Dinner Party with the Saints
by author Woodeene Koenig-Bricker
Welcome to a Dinner Party with the Saints! Pull up a chair and join a select group of the Heavenly Host as we celebrate their lives . . . and some special foods.
Why a dinner party? One of the traditional images of heaven is the Banquet or Marriage Feast of the Lamb. Revelation 19:9 says, “Blessed are those who called to the wedding feast of the Lamb.” The idea of those who have lived a holy life, gathering in celebration, has often been interpreted as our being present at the Eucharist with all those saints in heaven. But what if the banquet could be a little more earthly than theological? In this book, I imagine what it would be like if sixteen saints were to gather for a dinner party in heaven as they await the arrival of the Guest of Honor.
For far too long, the stories of the saints have emphasized their spirituality instead of their personalities. How often have you read the hagiography of a saint that could be summarized as “He or she did good deeds, helped the poor, prayed a lot, accepted suffering, and died a holy death”?
Another, more modern temptation in telling the lives of saints is to abandon the hagiography for pure history. This is just as insidious, since a biography often seeks to undercover faults and failures, and the saints may be judged by the psychological understandings of our own times instead of the spirituality of their own times.
In this book, I’ve tried to combine both hagiography and biography with fact and fiction with the hope that you will get to know the saints in a new way by seeing them interacting in an imaginary setting, but while still being the very real men and women they were and still are.