Why I Write About Saints (Even Though I’m Not a “Saint Person”)
And why their stories are more important than ever
I’m gearing up for a new, ongoing series here that I’m calling “Saint Roundups”—a collection of essays exploring saints who have experienced life’s more difficult or taboo realities. Think: infertility, mental illness, doubt, even divorce (like in my recent post, “6 Divorced Saints of the Orthodox Tradition—and Why They Matter”).
As I research and write, I’ve been reflecting on why I keep coming back to saints in my work—especially since, by my own admission, I’m not exactly a “saint person” (more on that in a minute). Yet for someone who’s never felt an automatic devotion to saints, I sure do write about them a lot.
So, as a way of introducing this series, I want to explore why I write about saints, what they have to do with the messiness of real life, and why their stories matter now more than ever.
Six Reasons I Write About Saints
1. They’re just always there—like holy stalkers or something.
I never really set out to love the saints, much less write books and blog posts (like here, here, or here) about them. I’m not the type to speak in hushed, feminine tones about the Theotokos, or to tie a St. Irene apple around my stomach for a miracle. (No offense if that’s you, I just don’t talk in hushed, feminine tones about anything—it’s not how my larynx works, also I have this weird thing about letting people or their apples touch me.) From the beginning, saints and their intercessions were one of the harder aspects of Orthodoxy for me to accept. I’ve come around to them, but I still keep a polite distance—like I’d avoid eye contact with my boss at a staff mixer, just in case small talk turns into a performance review.
Despite my skepticism, though, they always seem to find me. Like holy stalkers or something.
I’ve called myself some kind of Christian for most of my life, and for about as long, I’ve had a certain picture of what a “God-fearing” life is supposed to look like. But again and again, my life has veered from that image—sometimes through my own failings, sometimes in ways entirely beyond my control. And there have been moments, sharp and searing, when certain aspects of my life felt not just difficult, but scandalous—outside the bounds of what I thought Christ’s mercy could stretch to cover.
That’s especially when saints seem to find me. In every sorrow, whether it has involved despondency, mental illness, infertility, divorce, or simply being an intellectually oriented woman in church and society, the saints have come out of the woodwork—through casual references made by someone I don’t even really like at coffee hour, to an uncommon hagiography read aloud in matins, perhaps on an anniversary of a difficult event in my life; through strange dreams that make little sense except that they feature some saint I’d never heard of who turns out to have been a real person; through a faint memory of something a priest or professor once said in a lecture I didn’t realize I had paid attention to, to a sudden impulse to read about saints on a particular day in my private devotions, or a curious detail about a saint’s life mentioned in a historical novel by an author with no obvious faith background.
These are the mysterious ways saints not only find me, but also show me their own wounds, their own struggles with faith, or illnesses, or infertility; their own bold words and thoughts that didn’t always win them favour in the eyes of others. These are the ways they not only show me I’m not alone, but also that my wounds and so-called scandals are not excuses; they do not preclude me or anyone else from doing the hard and beautiful work of turning my life over to Christ, tear by tear, breath by breath, day by longsuffering day.
2. Their lives save us from the perils of spiritual abstraction.
Saints' lives are the embodiment of spiritual truths. It’s easy to read (or write about) Scripture, Church canons, and theological doctrines in the abstract—detached from the messiness of real life. It’s easy to turn holiness into a distant ideal, stripped of its human struggle and material reality. But each saint’s life is a kind of living homily, not composed merely of dogmas and verses, but of the way those truths can take shape in flesh and blood. Just as Christ’s parables invite us to wrestle with the Gospel—rather than handing us simplistic, one-size-fits-all answers—saints’ lives also surprise and confound us with the complexity of real holiness. They stir our creativity, challenge our assumptions, and awaken our hunger for righteousness, pressing us to discern how these same virtues might take root in the singular, unrepeatable life God has given us.
3. Saints’ lives help me avoid the temptation of ideology.
We are living through an era of profound change and disruption. No matter our background or beliefs, the past decade has upended expectations—economically, culturally, socially. Most of us, at some point, have felt disoriented or disillusioned by the forces shaping our world. And the hardest part? We don’t know where these shifts will lead—personally, communally, or as a civilization.
When faced with uncertainty, human instinct is to grab onto something solid. Just as a person losing their balance reaches for the nearest railing, we, too, grasp for absolutes—the more rigid and unshakable, the better. Ideology often becomes that false security. Feminism, conservatism, liberalism, democracy, even anti-Semitism—whether we claim the labels or not, rigid systems of thought offer a tempting shortcut: a ready-made playbook that reduces the mystery of being human to a set of fixed answers. They tell us who’s on our team, who’s the enemy, and what must be done to restore our own idea of safety.
Ideology infects the Church—even, yes, the Orthodox Church—in countless ways, one of them being when we flatten our concepts of Christ, salvation, or holiness into our preferred ideologies. When we turn the sacred, salvific, wild witness of our faith and tradition into something rigid, unmerciful, and unloving—and then position ourselves as its gatekeepers—we make faith the slave of ideology.
The saints, I think, help guard against this. It is easier to pick and choose Bible verses or Church canons to support an ideology. It is harder to do the same with saints’ lives. Yes, you can cherry-pick certain saints or details to fit a rigid notion of holiness, but those details are always part of a bigger story—one that will immediately complicate reductive, ideological interpretations simply by virtue of being embedded in a flesh-and-blood life. To talk about any saint, you have to talk about a story, and stories resist manipulation in ways that expository texts—like canons or treatises—do not. This may be why Christ so often answered divisive questions from the Pharisees with parables rather than a succinct point they could twist to fit their agendas. Who knows, it may be why He came in the flesh in the first place, conveying salvation through the complexity of a human life, rather than dropping another set of commandments or texts.
When we talk about saints—when we write about them, read their stories, and tell them, even in short form—we are forced to talk about an actual human being and an actual life. So much of ideology is de-humanizing; it pulls us out of the realm of human complexity and dignity and into abstraction, intellectual arguments, and reductivism—all so we can avoid the hard work of listening, hearing, and loving one another as Christ loved us.
I write about the saints because, like so many others in the world today, I am disappointed, anxious, and, frankly, just sad. That means I’m not immune to the temptation to seek refuge in the ideologies and dehumanized systems of this world’s logic. I need to be with other actual human beings—including, and especially, the saints. I need their stories. I need their lives to uplift me, to trouble me, to remind me to love, to show me when I’m wrong, to leave me with questions I can’t answer, to make me remember how scary, mysterious, and delightful it is to be a child of the Light in an ever-darkening world.
4. They bear* witness to how a life turned toward Christ can take infinite forms and permutations
Saints lives save us from the myth that holiness must look a certain way, keeping us from turning it into a static idol. While Christ is the one true Light, He allows His salvation to be refracted through the prism of human experience. The lives illuminated by that Light emerge on the other side in an infinite array of shades and hues.
You will find saints who were cobblers, stylites, physicians; married, single, childless, child-rich; men, women, children, elders; Black, white, brown, Semitic, Indigenous, and more; quiet, meek, brazen, bold; soldiers, peacemakers, kings, queens, and paupers. Some saints have illustrious names, while others are unknown. Some were renowned for their beauty, while others... well, weren’t (we love you, St. Christopher).1 Yet each, in their own way, reveals that holiness is never a single, rigid mold—it is a living, breathing reality shaped by love.
5. … And that’s just the saints we know about.
Returning to the prism analogy, what stands out to me is that the visible light spectrum we see is only a small portion of a much larger range of electromagnetic waves—most of which are invisible to our eyes. Even within the visible spectrum, some animals perceive far more colors than we do.
When I read and write about the saints, I’m often filled with wonder—not just at the lives and stories I find, but at what I must be missing, what I can’t see with my limited human perception. The saints glorified and canonized by the Church are only the ones we know about, and their hagiographies capture only fragments of their lives. If St. John the Evangelist said that “if every one of [Christ’s deeds] were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25, NRSV), imagine if we knew the stories of every saint who has ever existed. 🤯 Truly, God is “wondrous in His saints” (Ps 67:36, LXX, SAAS/OSB).
6. Let’s be honest: they also just make good writing material.
Saints’ lives are wild. I gave up listening to podcasts this year, and honestly, what’s saving me from true crime withdrawal is the lives of saints. They’re insane.
If you think I’m exaggerating, that may be because we are used to hearing about saints only during Sunday morning Liturgy or on major feast days—when we remember them primarily through short-form genres like troparia (a kind of hymn honoring the saint of the day) or homilies. Given the limited time and focus of these services, we usually hear about a relatively small number of familiar saints and only the details of their lives deemed most memorable or venerable by hymnographers. The customs and hymnography of matins widen the lens a little, but the best way to appreciate the variety and depth of saints is by reading and wrestling with their lives day by day throughout the year—especially those further down the calendar, as they tend to be the ones not celebrated with hymns or readings in church (not because they’re lesser, but simply because there are so many saints, and many don’t have hymns written about them, or those that do may not always be translated into English).
After just a few days of reading about the lives of saints, it quickly becomes clear that our conventional ideas about holiness are pretty narrow. Saints come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes their stories bore me, but other times they make me cry or laugh (see this Instagram roundup of some *rather intense saints* I posted for last year’s International Women’s Day). Sometimes I read their stories and just give God a Jim stare because what the heck did I just read??
Saints are beautiful, awkward, holy, and strange. They challenge, scare, and profoundly inspire me, pushing me to be more creative in my faith and my writing. In short, they are some of the best creative material I’ve ever encountered.
These are just a few reasons why I write about saints, and why I think their witness is more important than ever. Whether you’re well versed in the lives of saints or don’t know where to start, whether you are or aren’t sure what you even believe about Christian saints, I invite you to follow along in this new, Saint Roundups series. We’ll dive deep into the lives of saints who have faced life’s most challenging and taboo realities. Through their stories, we’ll explore the complexities of holiness and the unexpected ways these figures can resonate with our own struggles. As we journey together, I hope you’ll find that saints are not just distant, pious icons, but rather relatable companions who inspire and challenge us to embrace the fullness of our humanity. Stick around for the journey—I can’t wait to uncover the richness of these lives alongside you!
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This comment is admittedly tongue-in-cheek—we don’t know if St. Christopher was ugly or handsome (though he was, apparently, very athletic). In iconography, however, he is sometimes depicted as a giant with the head of a dog—not the greatest look. This is not because he actually had a dog’s head, but because he was associated with the Marmaritae, a tribe thought to consist of cannibals and “dog-headed” people. This was a trope commonly found in legends about foreign places from antiquity through the middle ages, that—however cringey and racially drive—was a kind of shorthand way of conveying the magic and brutality people perceived in “bizarre” people of distant places. The Greek tradition interpreted this literally, and the result is that we have a few saints in our tradition with rather unseemly faces in their icons—in addition to St. Christopher, we have Saints Ahrakas and Augani of the Coptic tradition.
This comment is admittedly tongue-in-cheek—we don’t know if St. Christopher was ugly or handsome. However, in some iconographic traditions, he is depicted as a giant with the head of a dog (not really the greatest look—for anyone). He didn’t literally have a dog’s head—the imagery is due to his association with the Marmaritae, a group historically described as fierce warriors and, in some accounts, as “dog-headed” people. (Others speculate that the dog-headed depictions may have come from a misreading the Latin word Cananeus (Canaanite) as caninus, "canine.")
Either way, the depiction reflects a broader medieval tendency to use fantastical imagery when describing distant cultures, often rooted in fear, misunderstanding, or exaggeration rather than reality. While such portrayals can be uncomfortable from a modern perspective, they were historically a way of conveying a sense of mystery and awe about unfamiliar peoples. St. Christopher is not the only “dog-headed” saint in the Orthodox tradition—we also have Saints Ahrakas and Augani in the Coptic tradition. More on dog-headed saints and depictions in the Church here.
Thanks for this, Nicole! I especially like what you said about the saints finding (or stalking!) you. I've felt that too, most strongly with my patron, St Maria of Paris. When I was an inquirer and wondering, during my first Holy Week, whether I could keep exploring the Church or whether I needed to go out of there now, St Maria found me in the form of an article about her life. I knew before I finished reading it both that I had to join the Church and that I had a patron. And I have felt her presence strongly on other occasions of need. Sometimes, with other saints too, a detail from their lives or a phrase from the hymnography will hit at just the right time.
Over the last few weeks I've gotten back into reading the lives daily from the OCA website and am often struck by the diversity you mentioned. For me it's a reminder that all of us too are called to be saints, each of us with our own distinct histories and qualities. Nobody else can be the saints we're called to be.
This is such a rich and resonant reflection—thank you. I’ve often found myself returning to the saints for reasons I couldn’t initially articulate. Now, writing about them more deeply through the lens of Christian mysticism, I’m beginning to see why. On my Substack, Desert and Fire, I explore the saints not just as moral examples, but as living witnesses to the mystical path—especially the stages of divine union as outlined by St. John of the Cross. His purgative way, that initial stripping of ego and disordered desire, is found again and again in the stories of saints who faced deep suffering, ambiguity, and what looked like failure through the world’s eyes.
What you’ve captured so well here is how saints disrupt our categories. Their lives aren’t tidy moral tales—they’re holy dissonances that push us out of abstraction and into something harder and more transformative. They don’t just tell us what holiness is—they embody it, with all the beauty and strangeness that entails. And in doing so, they remind us that divine union is not for the idealized few, but for the flawed and fiercely seeking—exactly where most of us find ourselves.
Looking forward to following your Saint Roundups. What a necessary and luminous project.