My parents believed that we should forgive others as God had forgiven us in Jesus Christ. So they forgave both the soldier and the nanny. It was a difficult act, a painful act—the pain of forgiveness piled onto the pain of deep injury. But it was an act of extraordinary human beauty.

I was one-year-old when I tragically lost my brother. The effect of my parents’ saintly deed are still with me almost half a century later.

Religiously most formative for me were not my own religious experiences but rather the saintly acts—saintly lives—of people around me. They drew from deep wells of faith and lived lives of integrity, goodness, truth, and beauty. In the process, they passed a faith on to me, not as a series of “religious experiences,” not simply as a set of convictions to believe, and not primarily as a set of obligations to fulfill. They passed it on as a way of life marked by love of God and neighbor that makes for human flourishing.

Through intense study I’ve come to think of this way of life as intellectually compelling and not just humanly attractive. Through my own religious experiences I’ve come to sense it as real for me and not just helpful for them. But both my religious experiences and my study of religion followed my encounters with saintly lives.

I know very well how terribly un-saintly lives many religious people lead; often we bring harm on others and ourselves in the name of religion. Yet honesty compels me to think of this unsaintliness as distortion, as a malfunction of faith. If I thought otherwise, I’d be untruthful to everyday saints that shaped my life and to their faith, the well-spring of their both ordinary and extraordinary goodness.