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Living saints today? Have you met any?

Where have all the saints gone?

living saints
St. Francis Hiding in the Garden

Living saints?  Have you met any?  Not a Hindu or Catholic Saint, placed on candle-lit altar or in rose garden.  But a living saint today.  Someone who projects a oneness with the world, is filled with loving compassion, who has a purpose of being in service to others?  A humble person who is truly awake?

I have been asking these questions, not as a religious person, but as a filmmaker who has made several films on past saints, the visionaries who woke us up like Naturalist John Muir and Mystic Saint Hildegard of Bingen; my own patron saint of creativity, has lead me to the idea who wouldn’t appreciate more saints?

What would they look like?  Where would you meet them?  At a volunteer or charity event?  A yoga studio?  A meditation retreat?  At the office?  I bet you haven’t met a lot, if any at all.  So where have all the saints gone?  We should have more.  We have a greater population now than when historical saints lived.  We are more educated.  We have the internet of all things amazing.  So, why don’t we have more saints?  Is organized religion turning them away?  Are we treating them with antipsychotics?  Are they self-medicating with recreational drugs?

Obviously I am not alone if you google “Where have all the saints gone?”  The question generally gets turned to who are the living saints today?  With wonderful answers from people that have meet Mother Teresa or other Sainted modern religious figures that were only officially canonized after their deaths.

Living Saints?

I like this comment I found:  “There are many living saints amongst us right now that we do not know of, simply because it wasn’t part of God’s will for them to be revealed to us. So it’s always good to love your neighbor, not only because we are called to do so, but also because you never know when you are talking to a saint!”

That is so true.

Michael Conti asks if you have ever met a living saint.

When I set out to make my films, I didn’t know at the time, that I would also be exploring that question in a more timely perspective as my subject material was historical figures that had personally inspired me and others into our live’s purposes.   “Early Christian communities venerated hundreds of saints, but historical research by 17th- and 18th-century Catholic scholars determined that very few of these saints’ stories were backed by solid historical evidence. Lives of such well-known figures as St. George, St. Valentine, and St. Christopher were based either on a legend that often predated Christianity or were entirely made up. Other saints had local followings. In rural France, St. Guinefort was venerated as the protector of infants after he saved his master’s baby from a snakebite. Saint Guinefort was a dog!” (Appeared in the November 2013 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 78, No. 11, page 46).

If you want to learn more about saints, here is a list of recommended movies about saints that I have compiled. It is primarily Catholic Saints, but obviously that isn’t the only religion that has mystics and saints walking among them.

15 thoughts on “Living saints today? Have you met any?”

      1. I would like to see a filim made on Virgin Mary based on the contents written in the book “The Mystical city of God”. I will like to see Mother of God filimed because I love her sweetness and humbleness. She is a the perfect role model and Mistress to all of the Saints who were born and will be born in this world.

  1. I know you are looking for living saints but Fr Peter Mary Rookey was a living saint who went back to love in 2014. He had healing masses and countless people were healed on many levels.

  2. I’m more interested in the people interested in saints or saintly behavior – compassion, sacrafice, service to others, unselfish acts. Are there online groups or communities I can explore? cwall700@gmail. com – thanks! – CW

  3. Hello Michael (he who is like God)

    Which saints do you want to meet? Those chosen by Yeshua are finite in number. The number remaining at this time can be deduced. I will show you what you want to see. There are passages in scripture with linguistic information layered over the contextual meaning (meta linguistic) which identifies those you seek.

    stemsee

  4. A true divine embodiment is an illusion it’s all a load of crap
    They need friction opposing energy magnetism to create
    O the more good the more bad and the more they create
    Truth is beyond all perception
    It’s unknowable and knowable and neither
    It’s ineffable and it’s but ineffable because ineffable is just another man made word
    From their magical alphabet that they use to create it all just rubbish
    Words have no power
    There is no power

  5. Clifford Davidson, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, without a doubt, although he is nearing the 90% of a century mark. So one would need to work fast.

    He is a professor Emeritus of English from Western Michigan University, and his wife was Professor Emerita of Music, also from WMU.

    He cared for, and assisted, through travels all over the world, Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, who was also a living saint. One of the highlights of their travels was when they went to Bingen for Audrey to transcribe a few of St. Hildegarde’s antiphons for beginner level church choirs.

    Audrey had a brittle bone disease that, truth be told, would have kept me from traveling to the grocery—but around the world they went, together, nonetheless, for decades.

    Clifford, of course, will deny his sainthood, but of course that’s one of the ways to tell.

  6. I feel like I forged my own path in life because people almost never are worth listening to, so I spit out almost all of what they had to say outside of their areas of university training and tried to get rid of the aftertaste. Researching Steve Jobs made me feel really positive about his approach to spirituality. He had Autobiography of a Yogi handed out at his funeral according to author and journalist Brent Schlender. It says all saints can stop breathing at will, and before declaring a person a saint, one must check, which Yogananda, the author, did with his guru; he describes how. So before the discussion continues, I’d like to just politely call to mind the psycho in the movie Room and point out it’s not all that complicated a subject: why is it not the first item of discussion?
    And that said, if you know of any living saints, please send a message my way.

  7. I’ve been searching for a living saint for some time now, after extensive reading of Paramahansa Yogananda. I have Yogananda’s theology on how to recognise a saint (they can stop breathing at will for an indefinite period, A, and it’s essential to check that before making statements claiming a person is a saint, B) on my website. Yogananda’s theology seems correct. I was imagining inviting a saint to sit in a water tank with clear sides for an hour to do the test.

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