Stories of the Saints: Bold and Inspiring Tales of Adventure, Grace, and Courage
By Carey Wallace, illustrated by Nick Thornborrow
Review by Brie Tschoepe
“Who is a Saint? Saints aren’t born better or braver than the rest of us. Saints aren’t people who are always good and never afraid. They’re people who believe there must be more to life than just what we can see. This world may be hard and unfair, but saints believe in a God who is bigger than the world, whose law is love, and whose justice is mercy. And this faith gives them courage: to stand up to evil kings, to care for people everyone else forgets or hates…”
For years, I and others prayed with the author for Stories of the Saints, that it would become the book that God wanted to bring into the world to inspire readers with the exciting and marvelous stories of faithful ones.
The book that finally made it to publication is deliciously beautiful and enthralling. The great effort of distilling the stories of 70 saints into a coherent series that is accessible and meaningful to both young and old(er) is brightly evident.
Where the stories seem to have melded with “legend”, Carey accepts the possibility of a mysterious Truth that may not seem probable, but magnifies the nature of the God they served. As she puts it,
“Are these stories true? That depends on what we mean by true stories...just because we can’t be sure a story really happened doesn’t mean it isn’t true in another way. These stories have been told for generations, some for thousands of years...They come from many sources, but they are among the best-loved and most enduring stories in the world because of the deep truths they contain.”
She might have sought to provide “historically accurate” accounts--which no doubt would have left her scant material. Or she might have painted the most fantastical elements, as if these were merely Christian “Fairy Tales.” What she birthed is instead a melding of the two that represents the very mending of divisions our community prays toward. She maintains the Mysteries and Wonders that the Catholic church accepted and preserved, while anchoring each individual in actual place and time and culture. We can marvel that their legacies still influence our expressions of worship and knowledge of God, and yet, in Carey’s rendering, it is abundantly clear that we are invited and welcomed to join their ranks, to “bring the better world to be” by even our own faith as well.
Postscript by Thomas Cogdell
My 8-year-old daughter was inspired by this book to write a song and create a video! She read in the book about Pachomius, a saint of whom I had never heard. Below is the video that she made to describe this unusual man of God.