"Saint Sparky" (Santo de Chispas) was an anonymous Franciscan Monk who lived in Spanish California in the early 1800s. He visited San Francisco once a year to buy fireworks and bring them back to his mission. He would then don a disguise and in the stealth of night distribute small bags of fireworks to the naughtiest and most mischievous boys and girls. Through his meditation and studies he had come to believe that almost all human efforts to create and live by rules to help us be "good" inevitably backfired. He believed that we must accept--and even encourage--at least some human "badness" to keep our efforts to strive for goodness from becoming misguided constraints. Distributing small and generally harmless fireworks to the "bad" children was his way of telling these children that they were really okay...that much of their naughtiness was actually "good."

The Saint Sparky Society is proud to carry on Saint Sparky's work today all over the world.