One of Catholicism's pleasures is the patron saint, a specialized advocate in the system, so to speak. Lost something? Ask St. Anthony? Bad eyes? St. Lucy is your girl. Mental troubles? St. Dymphna. Need help in the kitchen? St. Lawrence. Are you an anesthesiologist? St. Rene Goupil. Going on a trip? St. Christopher. Sterile, got an STD or hemorrhoids? St. Fiacre is your guy.
Protestants --who are very strange, compulsive, minority, highly Western and johnnycomelately kind of Christian-- find this stuff hard to take. They have a tendency to mistake the "worship in spirit and in truth" of John's Gospel with worship in neatness and tidiness. Theologically, and humanly, it makes perfect sense to pray to saints. Christians, and Jesus himself, have always asked people to pray for them. According to the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, the organic unity of believers, just because someone is dead to earthly life is no reason to stop talking to them! That is, like, so bigoted and discriminatory against the dead.
The whys and wherefores of these patronage allocations are varied. Some result from official proclamation, but most come from immemorial tradition, often with the macabre and unsentimental logic ordinary humans understand but civilized modern Westerners find shocking. Why is St. Rene patron of anesthesiologists? The Jesuit was tortured gruesomely for two months by the Iroquois before finally being dispatched and relieved from his pain by a few tomahawk blows to the head. Why is St. Lawrence the patron of cooks? He was martyred by being roasted to death on a gridiron.
Anyway, one of patron saints is one of the Twelve Apostles, Judas Thaddeus, St. Jude. (The other Jude was Judas Iscariot.) He specializes in impossible cases and lost causes.
He is the traditional author of the New Testament epistle of Jude (which, by the way, for those of you Dummies who are fans of The Lost Books of the Bibles, quotes the Book of Enoch!). If his image looks a lot like Jesus, it's because they may have been cousins. His shrine in Kerala, India, boasts the biggest devotional oil lamp in the world. Dominican friars specialize in promoting devotion to him. Danny Thomas built a cancer hospital for children and named it after him. (See what I said about all kinds of people and fascinating, etc?) How he got saddled with the lost and impossible is not clear. Part of his traditional iconography is him carrying a club. Maybe someone who needs to get hit on the head with a club is a kind of hopeless case, and so...?
Anyway, part of the piety associated with him is that if you ask him for help, especially if you perform the nine-day prayer called a novena, and your prayer is answered favorably, you should publish your thanks for his help.
So that's what I am doing today. I may be a bad, ex-, nonpracticing or fallen-away Catholic, but Catholic I will always be.
Back in early August, I gave a St. Jude medal as a gift to someone who shall remain nameless. This person, another less-than-party-line Catholic, looked a bit hurt. "Do you really think I'm a hopeless case?" I let the medal speak for me. Next time we met, this lost cause of a person was wearing the medal, pinned to their clothing, right out in plain sight.
In the interim, what I thought was hopeless and impossible has turned out to be hopeful and possible.
Thank you, St. Jude. Really.
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3 comments:
Wonderful tale of thanks.
Which is why someone who has strayed far from faith, but still recognizes it's power is so much more interesting than those that dismiss all religion as hokum but are 'spiritual'.
St. Jude has a shrine in Karala? That land of Hindus and Muslims. Sort of proves that he is the saint of impossible cases.
Actually, Kerala and the Malabar coast contain significant and ancient native Indian Christian populations, present there long before European colonization, well over a thousand years, and some who claim descent from the Apostle Thomas in the first century.
Ancient Christian population that survives in India is still pretty amazing. I find it quite fitting that St. Jude should have a large shrine there.
There used to be a Jewish community in Kerala, also ancient. In 1950 they all picked up and moved to Israel, no they weren't being oppressed, they just felt, there is a Jewish State again, time to go home.
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