We rely on titles an awful lot. They operate as a context clue for how we should respond to someone as we are introduced to them. Sometimes Mrs can indicate a married status, other times it can be the most fear-inducing knee-knocking teacher you are being sent to. Doctor might indicate respect or certain expertise.
If a barrister really insisted on the honorific “esquire” you could think “barrister-at-law” or you could think “what a nightmare”. Even the Earl of Shaftesbury has recently said his title has labelled him a villain of Lough Neagh. Titles bear weight and history and heteronormativity and politics, and so much besides.
So, what about when someone’s title is saint? A lot of people’s baseline understanding of saints and hagiography (the study of saintly lives) is that these people were very, very good. This isn’t always the case. Paul was a reformed murderer, Augustine famously wasn’t entirely up for chastity: “God, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Imagine your good friend sets you up on a blind date. The only context you’re given is “Well, I’ve heard he’s a saint. The religious kind.” What would go through your mind? And what would you wear?
I would hazard a guess that you might not be able to list a lot of the supposed deeds of the saints. Could you enumerate on what St Giles did? Or St Teresa of Avila? St Julian of Norwich? St Jerome? Indeed, an exhaustive list of their deeds and misdeeds is both uninteresting and an exercise in missing the point of this peculiar Christian tradition.
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The existence of saints, after all, remind us that people can be remembered for doing incredibly good things, that people can be reformed, and their lives add up to more than the weight of their worst day.
In our culture, we are often punitive and exacting. A person’s distant mistake looms larger than their efforts to change, or to articulate something new. Most often, a saint is remembered for one or two remarkable endeavours. It is my conviction that every human being has the capacity for a couple of heroic efforts. So, I began to think about hagiography and biography and the fine, ultimately artificial line that separates them.
With the latent interest I have in saints, thanks to being half-raised in my maternal grandmother’s house – a house my late uncle referred to as “the monastery” due to its religious iconography – I began to pore over records of saints’ lives. They are written in an austere prose style that coasts over decades of life in a half-sentence and can spend a thousand words examining the fostering of a new convent here or a commitment to exile there.
Like most Irish families, I know a lot of excellent storytellers who could transform a minutes-long incident about sneaking across the Border into something worthy of permanent, saintly record.
With this in mind, let’s do an experiment: which one is the canonical saint?
The first lived an honest life and used his hands for the betterment of the world. As he was beaten down by a horde of people, he forgave them.
The second lived with certainty of goodness. As a child he suffered violence and his hand was placed on to a flame by the authorities. He wept and did not lash out.
One is my father, one is St Stephen the first (Christian) martyr. The point is clear: while saints do indeed do remarkable things, the language we canonise them with is also available to describe those not officially recognised by the Church.
As I was writing my doctorate on North American Aids poetry, I was struck, again and again, with just how powerful language is. So many of those poets, ill and dying, sculpted and rendered their lives in glittering, dignified ways. As they used language, so they were remembered. With these concerns in mind, I began to write poems that blurred the lines between the secular and the sacred. I wanted to use the vocabulary brushstrokes of hagiography to see what would happen if I wrote about a youth worker I know in the same terms as I would about St Francis of Assisi.
The central kitchen-table dispute in my relationship happens to be the value of icons. My partner – a breathtakingly intelligent ex-theologian – might contend that the Byzantine icon of Mary that hangs by our bed is nothing close to “Perpetual Succour”. I think of my grandmother’s house, and I think of the atmosphere of goodness those icons brought.
Icons hang in many Irish homes not just for pious virtue-signalling or aesthetic pops of glam (or, at least, they shouldn’t only hang for these reasons) but because these people mean something, and by bringing them into your home, you bring what they signify into the rooms you live in. Icons of saints are less about signalling my piety, and more about a very human desire to be approximate to awe-inspiring, ordinary people.
I found myself writing a poem about my grandfather taking me to the Pennyburn dump, how he spoke to everyone he passed, how, through his one working eye, he saw the goodness in all things
So, I wrote a book of poems where I eliminated the title “saint”. Marie and Francis and Michael and Julian and Teresa and Niamh and Brigid all brush shoulders. I encourage my reader to imagine a canonical saint in a contemporary light – sore during a spin class or feeling a bit anxious on a train – and an ordinary person in the loftiest terms possible. Imagine a society with no honorifics dictating how you treated a person. Imagine living with the presumption that, in the least, every person you pass on the street is worthy of the utmost attention. Imagine living in a world where saints roam free, among us, on the bus or in TK Maxx.
In an age characterised by economic and political spiral as well as worsening geopolitical and environmental catastrophe, it is interesting that more and more contemporary writers are returning to the stories of saints. Because to acknowledge the idea of a saint is to acknowledge the question: what does it mean to be a good person?
Victoria MacKenzie’s staggeringly good For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain (Bloomsbury, 2023) retells, in two dramatic monologues, the story of two medieval saints, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, in their own words, and a pilgrimage Margery takes to receive the counsel of the anchorite.
Another novel, Ordinary Saints (Manila Press, 2025) by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin, tells the story of Jay, a queer woman living in London, whose deceased brother is undergoing the process of being canonised. It is at once a phenomenal metaphor for being the younger sibling and a genuinely complex story of trying (and not succeeding) to reconcile a religious past with a secular present that has moved beyond the shackles of shame.
I draw both of these novels as good examples for one reason: they centre the mystic, the other, the queer person. People who were traditionally expelled to the very edges (if not outside the building) of religious story. These people are the centrepieces of these novels, and mark an interesting turn of certain writers returning to a tradition that excluded them, finding aspects of it to use, and repurposing a tradition or a fusty vocabulary to an entirely new end. My collection, Lives of the Saints, centres ordinary people and parallels their actions with the actions of those saintly people deemed worthy of remembering by, well, I’m not sure who.
We only ever hear of St Francis stripping his clothes off in front of the court, never what he did of a long Italian Saturday morning when he was a bit idle and restless. Poems in the voice of Francis pepper my book, poems where he is listless and misses Jesus (to my ends, a long absent ex-boyfriend).
In writing poems about Sister Mona, a teacher who planted a rose garden in a school in west Belfast that was smothered by sand bags laid by the British army and exclaimed in protest that the roses would return, or my father’s brush with the RUC and then the guards on a fateful journey to get to Dublin Airport during the mid-80s, ordinary, already-miraculous stories are elevated to the something holy, and I mean holy in its true sense: the setting apart of one thing from many, many other things. And in some sense, this is poetry’s original purpose: setting apart.
My grandfather had a statuette of St Martin de Porres on his bedside table. Martin was flanked by cats (my continuing idea of heaven) and Martin’s gaze was cast to the ceiling of my grandfather’s bedroom. I often asked him (I called him Papa) to tell me stories about the statue, what Martin was like, his names for the various animals, what prayers he said when he went to bed.
[ Devil in the detail: Frank McNally on the diabolical reputation of St DunstanOpens in new window ]
My grandfather indulged me. I tried to write a poem for a long time about that little statuette, but it was very bad. I was trying to transform a cheap little statuette from the Holy Shop on Waterloo Street into something it wasn’t: the profound relationship I had with my paternal grandfather. So, instead, I found myself writing a poem about my grandfather taking me to the Pennyburn dump, how he spoke to everyone he passed, how, through his one working eye, he saw the goodness in all things.
It is a bright evening in late March when I finally close and shelve the “canonical” books of saints’ lives and turn my attention to the living.
Lives of the Saints is published by The Gallery Press. Mícheál McCann is a poet and schoolteacher from Derry who lives and works in Belfast.
