I realised this morning that I’d posted this last week – without a heading. Fixed now.

In a further addition to it – or perhaps a tangent. This weekend I was suddendly struck by the most obvious thing regarding saints. Look at the variety of life and personality commemorated throughout the year as examples of faithfulness and wisdom: fathers & sons, brothers, gardeners, wives, widows, virgins, artists, soldiers, physicians, scholars, nutters, pseudo-nutters, ascetics, old men, young women, the beautiful, the hideous, and the list goes on. Skim through your menaion – and you cannot miss the “obvious” – holiness, faithfulness, wisdom – does not have a “mould” or a consistent form.

Those who think that the ekklesia ought to look like a convent of Stepford Wives – ought to look again at the examples of faith before us, as well as the teachings of the Apostle (Rom. 12. 3-8; 1Cor. 12). So by way of answering my own question – “Saints, why bother?” – we bother because they show us the richness of expression of faithfulness.