Hope is a song in a weary throat

Pauli Murray makes our list of remembrances because she shines like the sun. She was the first African American woman ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church; her life of service became instrumental in dismantling some of the legal racism in the United States, from the Supreme Court on down; her faith and writings still stir people’s hearts. Even her complex relationship to gender continues to spark insights in the church—scholars still debate what pronouns she might have preferred. 

So many of the saints that we honor founded communities or reshaped society, but often their contributions seem quite distant, even if they are important. Francis changed everything about Western religious and monastic life, but we have so much distance from him that we remember him mostly by fetishizing his respect for animals. We nod politely at the martyrdom of Perpetua and her gender-bending visions of an empowered Christian womanhood—the Roman Empire happened a while ago, so it doesn’t seem very unsettling to us.

Not so with Murray, who walked among us quite recently. A documentary about Murray came out only a few years ago, so important is her work to our country as much as the church. There’s a Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, teaching her work, advocating for her causes, and debating her scholarship. 

Sometimes, people talk as though great saints happened only in the past. Murray reminds us that this is not so. The distance of the past simply lets us off the hook, painting with piety the startling holy humanity of our saints. Francis criticized powerful people, often to their faces, and I suspect they did not like him. Perpetua did not do what she was told, much to the frustration of her family. Both were controversial in ways that would, if we really sat in a room with them, be alternately exhilarating and terrifying. I’m inclined to think sitting with Christ was the same.

We spend too much time, I suspect, trapped in an awe of saints that keeps them at a distance. We spend too little time really listening to them, debating with them, crying with them. Saints aren’t saints because they’re pleasant, or because they accord with the special feelings of holiness that we like cultivate—they’re saints because the Spirit of Christ speaks to us in their lives, their actions, their words.

Murray didn’t just speak of freedom. She worked for it, accomplished it. She wrote of the pain and of the struggle. You wouldn’t have to travel far to find something inspirational about Murray, or even better, simply pick up her writing. I’d recommend it—her writing is lovely—and perhaps the Spirit might say something through Murray that we’ve all needed to hear.