Saintly actions are hard to come by

SOUL FOOD

For thy dear saints, O Lord, who strove in thee to live, who

followed thee, obeyed, adored, our grateful hymn receive.

Hymn 124,

The Hymnal 1940

I was in Dietrich’s waiting for a pound of French Roast coffee to

be ground when I heard a woman’s voice not far from me say, “She is a

saint!”

A second woman’s voice replied, “I know. I wonder how she does

it.”

“Me, too,” said the first voice. “I think it would be an

unbearable situation.”

As I walked to the door with my bag of coffee, the two women

walked ahead of me, taking their coffees and their conversation to a

nearby car. I got in my own car thinking about saints, those

creatures whose goodness and virtue stand so very far above my own.

Many of us, I suspect, would like to be saints. Like speaking a

foreign language, running a marathon or losing 10 pounds, it would be

nice -- but, oh the work of doing it.

A couple of week’s ago while I talked on the phone with my sister

Tammy, she asked if I had heard of a saint named Rita, the patron

saint, my sister said, of impossible cases. I confessed that I

hadn’t. My sister had come across Rita in a movie, a G-rated film

called “The Rookie.” It’s a baseball story, a true story with a

couple of miracles attributed to the intercessory prayers of St.

Rita. We talked a bit about the mysteries of prayer. Are the prayers

of some better than the prayers of others? Does God listen to some

people more than he listens to others? Does he answer them more

often, more quickly? How many prayers does it take? We talked about

how prayers are sometimes answered in ways we may not like, in ways

it seems we did not ask for -- in ways, even, that may be hard to

take -- not always in the obviously happy ways of movie miracles.

I tried to think of an example but, in that moment, I couldn’t. I

found one later reading about Rita Lotti, St. Rita of Cascia.

Rita was born in Italy in 1386, a time of deadly political feuds

and rivalries. Her husband, Paolo, was murdered by his political

enemies. Rita tried hard to dissuade her young twin sons from

avenging their father’s death. She prayed that God would hold her

sons back from committing such murders. Both sons died within the

year and Rita was left widowed and childless.

It’s the kind of answer to prayer that a saint might be prepared

to take, but it could throw many of us for a loop. It’s the kind of

answer to prayer that, could we see foresee it, might encourage us

not to pray.

It tells us what saints know and cherish: God works in mysterious

ways.

“‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,’

says the Lord, ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my

ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts,’”

wrote the prophet Isaiah in chapter 55, verse 8.

Great saints do not chafe at the idea; they rest in it.

In hymn 124, we sing of them: “They all in life and death, with

thee their Lord in view, learned from thy Holy Spirit’s breath to

suffer and to do. Jesus, thy Name we bless, and humbly pray that we

may follow them in holiness, who lived and died for thee.”

I ask their prayers and try to follow. I wonder how they do it.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.