Review: My Life with the Saints

It was a few months ago that I was looking for a winter book, that is, a book that I could curl up with on a comfy armchair for a few hours on cold winter nights. I was randomly browsing through the library bookshelves with that in mind when I spotted My Life with the Saints.

The reviews on the back of the book billed it as a "spiritual memoir." A spiritual memoir? What does that mean? Skimming the book summary, I saw that the book was about saints but was not so much a catalog of saints' lives as a meditation on how the saints' lives have touched author James Martin (a Jesuit priest who one reviewer described as a "cross between Holden Caulfield and Thomas Merton") at various points in his life.

Let me say upfront that I'm not Catholic, so praying to a saint for help is not something I would do. But, surprisingly, as I started reading I didn't find Martin's beliefs about saints too far from my own. While Martin does not dismiss the power of praying to saints, for him, it seems the power of the saints lies mainly in learning their life stories, which have important lessons for us in our lives today.

The life stories of 16 saints (well, technically more, since the Ugandan martyrs are all discussed in one chapter) are described in separate chapters. The saints Martin includes in the book are a diverse group in time and in personality. They range from Peter and Mary to Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius of Loyola, from Joan of Arc to Dorothy Day to Mother Teresa. The lives of these holy persons are (somewhat surprisingly to me) filled with conflict and spiritual struggles. Throughout the book, Martin reflects on how looking to the saints' lives helped him in his own spiritual journey -- of leaving a corporate job to join the Jesuits, in struggling to adapt to his vocation, and in performing mission work in Jamaica and Kenya.

Early on I tried to put my finger on the style of the chapters. The style seemed both familiar and strange to me at the same time. After Chapter 3 it dawned on me: the chapters are arranged in the style of sermons. Typically, it was the telling of the saint's life story mixed in with some personal storytelling and a bit of another text such as another biography or the Bible, all told in a very straightforward, gentle way. I suppose this shouldn't have come as a surprise given the author's vocation.

So maybe the book is a little formulaic style-wise, yet it is definitely not bland and boring. Neither is it a feel-good book with spiritual platitudes that are too easily arrived at. Like the best sermons I've heard, Martin offers some very nuanced yet powerful insights about Christian spirituality. He is strikingly honest about his own spiritual struggles, from feelings of inadequacy to the pros and cons of the celibate life. Likewise, he doesn't gloss over some of the darker details of the saints' lives -- Thomas Merton's guilt over his sinful past, Mother Teresa's "dark night of the soul," Pedro Arrupe's rift with the church near the end of his life. In fact, it is these deep struggles in the saints' lives that Martin seems to relate to the most.

The end result is a book that is a satisfying tapestry of intersecting lives. The very diversity of these lives supports Martin's final conclusion that each of is called to holiness in a unique way. No one path is for everyone, but we can learn much from the lives of those who came before, who Martin describes as our models, companions, and even friends.

I'm really glad I picked My Life with the Saints as my "winter book." A life told through saints seems like quite a task to pull off for a writer, something that could easily go awry, but Martin makes it look easy. But much more than that, the book is a superb spiritual guide that challenged the way I looked at God and the individual.