By Jon M. Sweeney

Many of the saints of history are strange. If you did not grow up Roman Catholic, they seem even stranger. My blessed grandfather’s unusual teasing humor, and my great-grandmother’s eccentricities seem at home in the company of St. Teresa of Avila and St. Francis of Assisi. But unusual behavior in many ways defines sainthood.

The first of several befuddling aspects of sainthood is “the gift of tears.”

Lo where a Wounded Heart with Bleeding Eyes conspire.

Is she a Flaming Fountain, or a Weeping fire!

This odd couplet from 17th-century English poet Richard Crashaw serves as an introduction to his longer poem, “Saint Mary Magdalene” or “The Weeper.” Mary Magdalene is known for many things in Christian tradition, chief among them her witnessing to the apostles about the resurrection of Christ. When Mary arrived at the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance, she ran to Peter and John and told them that Jesus was no longer there. They all ran back to the spot, and once Peter and John saw for themselves, they returned to their homes, presumably to tell the other disciples what had happened. But Mary remained at the tomb. The gospel says that “Mary stood weeping outside the tomb” (John 20:11). Both angels and the resurrected Christ appeared to Mary there and Jesus told her to go again to the disciples and witness to them that he had risen from the dead. She did.

Mary Magdalene is often identified (mistakenly, according to most scholars) with the woman from Bethany who came to Jesus as he was dining with Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36-50), anointing his feet with tears and oil. Her tears wet his feet and her long hair wiped them clean. The Pharisees who were present found this distasteful and criticized Jesus for allowing the woman to do it. Jesus explained it as the perfect expression of love.

Mary’s tears and saintly tears in general are often seen prefigured in the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah for the people of Israel, prescribed by the prophet as an essential step toward redemption.

Second, there is the celebration of pain in the lives of the saints. Long before Mel Gibson’s movie, saints were praised for their pain and suffering.

One of the most famous images of a saint is Bernini’s marble of Teresa of Avila in the Cornaro Chapel in Rome. Teresa appears close to death as an angel’s spear pierces her heart and she begins to writhe. The angel who delivers the heavenly stabs smiles gently over Teresa. This statue often leaves visitors wondering what in the world is going on.

Bernini didn’t create the sculpture purely out of his imagination; it was inspired by Teresa’s own writing. A matter-of-fact and business-like woman, Teresa was nevertheless forced by one of her confessors to write down narrative of her religious experiences. Explaining that this particular vision was representative of other, similar ones, but also that she was not accustomed to seeing angels standing before her, Teresa writes:

In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it.

Bernini’s sculpture — and perhaps Teresa’s experience — are intended to show that there is an ecstasy that is divine and that means far more than sex ever could. Teresa was one of the wittiest and funniest religious women in history, but the closeness she experienced with God involved intense pain.

Third, there is foolishness. A saintly fool is not to be admired in our world. We may dismiss him, or scoff at her, saying something like, “He is either for God alone — and of what use in society is that? — or he is actually selfishly for himself alone — and how are we to discern the difference?”

There are plenty of fools in Christian tradition. Joseph of Cupertino (d. 1663) was a Franciscan whose behavior probably would have gone unappreciated, or at least have been misunderstood, by Francis of Assisi himself. The two men are, in fact, excellent examples of the differences between holy foolishness that might land someone in a mental hospital and holy foolishness that is part of a strategy of ministry.

Joseph of Cupertino was known to have psychological problems — or unusual private and mysterious mystical experiences. He is known in history as the “flying friar” because he was reported to have levitated on many occasions. Many of his contemporaries attested to these flights, or simple risings into the air, including those who tried to bat him back down to earth, disgusted by what they interpreted as attention-craving foolishness.

St. Francis often played the fool himself, at times with his spiritual brothers, in order to demonstrate their love for God and relative disregard for the values of the world (decorum, property, honor). Francis liked to think of himself and his first friars as “God’s jugglers,” who would travel from village to village in Italy and elsewhere entertaining people with the good news. The earliest Franciscans begged for their bread, often slept outdoors, and spent a lot of time with lepers, who were complete outcasts of society, including the Church. Such actions were deemed bizarre and the children of the villages would often throw mud and rocks at the “crazy friars.”

Finally, there is voluptuousness. It was Friedrich Nietzsche, I think, who used this word to describe saints and he did not mean it as a compliment. He meant it as a way of making clear the extravagance and misplaced eroticism of some saintly behavior. When a saint is mystically “wed” to Christ, Nietzsche believed, it is not a means of submission to God and abstaining from worldly things. It is actually a way of gaining power over other people. In today’s age, when we are aware of the abuse of clerical power, it is easy to see his point.

Some critics have argued that the extravagance of the saints is a kind of cowardice. Like Scarlett O’Hara’s strategic use of emotion in Gone with the Wind, the saints may use these tactics as they confront the realities of life.

The legends of women saints in particular, and their writings, are full of erotic images of union with Christ substituting for a consummation with a husband, which was expected of every woman throughout the Middle Ages.

We may well share the opinion of Hilaire Belloc, an early 20th-century Roman Catholic:

“I was never made for understanding this ‘union with God’ business: St. Teresa and the rest. I don’t know what it is all about and the description of isolation and detachment, ‘the necessary night of the soul,’ disgusts me like Wagner’s music or boiled mutton. Good for others: not for me.”

Yet the counter-cultural aspect of these saints’ actions can still instruct us. And perhaps we can find God’s sweetness in those places that might surprise the ones around us who find the Christian path a bit unusual.

Jon M. Sweeney is a member of St. James’ Church, Woodstock, Vt., and the associate publisher of Paraclete Press in Orleans, Mass. This article is published in slightly different form in his new book, The Lure of Saints: A Protestant Experience of Catholic Tradition.

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