The Resonance of Pauli Murray’s Sainthood

Sometimes I struggle with the witness of the saints. While the Church identifies a saint as “a holy person, a faithful Christian, who shares life in Christ,” so many of our forebears held up as models of discipleship seem possessed of a spirit that I do not (and may never) possess. I can reason that all people have what is necessary to be counted among the holy women and holy men. I have even counseled people in my care that God has graced them with all that is necessary to be a saint where they are planted. Time and again, though, I hear the stories of some of the most recognized people of our faith and think to myself, “I’m thankful for their example, but I couldn’t do that. That’s not me.”

Live poor and free like Francis? After growing up poor, that’s not something I’d freely choose.

Bravely face suffering and martyrdom like Perpetua? I’m pain averse.

Set off into the frontier like Jackson Kemper? I get hopelessly lost even with GPS.

I don’t doubt that God can do great things through all people, even myself, but in so many of the biographies of people who fill our calendar of saints, I find it hard to see traces of the latent saint that is within me.

Pauli Murray doesn’t leave me feeling that way. Don’t get me wrong, they still did some pretty marvelous things that I couldn’t do. They were a gifted scholar, able to connect identity, justice, and the law in such a compelling manner that they shaped the civil rights experience of countless Americans. Their work influenced both Thurgood Marshall’s strategy in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which put into motion school desegregation, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s argument in Reed v. Reed (1971) that resulted in the recognition that the Constitution’s equal protection clause applies to women. 

They were also a trailblazer, becoming the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science from Yale Law School and the first Black woman to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. The fortitude and bravery needed to succeed in spaces actively resistant to including people with Pauli’s identities is awe-inducing. Their persistence in the face of discrimination and structural impediments was truly a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Pauli’s sainthood resonates with me not for the extraordinary things God ultimately worked through it, but for the ordinary, recognizable foundation from which it developed. They were a contemporary American not too far removed from my own days. I’m based in the Washington, D.C. area, where Pauli spent considerable time, so at different points we’ve likely walked the same streets, sat in the same buildings, and observed the same radiant sunsets across the cityscape. Pauli came to their religious vocation later in life, like I did, so it’s not hard for me to imagine them experiencing the sometimes-slow work of God in professional settings, wherein faith principles can guide our approach to people, ideas, and actions even if they remain mostly unspoken to those around us. I don’t doubt that Pauli knew the spiritual fulfillment of putting in a day’s work and trusting that God would use what they did to make a difference for someone, whether now or far in the future.

In Pauli, I find the example of a saint who navigated a world similar to my own. The social, religious, and political forces at play in Pauli’s life were also at play in the lives of my family members and mentors who lived at the same time. The faith-based ways in which they responded to those forces enable me to be formed and minister in a more inclusive, diverse church and society. Moreover, Pauli was confident both in their belovedness as a child of God and that God could work through them if they remained steadfast in following Jesus in their own context. They leaned into the many layers of their life—their race and gender, their queerness, their vocational gifts and changes, their complicated relationships—to communicate the Gospel through the wholeness of their person. God used all of Pauli, not just the parts that ended up in their commemorative biography, to continue reconciling the world through Christ.

Pauli didn’t become a saint by trying to mimic the sainthood of others. Pauli became a saint by following Jesus in their own time and with their own gifts to be the saint they were meant to be.

So, where other saints seem distant or bigger-than-life, with Pauli I’m left to wonder: if God can use a modern American lawyer, teacher, and priest to advance justice and shape the world into a more equitable space, what might God be able to do through me or my friends or my neighbors? 

How might trusting in God’s promise and seeking to follow Jesus’ example wherever we find ourselves—stepping into a career change, deciding how to expose our kids to community service, hearing an invitation in our hearts to become more involved with a cause we care about—deepen our discipleship?   

And what do we already possess – our learning, our bravery, our relationship-building, our creativity, our hope – that we can offer to God’s glory and turn into the healing, reconciling action Jesus asks of his followers? 

Because truly, we needn’t be a Francis or Perpetua or Jackson. We needn’t even be a Pauli. We simply need to be the saint that God has equipped each of us to be.