Faith column: Crisis calls for saints and heroes — who call us to be saints and heroes

“Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed that easily,” said Dorothy Day, that towering figure of bold, compassionate and rebellious Christianity in the 1900s. Her Catholic Worker movement inspired generations to stand for, care for and share with the marginalized poor and disenfranchised.

She didn’t want to be called a saint because often that is a way of diminishing the work; only a saint could do such things, and we regular people are off the hook. We lose the ability to imagine a better, more compassionate, more just world, and to work for it. To call someone a saint is to say that they went above and beyond what a normal person is expected to do. We put the saint on a pedestal, honor their memory and ministry, and promptly forget that we can do such saintly acts in our own lives. They made the sacrifice, so we don’t have to.

It reminds me of our language around heroes. We honor someone as a hero for their sacrifice in putting their life at risk for others, and we imagine that we’re off the hook. Culturally, we act as if calling them a hero is sufficient enough compensation for their work, and we seem to believe that only superhuman people choose heroic professions, and thus we can ignore their needs.

Military personnel, veterans and police officers have a significantly high rate of dying from suicide. They need better access to mental health care and less judgment for using those resources. Do we really believe that someone who projects toughness and strength has no need of compassion and support in healing from their stresses and wounds?

Health care workers need adequate protection and compensation for their work. They need sick leave, protective equipment and time away to care for themselves and recuperate. A free lunch and a one-day display of support is insufficient. They respond to human need with compassion; how can we not return that compassion?

We laud teachers for being generous and for inspiring the best in our children, and at the same time we don’t trust them to teach! We instead saddle them and the students with high-risk testing. To add insult, teacher salaries remain low — is that to guarantee that anyone who teaches has a “love of teaching” and will put up with low pay for the privilege of teaching?

And now, in the midst of this coronavirus crisis, we saw how many other professions could be called heroic and simultaneously diminished. Retail and grocery store workers, cooks, delivery personnel and others are lauded for being heroes putting themselves (and their families) at risk of exposure so we could get food and other things. Do they have what they need for themselves and their families?

Heroic service (as well as the work of the saints) is meant to inspire heroism in me. A hero or a saint calls me to my better self, to be the kind of hero or saint I can be. We may not have the same gifts or temperament our heroes and saints have, but we can offer the gifts of our compassion, generosity and sacrifice in heroic and saintly ways. We do not ask them to sacrifice so we don’t have to; we sacrifice for one another to build a better world of justice and compassion.