly I never committed.

Sometimes we think of removed religious communities as an escape from the world. But Thérèse found out pretty quickly that it’s not that easy, because humans lived there. It was like… the classic problem. Haha. Wherever you go, there you are.

But again, we often think our lives should look a certain way and that success means, you know, getting that consulting job or some variation on that theme. But there will always be such a range of ways to be in the world. I think it’s healthy to entertain that; you get freed up a little bit. There’s the story, for example, of a supermodel — her name is Amada Rosa Pérez — who was a pretty successful TV actress from Colombia. But in 2005 she became a nun, because she was just sick of the whole thing. She said, “I was always in a hurry and stressed out. Now I live in peace, and the world doesn’t appeal to me.”

I just think that success and failure — these are such strange categories we have. And these saints — they were all different. That’s one thing I love about them. There’s so much variation. You can’t say they all did the same thing. For example, John Wesley preached on horseback, and people have said that if you measured how far he went, he rode around the entire globe four times or something like that. He preached five sermons a day. It was ridiculous.

M

A bit of a workaholic.

KWM

He was a mess, but that was his expression of faith. And he could preach out in the open air for, I don’t know, 20,000 people at a time. It wasn’t like he was meditating on a mountain. He was going hard, rising and grinding all the time.

But then you look at somebody like Benedict. Even now Benedictine monastics only work three hours a day. That’s it. And when the bell rings at 12:40 p.m., work is done for the day. Then they eat, pray, sleep, pray — they pray a lot. And, you know, prayer is also their labor.

There’s a new book out called The End of Burnout by Jon Malesic. Have you heard of it? He writes about visiting a monastery and seeing that their way of life is no secret because they’ve been doing it for, what, 1,500 years? The monks are all about balancing the day. They have seven prayer periods throughout the day, so you begin to see why they literally do their work for three hours.

One day the bell rings as usual at 12:40, and Malesic asks this one monk, who was a defense attorney in his former life, “How can you quit work after three hours, when you know that there’s so much more to do?” The monk says, “Well, you get over it.” And they do.

M

But these monks must feed themselves, and run their monastery? They’re not maximizing profits, obviously.

KWM

Part of the story is that these monks were designing a website, which became very successful — it was blowing up — but they didn’t have the staff to keep up with the demand. And they refused to compromise their schedule in service of this project. So they shut it down.

It’s startling. But I think we can examine our own lives, and ask, What are the insane acts of discipline that we do in service to our gods or idols or ideals or ideas of success and perfection? We might think we’re free, that we’ve chosen how to live our lives, but in fact we’re following a lot of expectations.

M

And all those expectations are so normalized that you don’t think twice about them.

KWM

Well, we’re trying to get recognition, money, promotion, advancement — the things that look like success.

M

What about the failures of these saints? Can you talk a little about that?

KWM

Well, I have a really hard time reconciling myself to A. W. Tozer, who was a renowned Bible preacher in Chicago. My grandmother loved him. He led intense Bible studies and college students would flock to him. He would pray for four hours a day, and he was esteemed as a phenomenal man of God. Even now, I know people who read his work and find it very helpful.

But he was just the worst husband. He had seven kids, and he never took them on vacation. Ever! He was too busy doing the Lord’s work. And also he was like, “We don’t need a car” — so that meant that his wife had to track through the snow carrying their groceries. He gave away all his profits from his books, never copyrighted his work. He gave back all of his retirement money. He said, “I don’t need any of that” — and so when he died, there was no money for his family.

His kids hated macaroni and cheese, because that’s all they ever ate.

M

It sounds like he took a vow of poverty —

KWM

On behalf of his whole family! Right. And so here was Tozer, a man whom everybody would say was a saint, apart from his family. There were no scandals of sexual abuse or financial misdeeds, which is what you typically think about in terms of Church failure, but when it came to the people he was given to care for, he didn’t come through. When I read his biography, I told my husband, “This guy is not going in my book. I do not like him one bit.” Then we decided, okay, well, we have to put him in, because he raises important questions. Because it’s important to acknowledge that Christians do fail in personal ways. Or say shocking things, like Martin Luther, who said horrible things about Jews. And you look at the Holocaust — he played a role in perpetuating these evil ideologies that metastasized over the centuries. How do you follow a person who also was so flawed and awful? It’s so disappointing and perplexing!

And then there are other things — I wouldn’t call them failures; maybe struggles. I feel like for every struggle we experience, there’s always a brother or sister who went before us who lived that, too. In a different context, but the same somehow. I think about Henry Nouwen, who was an incredibly compassionate person and teacher, and yet he lived with so much anxiety and depression. He would overwork and fall apart, and he had this need to be needed. Yet he kept coming back to the idea that we are beloved — that before we do anything, God loves us. It was a truth that Nouwen kept bringing up, but he learned it amidst lifelong, very difficult anxiety.

So whatever your weakness or your trouble is — there’s a saint for you out there. Like, I can make you a match in the saints.

M

You can be the saint matchmaker! For a new dating show.

KWM

Yeah! Leave it to me. I can find your patron saint.

But it’s only because the human experience on earth is one that we all share in varied ways.

M

Exactly. Like the pandemic — so many people in the past have lived through a similar experience. Didn’t Dorothy Day live through the 1918 pandemic?

KWM

Oh, she must have. And Julian of Norwich — the Black Plague went through her town three times. Literally 50% of the people died. And we say this pandemic is so unprecedented. I hate that word, because it’s actually untrue. It’s particular, but also, no, we’ve done this before.

Julian lived from about 1342 to 1416. Some scholars think that she probably had a husband and children who all died from the plague — and the reason that she became an anchoress and lived by this church, living this life of prayer and counsel for others, was because she was alone, since everyone else had died.

For every life choice we have, there’s somebody who’s been there: a sister who’s like, “Yeah, I know, honey. I know.”

And I do think that today many people are considering whether they want to stay in the church. There’s so much working against that desire to stay and to engage with the Christian faith. Because right now in America you can look at these statistics about the Evangelical church — but that’s such a tiny little slice of the tradition. Even one of my own kids said, “I think I’m going to be a Buddhist, because I’m interested in meditation.” I was like, well, I get that. But guess what? There’s the contemplative, Brother Lawrence. I mean, we can learn a lot from different religions, but Christians can also teach us a lot.

M

As you’re getting further away from the “canon,” who are some of the people you’re writing about?

KWM

One of my latest favorites is a woman named Harriet Powers, who was enslaved in Georgia. She lived through emancipation from slavery, and she was married and had a bunch of kids — I think nine kids. She was illiterate for at least part of her life, perhaps for all of her life, but she was a quilter. And so she quilted what she called the Bible Quilt, among other quilts depicting scriptural stories. She’s quoted as intending “to preach the gospel in patchwork.”

The quilts are at the Smithsonian, and you can see them online. But these were Harriet Powers’ testimony and her sermons. She literally preached with quilts. See, she’s a saint to me. She’s not an intellectual, but she preached — a lot like the medieval artists who created stained glass for people who were illiterate and couldn’t follow the Latin sermons, right? Those people never heard the Gospel in church, but they could sit in the pews and look up at the windows and receive the truth.

So I feel like dogma and doctrine and biblical texts … these things are just not sufficient for people who grew up outside of religion, or outside of the Church, or who are feeling the constraints of whatever tradition in which they grew up. But I think this conversation about the saints opens up some rich opportunities as we wonder, how do we make room for new categories of meaning and purpose?

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Illustrations by Ollie Silvester.

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