This week I started something small. Each morning, before the day gets moving, I read a page about whoever the Church happens to be remembering that day. Most of the names were new to me. A missionary bishop from the fourth century. A widow who took in orphans nobody else wanted. A monk who spent decades copying manuscripts that no one would read for a hundred years.

It struck me how much larger the company actually is than the handful of names I already knew. Sirach says we are right to praise the ones who came before us, each in their own time, and I used to hear that as a line about a short list of famous saints. It isn’t. It is about a crowd too large to count, most of them unremarkable to everyone but God.

Reading about them daily hasn’t felt like research. It feels more like finally being introduced to people who were already there, quietly, the whole time I was deciding whether the Church still had anything left to say to me.

The thing that got me started is Magnificat, the monthly prayer guide with each day’s Mass readings, morning and evening prayer, and a short essay on the saints themselves folded in. I wasn’t looking for a book about the saints this week. I was looking for a way to pray better, and the saints came along with it, which feels about right for how most of them probably got found in the first place.

Today’s Bible Study

Hebrews puts a name to what I felt reading about a saint I had never heard of before this week. We are surrounded, it says, by a cloud of witnesses, and told to lay aside whatever weighs us down and run the race marked out for us. That is not a crowd watching from a distance. A witness, here, is closer to someone who already walked this exact stretch of road and can tell you where it gets rocky. That is different from admiring a saint from a biography. It is letting someone who already finished the race walk a little way beside you.

Recommended Reading

If you want to try this yourself, Magnificat puts out a new issue every month with the day’s readings, morning and evening prayer, and a saint’s life tucked into each one. I didn’t expect that last part to be the piece I would come back to first, but it has been.