Friday, October 28, 2016

Saints and Others



It’s All Saints and churches have their calendars of saints, and I have my own list of saints and others who I respect and revere.
Some of these people were Christian. A lot of them were not.
Some here were very saintly, others more heroic than saintly.
Some were people of great faith. Others were courageous skeptics.
All of these people were flawed human beings, some more flawed than others.
Many of them gave the last full measure of their devotion.
I am grateful for the lives of all of these people who now rest in peace from their work.
I look to each and every one of them for courage and inspiration.








Aelred of Rievaulx




Mordechai Anielewicz





Hannah Arendt





Willem Arondeus






W.H. Auden





Josephine Baker







James Baldwin






Bartolome de las Casas





Max Beckmann




George Bell*

*I'm mindful of the controversy that now surrounds him.  Whatever evil he may have done, the good he did was very good, even if it might not be enough to redeem him.



Isaiah Berlin







Joseph Beuys





William Blake






Dietrich Bonhoeffer






Filippo Brunelleschi





Paul Cadmus






Michael Callen






Albert Camus




Mary Cassatt





Jonathan Mirick Daniels






Eugene V. Debs




Hans von Dohnanyi





Donatello




Frederick Douglas




Albrecht Dürer





Thomas Eakins





Fanny Ann Eddy




Erasmus of Rotterdam





Max Ernst




Jan Van Eyck





Fang Li Xhi





Francis of Assisi





Caspar David Friedrich





Artemisia Gentilleschi





Giotto




Barbara Gittings




Emma Goldman





Francisco Goya




Philip Guston






Woody Guthrie




Fanny Lou Hamer




George Herbert




Joe Hill





Magnus Hirschfeld







Mahalia Jackson




Marsha P. Johnson




Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones)





Chief Joseph






Mychal Judge





Julian of Norwich





Frida Kahlo





David Kato





Yevgeny Kharitonov





Martin Luther King Jr.





Marquis de Lafayette





August Landmesser





Jacob Lawrence





Leonardo da Vinci






Abraham Lincoln





Martin Luther








Nelson Mandela





Thomas Mann





Thurgood Marshall



Del Martin (with Phyllis Lyon who still lives)






Masaccio (on the left looking at us)






Thomas Merton






Harvey Milk





Michel de Montaigne





Montesequieu





Jack Nichols and Frank Kameny





Reinhold Niebuhr





Felix Nussbaum





Origen of Alexandria





George Orwell





Thomas Paine




Quanah Parker






Blaise Pascal






Frances Perkins





Nicholas Poussin






Rabia al Basri






Yitzahk Rabin





Rembrandt van Rijn





Walter Reuther and Richard Frankensteen in 1937 after being beaten up by Ford company goons.




Marty Robinson and Tom Doerr in 1970 during an occupation of Rockefeller campaign HQ



Craig Rodwell





Oscar Romero




Eleanor Roosevelt





Franklin D. Roosevelt




Andre Sakharov





Nina Simone





Jonathan Swift





Paul Tillich





Harriet Tubman





Alan Turing





Mark Twain





Karl Heinrich Ulrichs







John Wesley




Rogier Van Der Weyden




Walt Whitman




Elie Wiesel






David Wojnarowicz




Tomas Young



Luke the Evangelist



Mary Magdalene, Apostle to the Apostles



Mary the Mother of God



The Beloved Disciple



Peter the Denying Apostle





Thomas, the Doubting Apostle


Some Saints that I knew personally:

JeDon Washington, the man who inspired me to be an artist

Charles Bewick



4 comments:

Kittredge Cherry said...

Wow, you've got all the saints from A to Z! (Or at least to W.) Great to see Elie Wiesel next to David Wojnarowicz!

JCF said...

Have all your saints "graduated to the Larger Life"? Because if not, I think there's a couple I would add under the letter "O". [Actually, Google confirmed for me that Phyllis Lyon is still alive---she turns 92 on November 10: Happy Birthday, Phyllis!]

JCF said...

I would add Mohandas Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, and Dorothy Day...and beseech all of them: PRAY FOR US!

Counterlight said...

Apologies to Ms. Lyon. I have corrected the error.