In the Nicene Creed, adopted at the First Council of Nicea in 325 AD, the Communion of Saints is sort of left out but a later revision was made in the First Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381 AD. It states in part, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,the forgiveness of sins,the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting”. It is this communion of saints I allude to today.

The Communion of Saints (in Latin, communio sanctorum) is the spiritual union of all Christians living and the dead, those on earth, in heaven, and according to the Catholic faith, in purgatory, as well. They share a single “mystical body”, with Christ as the head, in which each member contributes to the good of all and shares in the welfare of all.

My involvement with them has been not nearly so lofty or holy, for that matter. Nonetheless it has been real and, in my eyes, inspiring. I tend to consider saints in two categories. Official and non-official. The non-official ones are people who I think should be saints if only the right people knew them (St. Bernice of Green Bay, for one). The official saints are those listed by  the Church as being worthy of canonization. Further, the two that I have been involved with personally are St. Anthony of Padua, canonized by Pope Gregory IX less than one year after his death on the 30th of May of 1232, and St. Joseph. You may know Joe as Mary’s husband and the foster father of Jesus. He is the patron saint of workers. Anthony is the patron saint of people  who have lost something, hence the poem “Dear St. Anthony, please look around. Something is lost and must be found”. You may notice, also, that both these saints appear in statue and image  with the infant Jesus in their arms. Joseph, for obvious reasons and Anthony for his involvement with St. Francis of Assisi, who was famous for his reverence for the humility of Jesus in appearing to us as a humble chid, and also because of the legend of a vision of  the Christ child that appeared to him (Anthony) in prayer.

I’ll begin with my involvement with Tony. I had heard of this patron of lost things many years ago from a friend in my hometown and occasionally, through the years I would recite the poem, if I lost something. The first real “experience” I  had that inspired me was on Saturday, October 14th 2006. Several days earlier I had lost a crucifix that belonged to my late wife, Christine. I had been wearing it as an earring and after mowing my huge one acre lawn, one day, I discovered it missing from it’s place in my ear lobe. I was bummed and very dismayed. I looked everywhere and finally after a couple days decided it was somewhere in the lawn and was thus hopelessly lost forever. So I prayed to Anthony, the little prayer I had learned years before. Later that day I realized that sometime during the day I had gotten the song “The Hokey Pokey” stuck in my head and it would not leave.     Further, I realized that the verse that kept repeating was “Put your left foot in, put your  left foot out”. This continued through the day and night and even when I woke up that Saturday the infernal song was still there. “Put your left foot in, put your  left foot out, put your left foot in and shake it all about”. As I was walking past the garage,  on my way to the barn to do the morning chores, I felt inexorably drawn to the riding lawn mower, still singing that stupid song. As I approached the mower I looked down at the platform where my left foot would rest and, you guessed it, there it was.

Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather at that point and as you can see, I immediately took out my cellphone and took a picture of it. So…..

This brings me to last week. Once again I lost an earring. This time, a beautiful gold peace sign that my girlfriend, Debbie gave me. And once again, bummed, I searched, I prayed to Tony and searched some more. No earring in the bed. Not in the bathroom. Nowhere to be found. Until last Tuesday when my dog, Minnie got herself, as she does so often,  wrapped around the little shrub at the end of my house.  I tried to get her to go back around the shrub, in the opposite direction she was wound, but she was so wrapped that I couldn’t convince her to do what I needed her to do so I unleased her to unwrap it myself. When she was free, the leash fell to the ground as I unwrapped it from the little evergreen and as I bent over to pick it up, once again, you guessed it, there it was. Once again, out comes the cell phone to take a picture of my gift from Tony.

So…..

I was going to wrap this little story up with a clever little tale of my other saint, Joseph but I have been so longwinded with this story that I will leave it for another day. It’s a good one so you’ll have to come back and I’ll tell it to you on your return.

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“I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed: and the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I fail and keep trying.”

Tom Hopkins

Perhaps this moment in time is the hour I release myself from my confinement and walk, a free man, into the bright sunshine of self realization. Perhaps I am not able to fully release myself from the pain I have experienced from losing someone I loved so much. Ram Dass says “Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.” So, I am ready. I will leap to the next rung and for that brief moment between hanging on to the old and embracing the new, I will fly.    ……..WatchingAndWaiting

I would like to begin by thanking God for His kindness and love. It’s a good place to start and will always lead you to a good ending. I’m very thankful tonight for the twenty wonderful years I spent loving and being loved in this old farm house in Wisconsin. We raised chickens and pigs here for 12 of those years, grew our own food and raised a family. It will always hold a place in my heart as will those I shared it with.
It is where animalfarmproductions got it’s name.

My old house in Wisconsin