Reading some of the entries in Robert Ellsberg’s fat book, Blessed Among Us: Day by Day with Saintly Witnesses (Liturgical Press) has given me much food for thought and not a little indigestion. His idea is to provide a saintly model for every day of the year; altogether it adds up to 753 pages, not including the introduction and index. As lives of the saints are or should be required reading for Catholics, such anthologies generally inspire me, but not this time.
I am entirely with Ellsberg when he writes in the introduction that “It is holiness and not canonisation that is the goal of Christian life”. We can all agree that there are countless men and women in heaven who have not been raised to the altars; some, such as Dorothy Day and Blessed John Henry Newman, are in the pipeline for eventual canonisation; others, quiet, humble, self-giving persons that we have all met, never will be.
