The persistence of saints that I speak of today is not the virtue of persistence, or steadfastness to duty which is customarily among the reasons they are saints at all. Nope, it’s the fact that those suckers stick around.
The persistence of saints has to do with their value to people after they are dead, for gain and the glory of a deity (or deep conception, or, since my religious and ideological tent is quite immense, even mere curiosity).
Where people are squeamish of god, they are rarely squeamish of saints, a fact I attribute to how you can meet a person any day of the week, but gods are so scarce that it’s easy to believe they’re not taking appointments this year, or any other. Even very secular people, folks with no religious affiliation, will follow cultural folkways about where to put pictures of important people in their moral formation; existential authors, rappers, midwives, farmers or dive instructors.
If I were to put a pin through any picture of an existentialist to suspend it in a saintly niche I suppose it would be de Beauvoir. She really cuts the crap on things especially on this whole evil thing. -“Insisting that the future is undecided and that its form will be shaped by our present decisions Beauvoir argues that it is only by insisting on the dignity of today’s human beings that the dignity of those to come can be secured.” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I would put it over my desk. Or at the end of my bed, where I’m more likely to actually look at it.
