My Life with the Saints

Reviewed by Renée LaReau

(by James Martin, SJ (Loyola Press), $22.95, 424 pages)

In one of this spiritual memoir’s earliest chapters, James Martin recalls his encounter with a St. Joan of Arc statue in Paris while on a post-college European junket.  As Martin glanced at Joan’s towering likeness at the Place des Pyramides, he recalled some cursory biographical details of the fifteenth-century saint, snapped a few pictures, and sped to the next attraction.

Three years later, a subsequent trip to Orléans, the French city Joan famously freed from English reign during the Hundred Years’ War, prompted Martin, then an up-and-coming financier at General Electric, to learn more about her life through biography, film, and art.

He describes himself as beguiled by “the marvelous illogic of her story,” the story of a young, illiterate peasant woman who heard the voices of three saints commanding her to lead the French army to military victory, and who did so with remarkable success and a religious zeal that ultimately resulted in her tragic burning at the stake at the behest of the French dauphin.  St. Joan would, writes Martin, “become the first saint to be more for me than an image in stained glass or a name over a church door.”   

Meeting Saints

How does a saint become more to a person than a stained glass image, a name of a church, a concrete garden statue, or the simple-minded subject of saccharine, pious legends?  James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at America magazine, seeks to explore this question through his personal stories of “meeting” a variety of saints throughout his life, beginning with a mail-order St. Jude statue he ordered from a cereal box top as a child, and concluding with Mary the mother of Jesus, whom he has come to know better, as both Miriam of Nazareth and the Mother of God, in his adult life. 

Throughout the book, Martin juxtaposes brief historical sketches of formally canonized saints like Therese of Lisieux and Francis, beatified men and women like Pope John XXIII and Mother Teresa, and the revered faithful like Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton with reflective recountings of his spiritual encounters with these holy men and women.  In many cases, Martin was introduced to these saints by his Jesuit brethren, but other cases are less predictable.  For example, Martin first “met” Merton in a chance viewing of a public television documentary about the famous Trappist monk and spiritual writer, an experience that catapulted Martin into an intense spiritual search that would eventually culminate in his departure from a lucrative corporate career at age 28, and a decision to live the rest of his life as a Jesuit priest. 

Fascinating Women and Men

Martin writes that his biographical sketches are meant to facilitate meditation, and are not meant to be scholarly hagiographies, but even the brief vignettes he adroitly weaves together provide a vivid picture of the lives of fascinating women and men.  The reader will encounter the gentle humor of a magnanimous Blessed Pope John XXIII, who, upon overhearing a conversation about his rather corpulent figure, responded goodnaturedly, “But Madame, surely you know the conclave is not a beauty contest!”  On a more somber note, one learns what haunted Mother Teresa for much, if not most of her adult life. 

But perhaps the most significant contribution Martin’s memoir offers is the multiple examples of how to appropriate the wisdom of the saints into one’s own life: one’s prayer, one’s spiritual reading, one’s daily consciousness.  Much of the milieu in which Martin has done so will be most familiar to someone in religious life, but Martin’s accessible writing fuels the imagination such that one is inspired to give the saints a second look, much in the same way Martin did when he encountered Joan of Arc a second, more meaningful time.

“Often what you remember best is what you learned first,” Martin writes in the chapter on Joan of Arc.  This truism manifests itself in Martin’s meditations, of which the earliest ones (Joan of Arc, Thomas Merton, St. Jude) are the most compelling in the book. 

Being Yourself

“For me to be a saint means to be myself,” Martin quotes Thomas Merton, a saying that invites the reader beyond admiration to emulation, but emulation in a way that will be unique to each reader’s vocation, emulation that is in accord with one’s own deepest, most honest desires.  “Ultimately,” Martin writes, “one’s deepest desires lead to God and to the fulfillment of God’s desires for the world.”

On a practical note, My Life with the Saints is the kind of volume to keep on the bedside table, with chapters at a length that is perfect for a saint-a-day schedule.  This book is an especially good read for anyone looking for contemporary spiritual writing for their own Lenten reflection.

Renée LaReau writes from Columbus, Ohio. 

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