(no subject)
I decided to turn this into a post because it was just getting too long and involved.
You said:
How can you have met a Saint? One of the things that makes them a Saint is that they are dead. If I went back in time and met Peter the Apostle, he still wouldn't be St. Peter, because he was alive then. Who do you claim to have met?
Well, I met them after they were dead. Or, in some cases, I met the personification of people's ideas about them.
The really popular ones, like Jesus and the Virgin Mary and the Apostles--they're all over the place. The personifications, I mean. Not so many in rural areas, because there aren't that many rural Catholics around here, but in the city they're like...well, not as common as pigeons. Maybe more like outdoor sculpture. Generally I try to pretend I don't see them, because some of them will start following me around and lecturing or preaching or even accusing me of witchcraft just because I can see them. Others just hang around their church and do their job, though. Listening to people's prayers and spiritual housecleaning and things like that.
The personlike ones are more ghosts than ideas, although of course ghosts are affected by ideas. If a lot of people are thinking about you it's hard not to start becoming what they think you should be--if you stay around, that is.
I probably met a lot of saints' ghosts when I was really young, just like I met a lot of everything else disembodied, but I don't remember many details because there were just too many of them, sometimes all talking at once. That was when I told them all I wasn't going to do any more favors or listen to any more spiels. Because there were just too many of them and I couldn't choose between them and it was getting me in really bad trouble at school (my mom took me out around then!) and not being able to help them all was making me feel like shit and besides they kept coming to me at night when I was trying to sleep. And some of them were just mad in general, so they were showing me gross things or distracting me on purpose. Like the fairies, except that the fairies usually do it because they're bored. I think.
Anyway, some...people eventually took pity on me and kept most of the ghosts away. I heard later that there were a couple of people in the area who'd already been driven crazy, and they (the first people) thought that this was a pointless waste, because what if they really needed an interpreter at some point? Better to have a fairly coherent one around in case there was some kind of large-scale crisis. So after that I didn't see many saints, because most of them are, after all, issue-driven people, and unless they happened to be into metaphysics or something I wasn't terribly interesting to them.
The ones I met after that--let's see. The most interesting ones I met were these two guys John and Isaac...I actually didn't know they were saints until I looked them up later on. They said they were going around North America doing some kind of survey or observation--and meanwhile watching as many lacrosse games as possible. When I met them I was hoeing in the garden, and John came up and started giving me tips on planting and whatnot. Isaac made some joke about mustard seeds, which now makes much more sense than it did at the time. And I thought, hmm, are they trying to act all casual so I won't think they want something and tell them to go away? But if they were, they were very subtle about it. They didn't ask me for anything, although John did try to persuade me to play lacrosse even though I was home schooled at the time.
Isaac was a little strange. Very tough, and sort of bitter but the bitterness was kind of smoothed out and settled. But also further ingrained, you know? Most ghosts don't last more than a few decades, but there was something that just kept him going, on and on, through all the changes that had happened in the world around him. I don't know what it was. He didn't talk all that much, but I felt sort of compelled to look at him even when it was John who was talking. I'm glad they were long beyond the "look! I'm dead!" stage--a lot of ghosts think they're supposed to go around looking the way they did when they died, or they wave their intestines around just to be shocking. Like flashers, except that instead of trench coats they have skin.
Anyway, John was really interested in everything. He told me all this stuff about plants and history and canoeing and the Hurons, and he asked me about what I was learning. And I went to the library and looked some things up for him and Isaac because ghosts can't open books or turn pages, or not continually, anyway (I know I said I wasn't going to do any more favors but this was just sort of in the context of hanging out! Besides, I was learning things). They stayed for a couple of weeks and then said they were going on to their next stop.
Then there was Catherine of Alexandria--she told me right out who she was, but she wasn't very chatty. She was going around studying media, as she called them, and she had a list of questions for me. She asked me to write down the answers and leave them out for a while so she could memorize them. It was a little bit frightening how much she'd trained herself to remember.
I also have my suspicions about this one woman Lidwina...I was about to walk across the duck pond last winter when it was frozen, and she ran up and yelled at me in a vaguely German-sounding accent. I told her the ice was perfectly thick right then and she said, "Well, you could still slip and fall!" We talked a little, and she complained about young people these days, and Amsterdam--in a funny, affectionate way, not a harping way. But she never said why she was there.
That's about all I can remember at the moment.
[OOC: Pretend this went up at least a few days ago, ok? Before the truth or dare game.]