There are many ways to use this book. I actually started in the index at the back, counting the number of mystics and saints in it. One hundred and two, from Abba Antony to Wangari Maathai. It happens that Antony lived in the fourth century in Egypt, and Maathai lived in the twenty-first century in Kenya – which gives you a glimpse of the range of this book.
Some of these mystics and saints will surely be new to you. For example, do you know the Japanese Takashi Nagai, or John M. Perkins, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper? There are also mystics as personified sacred objects — like the Hodegetria, otherwise known as the Black Madonna of Czestochowa; and there’s even a fictional character who is for many people more real than their next door neighbor: The Pilgrim of the allegorical modern Christian classic, The Way of a Pilgrim.
Next from the rear of the book are pages of notes, summarizing quotations and sources for these 100-plus mystics and saints, many of whom are not to be found in other, similar books of saints. Then comes an interesting “Reading Guide” as to how to turn to these historical figures and their writings and images for a year, following the Christian liturgical calendar.
But most striking of all is the visio divina (Latin for “sacred seeing”) aspect of the book, and that is what is featured in full-color on 102 of the 209 pages that precede all that backmatter: icon-style portraits of each one. These paintings appear on pages that face pages of written description of who they are and why they are important.
Probably half of these 102 mystics and saints is a person of color. A highly recommended source of visual stimulation of holiness from 2,000 years across the globe. A tool for any Christian who desires to deepen their spiritual practices of beauty and zeal (using visio divina), and justice (by reading).
