St. Richard's Feast Day is December 9

(or how saint becomes ancestors again and ancestors become saints)

Facebook has just informed me that today, December 9th, is the birthday of my childhood art teacher, Richard Mello, pictured above in 1979. Mr. Mello was an enormous soul—big of body and giant of heart. He wheeled his cart into our first grade classroom and got us painting and imagining. His room was filled with blank sheets of paper, wide tables, and all kinds of watercolors, crayons and invitations. He moved up to the new junior high with my class where he sat in the middle of the modern building, the whole school focused around his open air art room, reminding us all that were there not just to learn but to create. He dj’ed our dances, knew all the best music, advised the newspaper, and held forth like a great Dionysian god of our tween years.

But I didn’t know he was a saint until two years ago.

A “saint” has become synomous with a really good, usually pious, person officially sanctioned by the Church. But that’s not the way it traditionally worked. A saint could be anyone when they were alive but what they did AFTER they died is what got people interested in them. They didn’t perform their miracles from this side of the veil but from the other. I always like to point out that the Church most definitely did not consider Joan of Arc a saint because in fact they tried and burned her as a heretic and a witch. Nor did they change their minds with ease. Only after 600 years of fanatical devotion to her from around the world, only after World War I when the French lay their victory at her feet, only after the atheist mystics Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain began to claim her as their own, only then did the Church deem to beatify her. But she’d been showing up an helping people, inspiring people, empowering people, consoling people for centuries all on her own.

A saint is simply an ancestor on the other side who helps a lot of people. Sometimes I say that no no living person is a saint (because we are complicated messes, don’t even get me started on Mother Theresa or the Dalai Lama…) but every soul on the other side of the veil can become a saint, if we remember how to call on them.

I first called on Mr. Mello two years ago when my book Take Back the Magic was still in production and I was presented with the cover that had been designed. It was pretty but banal and, let me tell you, everyone judges a book by its cover. I wanted to throw a frustrated temper tantrum, kick my feet, whine, cry, ball my hands into fists and scream, “NO! This will not do!” But I have, over time, learned to call on the dead in these moments. How could I communicate what I wanted? How could everyone win—the design team, the publisher, the artist they were working with, me, my readers? This was a job for someone on the other side.

But who?

When I give an ancestral assignment I either choose someone who was brilliant at that job in life…or a flamboyant failure and thus has something to prove. My mother was an artist, my father a wannabe artist but I call on them so much and I like to be inclusive. Call on someone new and they want to show you they are really there. For no discernable reason I remembered Mr. Mello. He knew how to make art popular. He designed our newspaper, got everyone dancing, inspired creativity in the masses. The first thing to do on that June day was to check if he was still alive. He was not. He had passed on that very day five years earlier. That was my confirmation that he was standing ready.

I wrote to my design team, feeling relaxed and playful and generous. I no longer felt fearful and angry. That’s what the dead really do for us…they move us from fear to faith. I let the team know that I didn’t love the cover, that it was neither wild enough nor compelling but that I trusted they could do better. Everyone nodded in agreement over email and a few weeks later they came back with a new cover for my book.

I am of course incredibly grateful to the British artist Charlotte Day for her beautiful botancials, and to the design team for their exquiste work BUT I know that the invisble hand behind everyone’s ideas was Mr. Richard Mello.

I am telling you this story because that is how we show our gratitude to the dead, to the saints on the other side. We give others an opportunity to call on them, and get to know them, and in this way the dead don’t just live in our memories but they are ALIVE in our Lives making them happen. You can call on Mr. Mello, too, and share your stories of him, just like people who had never met Joan of Arc called on her in their hour of need.

Today is Mr. Richard Mello’s birthday. I am still grateful to him, I know we’ll work together on my next book’s cover…the book I need to go and finish TODAY!

And by the way? If you do experience a miracle with him? Let me know okay?

Here is the cover he inspired from the other side.

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Perdita Finn is the author of The Reluctant Psychic, Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. With her husband Clark Strand she wrote The Way of the Rose. She teaches popular workshops on collaborating with the dead.