Dwight Longenecker
Can saints fly? Perhaps levitation is a gift to humanity to puncture our pride—to remind us that we don’t have all the answers, and that our approach to all the things we take with such gravity ought to be spiced with a touch of levity.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote somewhere that “Scripture can only be interpreted through the lives of the saints”. The observation shifted my understanding of the interpretation of Scripture and the lives of the saints in a profound way. Suddenly I saw particular verses of ideas in the Scriptures fleshed out in the lives of the saints. So, for example, the verse teaching that “unless you become a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of God” is exemplified by the children of Fatima or St Thérèse of Lisieux—a child who teaches her “little way of spiritual childhood”. The idea of divine foolishness? – St Francis. The call for the strength and meekness of an ox? – St Thomas Aquinas. Putting on the full armor of Christ and being a warrior? – St Martin of Tours and St Ignatius Loyola.
In my book The Romance of Religion, I took the connections further and argued that, as Scripture is fleshed out in the lives of the saints, so the great fairy tales and legends are also made real in the stories of the Bible and the lives of the saints. Are you enchanted by the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk and all the stories of the boy who killed the giant? The Old Testament tells us it really happened. The boy was David. The giant was Goliath. Are you delighted by stories of dragons being slain? Consider St George, St Michael, or the valiant Virgin who tramples down the dragon. Delighted by Cinderella? Consider the peasant girl Mary visited not by a fairy godmother, » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/03/ill-fly-away-oh-glory-they-flew-history-impossible-carlos-eire-dwight-longenecker.html