I came across this brief description of a “real saint” in Frederick Buechner’s sermon, “Growing Up”:

I mean real saints. I mean saints as men and women who are made not out of plaster and platitude and moral perfection but out of human flesh. I mean saints who have their rough edges and their blind spots like everybody else but whose lives are transparent to something so extraordinary that every so often it stops us dead in our tracks. Light-bearers. Life-bearers.

Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons by Frederick Buechner