The Unattractive Call: Why Wanting to Be a Saint Can Make You Seem Strange in a Not-So-Saintly World

Kurt Vonnegut, slinging zingers from the foggy margins of American literature, once said with needlepoint clarity, “A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society” (Vonnegut, 1999). To call this a hard assignment is like saying winter in Montana nips. To long for holiness, to ache toward sainthood, in an era that prizes the brash, the clever, the likes-per-second and self-made shine, is to step quietly into the lost art of being misunderstood.

Let’s be honest: there’s a beauty in sainthood that is more iceberg than flower garden, most of it hidden, most weathered by razor winds. Holiness in its realest, root-tangle form isn’t the stuff of saints’ medals and heroic stories, gold-embossed and glow-tinted. It is dogged, it is stubborn, it is the old lady walking her groceries across ice for the neighbor she doesn’t particularly like. What is romantic in theory reveals its sharp bones in practice. In a culture obsessed with self-expression and careful image management, sanctity signals, embarrassingly, “I am more than my appetites; I suspect you are too.” This unsettles people in the same way hunger stirs up a well-fed crowd.

Real sanctity suggests that there is a depth beneath the surface, an ocean floor that resists headlines, elevator pitches, and Instagram reels. In our world, humility is suspect, a camouflage for the unsuccessful; sacrifice, a category error when life is all about acquisition and comfort. Saints threaten by dissent; they upend the social contract, refuse the cynical exchange of tit-for-tat. In a room of people smiling the right way, a saint might weep or laugh or cast their vote for mercy, not strategy.

The world applies pressure in ways subtle and blunt as wood mallets. There’s the soft pressure to belong, our tribal mammal DNA hungering for “Don’t be weird.” There is the hard clang of ridicule, the edge of being called a killjoy, a do-gooder, a holy-roller. In psychology, researchers have named the internalization of group norms, regardless of virtue or vice, “groupthink,” and in cultures bent on achievement, comfort, and the dazzling now, groupthink tilts toward cynicism.

In American life, we quietly revere the self-made, the bold, the norm-bending, so long as the norm isn’t decency itself. Our social air hums with drinks for the influencers, not the merciful. To choose holiness is, at some level, to offer yourself for bafflement or even hostility, to court anonymity or the cold shoulder instead of applause.

History has its shelf of saints, cluttered, inconsistent, occasionally bloodied, rarely “nice.” Francis with his peacock-feather hat and leper embrace. Dorothy Day, who annoyed bishops and embraced the poor in a way that threatened indifference as much as injustice. Maximilian Kolbe, who swapped his life for a stranger’s in Auschwitz. Their decency was so much more than etiquette; it ate into the bone of comfort, shredded every safe blueprint. They lived out the “cost of discipleship,” to use Bonhoeffer’s old phrase, and their lives glowed awkwardly in the dark, lighting up the ugliness around them.

To be near such people is rarely comfortable. They point, sometimes by word, often by sheer being, at a reality that asks more than we want to give. They are the uncompromising ones in the cheapening market of compromise, revealing, often unintentionally, what our culture most fears to lack: integrity, depth, love.

The Catholic understanding of sainthood cuts against common caricature with surgical precision. Saints are not the flawless, but the fierce lovers, the humble servants, the ones who failed and fell but said yes anyway, again and again. The Council of Trent and John Paul II’s theology remind us: sainthood is not about sinlessness but about radical openness to grace, a willingness to become a conduit for love, healing, humility, and sacrifice (John Paul II, 1995). Yet this, too, unsettles. Humility disrupts systems built on egos and titles; sacrificial love unnerves those comfortable in their self-preoccupation.

Here’s the grit: to aim at sainthood in this way is to expose the ego’s flimsy armor. It reveals our fear of being strange, our need to fit, the tremor in our hands when we think about being left out of the world’s warm rooms. To want to be a saint is to feel keenly the ache of rejection, the cost of nonbelonging, and still to walk on.

No one writes about saints as easy-baked heroes. They are, more often, the beautiful misfits, the ones who saw glory kindled in gutters, who saw hope in the betrayed, who heard music in the silence after loss. They wrestled, raged, ached toward the Light. The Catholic tradition does not ask us to perform holiness as if it were a mask, but to be transformed, inch by dubious inch, into its strange shape.

To pursue sanctity…really, to desire it sincerely…is to sign up for a life that will confound the algorithms, that will attract suspicion, that may sometimes feel like loneliness itself. But it is also to believe, with wild nerve, that such striving heals, that love, given away in costly fragments, stitches the torn seams of the world. In the words of Dorothy Day, “We have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community” (Day, 1952).

The world, for all its practiced indifference and cultivated chill, is desperate for witnesses, a deeper decency, the scent of hope, the shock of real mercy. Saints walk among us not mostly as stained-glass superheroes, but as the daily oddballs who dare to be gentle, the ones who forgive last night’s insult, the teachers who stay late, the fathers and mothers who pray for their angry children. Their lives unsettle, but quietly heal. Their strange hunger for holiness, the unlovely call to love, is, in the end, what the world most needs and least expects.

And so, perhaps it is true that wanting to be a saint will make you seem strange. But it is also courage. It is seed-planting. It is the slow, root-deep hope that what’s unattractive one day might, at the last, prove beautiful enough to save us all.

References
Day, D. (1952). The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography. Harper & Brothers.
John Paul II. (1995). Tertio Millennio Adveniente [Apostolic Letter]. Vatican.
Vonnegut, K. (1999). A Man Without a Country. Seven Stories Press.