What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote
human possibility. It is impossible to say what that
possibility is. I think it has something to do with
the energy of love. Contact with this energy results
in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of
existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he
did the world would have changed long ago. I do not
think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself,
for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of
a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance
that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an
escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill.
His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its
particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something
in him so loves the world that he gives himself to
the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with
the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle
the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is
dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world.
He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among
us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
—Leonard Cohen from Beautiful Losers
 |
| my little saint photo by Michael Kolster |
No comments:
Post a Comment