book review: saint

Another Ted Dekker thriller, I listened to Saint on CD during a long road trip with my sister and her kids. Again, the spiritual truths in this one knocked me over, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. At first it seems like your run of the mill Bourne-esque assassin-who-can’t-remember-who-he-is story (one of my favorite movies, by the way). But of course, it is so much more, as I knew it would be because it’s Dekker.

What I didn’t know is that our assassin is a character from a previous book that I read (both part of a series, but they can be read alone) called Showdown. But what made this so remarkable is that in Showdown, he is a character who is chosen by God, given gifts and powers, and is full of potential and zeal. Yet, in Saint, that character is unrecognizable—instead we see a skilled assassin, who, in fact, has no recollection of his true identity. You see where it’s going, right?

In the story, the organization that trains assassins believes that the key is in taking away their identity completely, causing them to forget their origins, making them believe they are someone else, and motivating them through lies. They train in a pit where they are fed lies until they believe and their memory is erased. They are sent on missions that train them not to trust any reality except the one they learned in the pit. There are parallels to our human state at every turn.

As the truth of his origins is revealed, he can’t accept it. He feels so lost and confused. He doesn’t know who to listen to or who to trust, and he only wants to return to the pit where he is comfortable instead of his true home, Paradise. I don’t want to give too much away, but what really struck me in this story was that I knew who he was—who he was meant to be, his true identity, his power, his genius, his potential—and I wanted so badly for him to know too.

I’ve been thinking about our true identities since then. I think of it as our imago Dei—the way we were meant to be and live and function. We’re deceived and trained and lied to. We don’t know who we are. And hearing the truth seems so strange. We want to hide in our comfortable pit with all our lies. But who we are, who we could be is beyond what we can fathom. What if we could see reality? Would we throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and run with perseverance the race marked out for us? (Hebrews 12) What if we could see the potential in others? Would we desperately want them to discover their true identity and be set free from the lies? What if we can see spiritual reality... if only we ask?


Had to add this link to Don Miller's blog. It's a poem for a newborn baby. It's fitting here because it's about our spiritual amnesia, and it's beautiful.