I don’t know about you, but sometime after Vatican II, I seem to have lost my need for saints. “Now you can go directly to Jesus,” I was told or at least heard. There may be a difference. But when Life Happens, I seek all the help I can find: Saints, saints, all three Persons of the Trinity and those saints and sinners still here whom I think may be willing to join in my urgent pleas to surround a situation or person in a cocoon of earnest intentions of positive energy and support. “Pray for her pleezze. Pray very hard. Squeeze your eyes tight, reach into your heart, and send some love--NOW!” I’m confronted with one of those times as I sit to pray with these readings on this Feast of Sts. Cosmas and Damian. We are, most of us, confronted by one or more of these situations often: threatening news on an x-ray, the loss of a job, the inability to help a child no matter how or what we try, the phone call about a past-due bill, concern about the unhealthy choices of a loved one. You fill out the list for yourself. “I will be for her an encircling wall of fire, says the Lord, and I will be the glory in her midst.” “Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion. I am coming to dwell among you. Many nations shall join themselves to the Lord and they shall be his people and he will dwell among you.” Zechariah 2:509, 14-15a, in today’s Reading. |