Saint
One spring I became passive.
It seemed like virtue.
If you do nothing the world flows around you like water.
You don’t even have to think! Smiling you watch it go by.
I may become smaller and smaller, I thought,
Until I am like a tiny saint with a long white beard and shining eyes,
Who has to be carried about.
But just then a car alarm went off and I jumped up to see what fool it was.
Becoming a saint is not so easy.
Perhaps, I thought, I could be the kind that giggles all day long and leaps into the air!
But first I will take a little rest, just a little one. And I fell asleep.
I have not yet become a saint.
I have also not yet become a saint. I'm not sure that I want to be that, at least not the standard version of one. The worst thing that can be done to a saint is to put that person in a stained-glass window. Saints come in all shapes and sizes. Some are hermits. Some are intensely engaged in social justice. I think about the dervishes, the tzaddiks, and the bodhisattvas. Thomas Merton once noted that a saint is often considered to be crazy because he or she does not follow society's values and rules. Dorothy Day comes to mind. So does Franz Jägerstätter. Saints dwell among us unnoticed and sometimes unloved. Saints mainline the divine nature of things which can never be adequately expressed, only experienced. And yet, they are profoundly human and real.
I love it. Playful and Pensive.