What goes into making a saint? Often it is what I consider inhumane parenting that follows the teaching of the Church. Frankly, I feel this way when I consider the vast majority of so-called “Christian homeschooling,” and the way that it so often keeps children isolated from facts, from diversity in the world, and–sadly–from vaccines. In my current work, I am already discovering the damages and very real consequences that result from previously homeschooled college students who are at almost unfathomable disadvantages when trying to simultaneously navigate independence, different viewpoints, and sexuality.

Meanwhile back to today’s saint, Edmund.

He as raised by parents who sought to do all that their religion expected of them in raising their son. Butler, approvingly (?!?) describes the life of this child:

For that fundamental maxim of virtue he (a young Edmund) had always before his eyes that even devotion infected with self-will and humour, becomes vicious, and nourishes self-love and self-conceit, the bane of all virtue and grace in the heart. As for our young saint, he seemed to have no will of his own, so mild, complying, and obliging was he to every one, and so dutiful and obedient to his mother and masters.

Now, certainly, a child with “no will of his (or her) own” and with no “humour,” and whose entire nature involves mildness, compliance, and obligation can become a human equivalent of a bonsai tree (pictured above)–stunted, yet perfected into some easily movable object of admiration and beauty that can function ornamentally, and fit conveniently into small spaces.

Edmund’s future involved great austerities, hair shirts, sleeping on floors even when beds were available, eating as little as possible, avoiding all places and people that showed any mark of sin (read: humanness), and giving “vice no corner.” Edmund eventually became Archbishop of Canterbury (pre-Reformation), where he could pass on the received wisdom of how to raise children and how to comport oneself in this world so as, ostensibly, to please God.