Reading Makes Saints

Saint Josemaria Escriva once said, “Reading has made many saints.” And indeed, many of the saints we admire now started their own spiritual journeys by reading.

Saint Augustine’s conversion journey in the 4^th Century started out with a voice calling out to him “tolle lege,” which means “take up and read.” And Saint Augustine did just that; he picked up the Epistle to the Romans, read it, reflected on it, and thus began his spiritual journey.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola started his spiritual journey after reading about Saints Francis and Dominic. It was the 16^th century, he was serving as a military leader during the war, when all of a sudden, a cannonball struck his leg. Injured, unable to walk, and confined to his bed, he resorted to reading to keep him preoccupied and distracted as he recovered from his disability. Being the consummate soldier that he was, he looked for books on chivalry and military valor but the only books available to him at that time were books on the lives of Saints Francis and Dominic. He read them nonetheless but soon after, he paused and reasoned to himself, “Saint Dominic did this; therefore I must do it. Saint Francis did this; therefore I must do it.” He got so inspired that he decided to imitate them, and the rest as we know, was Jesuit history.

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross also had her conversion moment after reading a book. One fateful night, she was alone waiting at a friend’s house and she happened to pick up a book on Saint Teresa of Avila. She ended up reading the entire book, and when she finished, she closed it and said, “This is the truth.” She later converted and got baptized into the Catholic Church. A few years later, she entered the Carmelite monastery to become a nun and then eventually a martyr and a canonized saint—again a spiritual journey that can be traced back to her deep reading of a book.

Can you imagine our world if these Saints never picked up those books? Their contributions to society, their deeds, their saintliness, their inspirations and motivations, can all be traced to some deep reading they made where they got to discern the call of God in their lives. But what if they had smart phones and they all got sucked into reading their social media newsfeeds instead of those books? And what about the generation now growing up in the digital age, shaped by smart phones and social media—the generation that author Jean Twenge called “iGen?” Some argue that deep reading is going away and that some of that precious time now gets allocated to screen time, checking and consuming copious information via our smart phones and social media. According to a research study, young people spend an average of 165 minutes (that’s almost 3 hours!) per day on social networking sites. That's three precious hours that could have been spent reading and getting inspired by the autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux. However, despite the many diversions driving people's time away from reading, deep reading that is, I still hope to have a future where we would read about saints who became saints because they read.