It’s St. Anthony’s feast day today. He has a special place in Catholic conventional culture for help finding things. Mary Fiorito has quite the story here. I mentioned this on my weekdays segment on the Catholic Channel on Sirius XM Channel 129 today, but Pope Benedict XVI had a wonderful reflection on St. Anthony, which captured his depth as a teacher and even mystic. It’s brief — here. Worth reading. Here’s just a taste:
St Anthony speaks of prayer as of a loving relationship that impels man to speak gently with the Lord, creating an ineffable joy that sweetly enfolds the soul in prayer. Anthony reminds us that prayer requires an atmosphere of silence, which does not mean distance from external noise but rather is an interior experience that aims to remove the distractions caused by a soul’s anxieties, thereby creating silence in the soul itself. According to this prominent Franciscan Doctor’s teaching, prayer is structured in four indispensable attitudes which in Anthony’s Latin are defined as obsecratio, oratio, postulatio, gratiarum actio. We might translate them in the following manner. The first step in prayer is confidently opening one’s heart to God; this is not merely accepting a word but opening one’s heart to God’s presence. Next, is speaking with him affectionately, seeing him present with oneself; then a very natural thing presenting our needs to him; and lastly, praising and thanking him.
St. Anthony pops up in the book I put together, A Year with the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living, which is a devotional that is intended to help with the noise of life, which seems to get louder every day, to help acquire some of that posture of silence for prayer.
Anyway, St. Anthony comes in handy for more than finding lost items!
NOTE: As I post, A Year with the Mystics is currently 45 percent off the list price at Amazon.com. I’m ordering some copies. Feel free to join me. Here’s the link! It’s not self-promotion; I put it together because I wanted it to help. It seems to — it helps me! Thanks be to God!