Pied Beauty

Devotional image of St. Kateri Tekakwitha. The real saint's face would have been ravaged by smallpox.

My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd:
'This Land of Saints,' and then as the applause died out,
'Of plaster Saints'; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.

--Yeats, Beautiful Lofty Things

One of the worst curses of religion is the cult of the plaster saint; the crystals and rainbows vision of the cosmos. I can think of nothing better calculated to drive people from religion.

It is not that these sentimentalists forget the devil; they are usually just as one-dimensional with their sinners and their orcs.  It is that they forget the comic, and the pied beauty of the everyday.

“God save us from gloomy saints.” –Theresa of Avila.

Glory be to God, instead, for dappled things.