Adventures in Sainthood

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of saints and sinners. When I discovered the Enneagram, I became obsessed with identifying and analysing my sin and virtue (and diagnosing everyone else’s!).

I love the mythology of it all, the drama of good and evil, virtue and vice.

Back in early 2025, I started a small series on Instagram called loving no matter what.The plan was to explore what it means to love wildly, unreasonably, as medicine for these times. I made two episodes, then stopped. It felt out of integrity, like I was speaking from a place I couldn’t yet inhabit.

I decided that kind of love belonged to saints, not to me, an ordinary, inconsistent human.

Then one day, I discovered that the word sin comes from an archery term meaning to miss the mark.

That changed everything.

Far from being an evil, shameful stain or some original flaw written into us, sin simply means to miss, to fall short.

Who among us doesn’t miss the mark many times a day? We raise our voices at our children, lose patience in traffic, gossip, judge, promise ourselves we’ll do better and don’t. None of us go to bed planning to be lazy, unkind, or small-hearted, yet life has us falling short of who we wish to be, again and again.

In this sense, we are all sinners, not as moral failures but as participants in the ordinary, accidental practice of being human.

It’s a radically generous way of seeing the concept of sin, and through that generosity we open up the possibility of something that once seemed impossible - sainthood.

Saints throughout history were granted their sainthood because they lived lives that did more than seemed reasonable. More forgiveness, more mercy, more peace, more love. Their lives stretched the limits of what was imaginable.

The invitation of sainthood, then, is not to become perfect but to respond to our missing-the-mark with something proportionate, to develop within ourselves a capacity for unreasonable goodness.

When I look at the “sin” of the world, the cruelty, the violence, the abuses of power, I can understand it in the sense that I can trace the roots. So much of what we call sin, the inflicting of pain, is the result of pain that has never been healed.

And yet, even with that understanding, what we are seeing out there feels disproportionate, more than a reasonable response to pain. The harm has grown larger than the hurt that caused it, multiplying as it moves through generations, institutions, and systems.

If that’s true, then the only proportionate response is saintliness, a forgiveness that exceeds reason, a mercy that refuses cynicism, a peace that doesn’t wait for the world to be peaceful. The greater the missing of the mark, the greater the love required to meet it.

These, then, are the everyday adventures in sainthood, the practice of being human, again and again, with intention. Missing the mark, yes, but daring, in our own small ways, to do more than seems reasonable to correct course.

And maybe that’s what my old Instagram experiment was really reaching for. Back then, when I began loving no matter what, I thought I was studying something outside myself, trying to get to the final destination. When actually what I was really doing was setting out on a quest.

Lately, I’ve become re-enchanted with one of my great childhood passions - mythology. I’m particularly enchanted with the Greek pantheon. What I loved back then, and love still, is the epic sense of adventure that runs through those stories. The hero or heroine sets off on a quest, full of passion for reaching their destination. Will they make it? Probably not. Most will meet a profoundly tragic end (not before, of course, marrying their brother, sister, mother, or father 😆).

Still, they set off with hearts full of courage, wildly, ridiculously, without reason.

I’ve started to think of sainthood like that. Not as a fixed or polished state of goodness, but as a great adventure of the heart - the kind that asks for the same reckless courage, the same willingness to begin without any guarantee of arrival.

To make this life an adventure in sainthood we surrender to the lifelong quest to throw ourselves at the practice of loving no matter what, wildly, ridiculously, without reason.