REMEMBER MAN, YOU ARE DUST!

by Susan Fox

Every Ash Wednesday as Lent begins we hear the words: “Remember man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return!”

The words, “REMEMBER YOU ARE DUST,” are an anecdote to pride. Sometimes we can fall into thinking we are something extraordinary, and then we remember… oh yeah, I’m dust. All those extraordinary things in my life? That’s God working through me. This is a good and dusty moment.

These words are an invitation to conversion for the sinner.  I remember meeting a young man who had no concern for the consequences of his actions, so I pointed to the daisies planted in his front yard, and asked him the serious question, “Where will you be when your toes are pushing up those daisies? Who will be your companions?” Will you hang with the devil and his dominions for all eternity in the barbeque pit? Or will you play with God and his angels and his saints. People don’t think that the decisions they make now will have incredible consequences for themselves for a very, very long and unending time. And the discomfort of living with the devil forever is just one of the drawbacks.

THEN there is a certain freedom in being dust, light as a feather, knowing that your life someday will be somewhere else, not tied to this earth, your current anxieties or responsibilities. Instead, we will be embraced in the arms of God for all eternity. For heaven is not a place but a state of being. It’s like that moment in Dante’s Divine Comedy when having ascended to heaven he looks back at that  “dusty little threshing ground that makes us so mad for our sins,” i.e. the earth. He feels so distant and uninvolved in the things that formerly attracted him.

We all have sin, and anxiety. We all have fallen short of the Glory of God, but these things will be unimportant from the perspective of eternity as long as my basic choice is for God – and more importantly, I trust in His mercy. This is a moment of dust-hood.

Doctor of the Church: St. Theresa of Lisieux

We don’t have to go to Purgatory. A famous doctor of the Church teaches that God does not want us there. It’s a big waste of time. But yes, I’ve heard all the stories of the seemingly holy people that go there until the end of time. Their problem is that they expected to go there, or they relied on the merits of their own lives. St. Theresa of Lisieux taught that you CAN avoid Purgatory by trusting in Jesus to purify yourself and give you all the graces necessary for salvation before your death. This is not presumptuous. You also need to work diligently with God’s grace to change your life. But your efforts will never be perfect. Only Jesus can effect the change in our hearts.

One of St. Theresa’s fellow sisters challenged her on this idea, and then died later the same year. Sr. Feodora appeared to St. Theresa after her death with a sad look on her face, seeming to say, “You were right!” But when people lack trust, and end up in Purgatory, then the Church Militant goes into action and prays for the soul who failed to trust Jesus. Thank God for the Body of Christ. Because of our charity, the Church Suffering is freed from Purgatory.

St. Theresa also said that some great souls go to Purgatory because they rely on the merits of their own lives, and so they are judged on the merits of their actions. These souls may actually have lived great lives, but no one’s actions are perfect! The best thing to do is to consecrate yourself to Jesus through Mary and place ALL the merits of your life in her hands. When you arrive at the doorstep of eternity shivering and naked, the Blessed Virgin Mary will cover you with her cloak -- the merits of her own life. And you’ll be a shoo-in for heaven.  

In 2010, I faced the possibility I would die. My arteries were 90 percent clogged. I had to have heart surgery. At the time, I said to the Lord, “If I die now, my life is a waste because I have so much unfinished, and I’ve done nothing.” He gave me the same answer, St. Faustina reported in her diary: Jesus told her, “Do not fear; I Myself will make up for everything that is lacking in you.”

Ah! Dust-hood! After those words, I went peacefully into heart surgery, knowing that whatever I haven’t done, Jesus would accomplish for me. It wasn’t a bad experience.

Jesus identified St. Faustina Kowalska 
as the "Secretary of My Divine Mercy." 
She wrote a diary explaining her 
experiences with Jesus, Divine Mercy

One nun after regularly going to confession still felt she was not forgiven. It was a great suffering to her. She finally went to St. Faustina. Her faith in the holiness of Sr. Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938) was so great that she felt she had a direct line with Jesus. So she said with great trust and humility, “I know sister if you tell me Jesus has forgiven me, it will be true.”

Actually, she was availing herself of the Communion of Saints, and the act bore good fruit for her. For Jesus told St. Faustina: “Tell her that her disbelief wounds My Heart more than the sins she committed.” Faustina’s fellow sister received this message with great joy, and she began to cry like a child. Glorious Day! She achieved dust-hood! May we all be so blessed.

But imagine you are that young man I met near the daisy bed, secure in your youth, and neither fearing death nor sin. And you make no preparation for the next life. I have been speaking lately to people in this state of being, and their lives bear a lot of unnecessary suffering.

To even identify what is a sin is like attacking them personally. “Judge not lest ye be judged!” they thunder back. They cannot distinguish what they do and who are they in relation to God. They are so vested in their sins, they think I do not love them if I can say, “This action is wrong.” It is to the point that they cannot recognize right and a wrong. I keep telling them that if I cannot make judgments about whether some action is right or wrong, I cannot work to stop myself from sinning because I will not know what is sin!

Judge Roy Moore's 10 Commandments Monument
 removed from an Alabama courthouse

Actually, being ignorant of sin is a punishment from God. When Moses brought the 10 Commandments down from Mt Sinai, he found the Israelites worshipping a golden calf and he threw the 10 Commandments to the ground and broke the stone tablets. The punishment for their idolatry was to leave them in ignorance of their sins and have the law taken from them.

Sadly, God has removed the 10 Commandments from the United States. Judge Roy Moore, Alabama Supreme Court chief justice, fought and lost a federal court order requiring a 10 Commandments monument to be removed from the state judicial building. They were removed. That is a very bad sign, and now we find so many Americans totally ignorant of right and wrong.

I remember my husband discussing condoms with a co-worker. Larry, finding out the co-worker was using this method of birth control with his wife, looked the man in the eye and said, “George, that’s what you do with prostitutes not your beloved wife.”

The man was shocked.

Another man whined that his wife left him after he suggested they get an abortion. Larry said, “When you suggested the abortion (even though he changed his mind later) you were saying she, and the fruit of your relationship, the child, was dead to you.” The wife was angry and had the abortion anyway.

That man was shocked.

I once translated the letter from the first bishop of Seattle, Bishop A.M. Blanchet, and a white French Canadian. He had witnessed the Indians whopping and hollering, killing "easily and with gaiety of heart" the white settlers in Eastern Washington.

Rev. A.M. Blanchet in
1856, later the first bishop
of the Diocese of Nisqually
-- which became the dioceses of
Seattle and Spokane.

It was the mid-1800s, and despite the evidence of brutal murders, he never lost faith in the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest "because it cannot be doubted that when the Indians will understand the seriousness of the crime of homicide, they will avoid committing it," he wrote in his journals.

He merely felt he had a job to do as a missionary: "As they learn to know God - that will inspire their horror of all these terrible crimes that they commit now so easily."

We are well past the new millennium, and I believe now that unlike Rome, which was conquered by barbarians, we have devolved to become the barbarians, barbarians with technology allowing us to do much more brutal murders than the Indians ever committed.

Technology gives us the appearance of civilization. But look what we do with it! 54 million Americans murdered since 1973. Scientists are making human animal hybrids in test tubes! Rancid pornography on the television and the Internet. All of this is a sign that we have lost a sense of sin. We do not know any more how to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil.

In fact, evil often parades as good in our culture. And so I wondered how do I bring a perspective of dust-hood, a knowledge of sin to the people I meet in person and online?

I think Bishop Blanchet answered the question for us. He met the barbarians, and made them Christian, and they stopped the sin of murder.

"As they learn to know God - that will inspire their horror of all these terrible crimes that they commit now so easily," he said.

We must learn to tell people about God, about His love for us, and His mercy. We must tell them that an all Good and Loving God sent His only Son into the world to suffer and die for our sins. And dear God, if there is no sin -- as many believe today -- then His Life and Death was a waste.

Let us reject that perspective. There is sin. We all sin. There is a merciful God, and He does the work for us to help us overcome our sins. And then one day He will bring us to Himself in one  great embrace of love. Yipee! Dust-hood!

LOSS OF COMMON SENSE: Sodomy rights in Colorado

(editor's note: Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper is about to sign legislation that will create civil unions between people of the same sex. This is the response of my husband, Lawrence Fox. He faxed this to the governor's office as we heard he doesn't read his emails.) 

Dear  Gov. Hickenlooper,

In 2008, the people of Colorado voted to keep marriage between one man and one woman.  This was not a bigoted but a reasoned decision on the part of the people of Colorado. Now the Colorado legislature in cahoots with  you, our governor, is going to thwart the will of the people. RE: Please veto SB 13-011, Civil Unions.

At one time the United States Government told the people of Utah, “Give up polygamy and you can then enter the Union of United States.”

Now the government dictates to its citizens that sexual misogyny, sexual androgyny,  and sodomy are now protected practices.

The culture of death has  finally reached its apogee in Colorado. In one year, we can now smoke dope and commit sodomy. And why not, we were given the right to terminate the life of our unborn children, divorce & re-marry, divorce & re-marry, engage in pornography, and sterilize ourselves. Give it a couple of years and gay marriage and euthanasia will become part of the Democratic agenda.

What a pyrrhic victory for same sex couples! But society has morally collapsed in order to achieve such an end.

The Democratic Party and general populace have become so bored that sodomy rights is now center stage.

Yes it is now an undeniable reality. The moment Democrats achieve political power the critical issues become: sodomy, abortion, contraception, and euthanasia and all under the veil of personal rights and freedom.

How can a State affirm the dignity of the individual while at the same time overlook an individual’s destructive habits?

Is it not reasonable to recognize that certain sexual behaviors are detrimental to man and to woman, especially activities that include men having sex with men even in a “committed relationship.”  Is it not reasonable to recognize that homosexual behavior place men at greater risk of Hepatitis and AIDS?  Why would the state be interested in the protection of sodomy as in the case of two men or anyone for that matter? Lesbianism has its own detriments.

If the State accepts civil unions, the demand for homosexual marriage will soon follow and the state will again be saying objectively that a conceived child does not have a right to a father or a mother.

What a monstrous position regardless of personal rights.

It is contradiction for the state to recognize the homosexual couple’s right (or anyone’s for that matter) to conceive a child without the natural father and mother. What a failed experiment on the child’s psyche.  

Prisons are filled with boys without fathers.

Now society is pushing transgendered therapy on prepubescent children.

Is it not reasonable to resist a culture, which teaches that sexuality has nothing to do with children and the welfare of children?

Note: This is precisely the social agenda of the GBLT culture: sex and children are exclusive -- one does not necessarily lead to another. (Oh that was what Planned Parenthood pushed from the beginning and now a majority of Christians are monthly sterile married partners).

Other Thoughts

History shows that human society (laws, morality, religion and culture) built on the committed relationship between one man and one woman, known as marriage, survive.  In contra-distinction societies which experimented with alternative styles as norm are all dead: Incas, Spartans, Ming, Athenian, Carthaginians, Sodom, Gomorrah, Canaanites and countless more).

We are writing our own death sentence because some  man ora woman are unable to bond with someone of the opposite sex?

Many aberrations within modern society are the direct result of a lack a genuine masculine and feminine bonding and nurturing within the family. History has shown that this genuine bonding between man and woman is rooted in the human heart. Stable cultures have been formed around the marriage ritual: courtship, dowry, weddings, sacrament, blessings, fertility, medicine, midwives, extended family, and peace exchanges between extended tribes.

Family is the foundation from which human bonding is learned, experienced and shared with subsequent generations.

The family throughout history has either defined the perseverance of a people and its way of life or its demise. Note that in most of the Western World, very few people marry, very few couples have children and numbers have shown that in as little as 100 years, the Western way of life will be lost.

The family has survived throughout history the internal and external pressures, which misshape and dissipate it. But if the family does not survive this generation, then society will collapse.

Pressures which misshape the family are: substance and physical abuse, which destroy the dignity of the abused and the abuser; polygamy, which diminishes equality; infidelity and divorce, which destroys love and trust; pornography, which destroys sexual integrity; infanticide and abortion, which takes the life of the child; sterilization and contraception, which creates the need for abortion and infanticide and treats the person of the child as a commodity; and homosexuality, which denigrates masculinity and femininity.

Tragically, the culture which GLBT seeks to establish as normative is one in which the complementary nature of man and woman are made irrelevant, and the fundamental right of every child to a father and a mother is denied.

How can a culture survive when it’s very foundation, that is the family relationship between one man and one woman, is redefined to mean something else?

The answer is that it cannot. 

This bill undermines religious freedom and will force the closure of religious charities.

There is no government Interest in the promotion of alternative lifestyles.

Thank you. 

Lawrence Fox 

The Pieta of Main Street

by Susan Fox

The road is August-cracked,
dry and dead with frisbees.

In the autumn,
the wind wisks through the trees
and buries 
all the broken bottles of pleasing summer
under piles of vicious leaves. 

The people, who follow its crooked path, 
are crippled with need.
They are lonely for the summer,
and grow smaller in December
when the cold reduces all things to a sharp black silhouette:

An old lame woman
struggles home from the market
in a bright cold;
Waving a can of tuna, she asks,
"Have you any change?"
but the embarrassed crowd
ignores her;
the bus rumbles by mournfully,
spraying her with snow.

Grinning, 
the greasy blond
becomes friendly in the post office;
he is rejected by a smart brunette,
who does not see his face fall
or become fragile in the moonlight.

A child at the hardware store has two squares
cut around both ears;
his mother watches anxiously.
"Lord, here are two swords," we cried,
but there is his mother's agony.
The pieta has been carved -- everywhere.

We have seen the yearning 
of five small children
for their parents' attention.
It is not
that it is not given, 
but that the giving is divided
among five. 

In the supermarket,
the old crones whisper,
"Do you remember the Swede,
the big blond Swede,
who froze last winter 
and died 
in a dirty hotel on Main Street?"

This is our neighborhood -- 
rough and unshaved,
rude and soft-spoken,
like a man down on his luck:
a little rocky in the moonlight.


My cat is the real Christian here;
she goes about 
spreading love
by rolling in everyone's yard.

There go the children -- 
black and white -- 
down the street 
with broken sticks
and old wagons racing!

There goes a gentleman Riley,
riding the rails --
fat stomach and a smart cigar --
waving from the open freight car.

The world's greatest disease
is no love,
quoth Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

She should know
the loneliness,
a dead Christ in His mother's arms.

Other poems by Susan Fox (Some appear at the end of a Post)
She Lost An Earring!
Seven Meditations on Exile at the end of the post
St. Anthony's Bread at the end of the post

THE FATHER'S GIFT: The Holy Eucharist!

by Susan Fox

IN THE YEAR THAT KING UZZI’AH DIED, Isaiah had a vision of God on His holy throne. Overcome with reverence, he prayed, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 5-6)

I find his response to seeing God most comforting as I often feel the same way.

I have spent my entire life in the Presence of God in the Holy Eucharist, the One whom Isaiah prophesized when he said “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name

Immanuel (which means God is with us).”

Providentially, God provided a means for Isaiah to bear the vision. He sent a seraphim, a holy angel, with a burning coal taken from the altar, “And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven.”  And God has provided the same recourse to Catholics in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. We have a means to forgiveness that will enable us to approach God in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.

My pastor today pointed out that in the Catholic Church, God is always present with us under the appearance of Bread and Wine. In the Holy Mass (where the word Christ’s Mass comes from), the priest prays the words of consecration over the bread and wine, and the Holy Spirit responds by turning these gifts into the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ really present among us.  Just as the Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary and made her with Child (as Isaiah foretold), the Holy Spirit turns the bread and wine into the Real Presence of Jesus.  Jesus promised us He would be with us until the end of time, and He has kept His promise.

 “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” (John 6:53-56)

This was no symbolic talk. The disciples heard it and started muttering among themselves that this was hard to accept.  But Jesus didn’t water down the message. He simply pointed out that no one can come to Him unless it be granted to him by the Father.

This has been given to me by the Father. I was four years old when my family was involved in a car accident in New Orleans in 1957.  I remember the details distinctly  -- a rare gift as many people don’t remember things that happened at that early an age.

I remember the comic book I was looking at (I couldn’t read) in the back seat. I remember looking over the seat and seeing a car coming straight for us (it was a head on collision) and I remember my parents didn’t see it because they were looking at each other with great love. It was a lovely last memory of my parents’ life together, one I treasure.

When the accident occurred I was protected by the back seat, but my parents had not used the seat belts on our new car, as it was not something they were used to. By the time I climbed out of the back seat, I saw Mom was knocked out in the front seat (glass emerged from her eye decades later resulting from this accident) and my father emerged from the car with blood on his throat.

I was taken from the car vomiting, and screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” They didn’t let me go to him, and he died three days later in the hospital. But when I cried out, my Father in heaven heard me and answered. He so loved the world, He sent His only Son, and I was about to be the beneficiary of that Gift foretold by Isaiah in a very personal way. 

I WAS A CATHOLIC CHILD, baptized and loved, but really my faith was not visible to me before that time.  I didn’t know Jesus.  But when my father died, my mother and grandmother took me to the hospital chapel. It was a Catholic hospital, so the Body of Christ under the appearance of bread was stored in a golden tabernacle in the hospital chapel. As Isaiah prophesized, His Name was Immanuel. God was waiting for me. He was there in a real physical way after the accident that took my father’s life.

Mom said, “There is Jesus in that tabernacle. Pray for your Daddy.”

I prayed. I told Him I wouldn’t pray.

Now today whenever I can I go back there, and pray again, but with great joy and gratitude for so much was given to me through that tragic circumstance.  It was April 28, 1957, but it was Christmas in a little girl’s life. God sat with me.  It was as if Christ on the cross had just said, “It is finished.” And then He was immediately by my side when I grieved my father’s death.

This great gift of His presence in the Eucharist has remained with me my entire life. And I tell you about it now, so that you can know He is available to you in the same way at any time in whatever troubling circumstances you find in your life.

We often think of the Christmas story as one of joyful anticipation and fulfillment of God’s promise to send His Son. This it is. But there is also a lot of suffering in the Nativity of Jesus. He chose the circumstances of His own birth, and He did not make it easy on Himself. He wasn’t born to a rich family. There was no room at the inn, so He was born in a stable, described as a cave. When King Herod heard of His birth, he  saw a threat to his throne. So he ordered the execution of all the male children under the age of two in Bethlehem. This was a terrible atrocity.  “Rachel weeps for her children, and they are no more.”

His family became refugees in Egypt as his father Joseph was warned to flee the persecution.

But I remember my son James at one week old. We took him to a restaurant with a thousand tiny lights. He marveled at this for some time, and then promptly fell asleep. He had also marveled at his father’s face on the morning he was first born. His Dad was tired, having been up all night, wore a hospital gown and puffy blue hat, but he was rocking James and singing, “Do dee do do.” Real intelligent stuff.

Just out of the womb, the baby stared at Larry’s face very intently.

I think Jesus picked the circumstances of His birth so He could stare into the loving faces of Mary and Joseph, see the humble shepherds when they came to pay their respects, and accept the homage of kings. Jesus was always a sucker for the little people. He – King of Kings, Lord of Lords -- chose to become a little One Himself.

And that’s how I found Him, under the appearance of simple bread, waiting to comfort me when my father died.

Message to Wayne

Wayne, 8 p.m. Sunday Oct. 21 Mountain Time in the United States, we prayed as you requested. God bless you. Susan Fox

AND WHY DO WE VENERATE THE SAINTS? IS THAT IDOLATRY?

Welcome Wayne!

By Susan Fox

Folks, here is a comment from Wayne who I met at the National Catholic Register online discussion board. If I publish the comment by the regular means, I can’t answer the question. Please I encourage you to comment on this posting if you have anything to add to my answer. Your insights will be most welcome. Notice on this site you can sign up to become a follower. (Right Hand column below --  just above the Total Pageviews.) This allows me to send you an email directly without knowing your email address.

Hi, its me, your friend wayne.

Heres a quote fom your piece....Jesus said, "Begone Satan: for it is written, "The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and him only shalt thou serve." And Satan left Him.

You were , along with sister tarah, the only 2 who made sense in that NCR site. Now, if you could, help me out with this one. The adore part. Dont the catholics adore hundreds of "saints" and poor old mary? i know the prevailing theory is that these departed ones in turn pray to Jesus for you. The word adore...i dont see any problem with that. But does that quote mean to adore god only? i dont see adore as meaning worship. i adore. I adore Welches white grape peach juice. Glad to talk to you again

Yes, Wayne I adore chocolate, but – you are correct -- that is different than adoring God. It’s too bad we can’t use the Greek language because they have a whole bunch of verbs that mean different kinds of love, and that’s what we are really talking about.

I adore you, too, Wayne, but in that context I am really talking about friendship. I adore my husband, but in that context I am talking about romantic married love. My love for chocolate is self indulgent, though not necessarily bad, whereas friendship and married love involve a certain element of selfless giving. At least that is the goal.

But the love I have for God is totally different. If any of my other loves interfere with the love of God, I have to put them aside and chose God alone. You know Jesus said, any man who has left brothers, sisters, father, mother or children, or lands for My sake and the Gospel, he shall receive a hundredfold now in this life houses, brothers, sisters, mothers and children with persecutions and eternal life in the world to come.  (Mark 10: 29-30)

We do indeed believe we can adore only God and Him alone. It comes from this commandment: “Love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind, your whole strength, your whole being and your neighbor as yourself.”

So as they say on Star Trek: THIS IS THE PRIME DIRECTIVE, the essence of the Christian life as Christ has laid it out for us. Our loves are prioritized.

So where does this leave poor Mary? Or poor old St. Anthony? I really love Mary. I really love St. Francis, St. Anthony, St. Faustina, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Isaac Jogues, St. Theresa of the Child Jesus, St. Joseph, St. Peter To Rot, St. Juan Diego, St. Pio.  I love so many saints I can’t list them all. I was tempted to say I adore them, but I adore them the same way I adore you, Wayne – they are my friends. So I do not adore them the same way I adore God, and if I did, I would be committing the sin of idolatry.

The Catholic Church calls this form of friendship veneration. We venerate the saints. For me, it means loving them as my friends in heaven. But the definition of venerate is “to regard with reverential respect or with admiring deference.”

So how do we venerate a person in heaven without giving them the regard due to God?  It’s simple. HERE IS THE ANSWER: All devotion to the saints must have as its end Jesus Christ.

That is if you find yourself loving St. Anthony to the exclusion of God (and I know some people who don’t go to Mass but they always pray to St. Anthony), then our love has become disordered. It is idolatry.

But in the Catholic Church we are always running around talking about “True Devotion to Mary.” TRUE Devotion as opposed to FALSE (idolatry) devotion. It’s means that we do not worship her as a goddess, by no means, she is a creature created by God. We go to her instead as a more perfect means to get to Jesus. Jesus is always the goal in any devotion to the saints. Well, why not go directly to Jesus? You can! And you can go to your friends in heaven as well, and end up at the same place, God.

In fact, one of the most frustrating things about the Blessed Virgin Mary is whenever I go to her, I end up with Jesus or the Father or the Holy Spirit. She just disappears. I can’t get a firm fix on her. I ask St. Anthony to get me a parking space. I find a parking space and I thank God! I forget St. Anthony. And you know what? That makes him very happy because he lived his life loving God with his whole heart. He is one of those Christians, who gave up father, brother, sister, mother, children, lands to serve God. I think he even slept in a tree, which is much more than I do. I sleep in an apartment.

He was one crazy dude (from the world’s point of view), but he loved God more than anything in this world and it was evidenced by his life. He was a Catholic priest, a Franciscan in the time that St. Francis lived. He really embraced poverty just like St. Francis.

Most of the time we Catholics pray to St. Anthony to ask him to find something that is lost. But it almost seems to me sacrilegious because he was such an incredible man. (It’s not sacrilegious however. The saints are very humble.) He was sent to preach to the Waldensians  (early Protestants), and they hid in their houses and refused to listen. He happened to be standing on a bluff next to the sea and all the creatures there came to the top of the water. They seemed to be listening, so St. Anthony began to preach to them and eventually 50 people came out to listen to him along with the sea creatures.

One man didn’t believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, so St. Anthony made a deal with him. The man had a mule. So St. Anthony said, “Starve the mule for one day and at the end of that time, we’ll offer him food or the opportunity to worship Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.”  The man agreed. St Anthony prayed all night and said Mass on the next morning. The man did not feed his donkey for one day. St. Anthony put Jesus in a gold vessel called a Monstrance. The donkey was put in a pen. Hay was placed on one side of the pen and St. Anthony came with Jesus on the other side of the pen. The donkey did not go to his food. He went to Our Lord Jesus Christ present in the Holy Eucharist and held by St. Anthony. Then the donkey knelt.

I know that’s impossible! It was a miracle. But the man who owned the donkey returned to the Catholic faith, so I guess God felt the miracle was necessary. (See poem about this below)

One time on my birthday I lost my favorite Brown Scapular (it’s like a Catholic altar call. It’s a rope with a brown cloth and an image of Our Lady on it, worn around the neck, and it means I belong to Jesus, not to the world.)

So I said to St. Anthony, “I hate to ask you to help find my scapular because you were such an incredible miracle worker, but could ya? Would ya?”

Now I don’t hear voices or see visions but somehow I understood that I would find my scapular before the end of the day.   Suddenly I noticed it was 11:30 p.m. on my birthday and I didn’t have my scapular. So I said, “St. Anthony. It’s 11:30 p.m.!” Wayne, I kid you not, I was walking out of my dark bedroom where my husband was sleeping when I said that, and I reached out for the doorknob behind the bedroom door and my scapular was hanging on it! Now, of course, I thanked God! (not poor St. Anthony).

If you wish to know more about St. Anthony there is an article on him on our blog

http://christsfaithfulwitness.blogspot.com/search/label/St.%20Anthony%20of%20Padua

Or check the labels on the right side for an article called, “St. Anthony of Padua.”

I did mention earlier that Mary is a more perfect means to Jesus, and why is that? Mary is His Mother. Christianity is really about relationships. Our God is Three Persons in a Triune Relationship. Our God is One, but He is also a Community of Persons. If I want to get to Jesus only the Holy Spirit can bring me. I can’t even say His name unless the Holy Spirit allows me to. If I want to reach the Father, only Jesus can bring me. Jesus and The Father send the Spirit. The path of holiness for myself is to understand who am I in relation to God? Who am I in relation to each Person of the Blessed Trinity? Mary was Jesus’ mother. Jesus is the God who said, “Honor Your Father and Mother.” He doesn’t disobey his own commandments. He also gave away his most precious and last possession from the cross – His mother. (He'd given up everything else, including his clothes at that point.) He said to John, “Behold Your Mother.” And to Mary, he said, “Behold your son.” It was his last moments on earth and He was dying. But He gave away His mother. So Jesus felt His mother could help us. He was giving us a short cut to salvation. 

Do you know about short cuts? They have them in computer games. They are called cheat codes. You learn the cheat code and you can win the game faster and easier. In some of the games my son played he never ever would have unlocked the puzzle to get to the next level unless he first searched online for the “cheat codes.”  In giving us His mother, Jesus gave us the “cheat code” to salvation. (Disclaimer: this is my explanation of the Catholic teaching on Mary, not that of the Catholic Church.)

In the Old Testament, when people wanted something from the King, they approached the King’s mother first to sort of soften him up. St. Louis Marie de Montfort, who wrote “True Devotion to Mary,” said that when a soul gives himself to Jesus through Mary, it’s like handing a wormy apple to the King’s mother.  Mary slices the apple, cuts out the worms (our gifts are not perfect) and places the apple slices on a gold plate and hands it to Jesus. And Jesus is very pleased with you.

St. Louis Marie de Montfort called devotion to Mary the short, sure and easy way to enter the Kingdom of God. And the veneration we Catholics give to Mary is greater than the veneration we give to all the other saints. But still we realize she is a creature of God, and He made her. But what a creature! I am so grateful to her. When I think about the fact that if she hadn’t told God, “Yes, I’ll be the Mother of Your Son,” then I, Susan Fox, would never, ever have met Jesus. How sad my life would have been without Him.

Now below I share a poem I wrote some years ago about St. Anthony’s miracle:

St. Anthony's Bread

(St. Anthony of Padua converted an unbeliever by working a miracle. He gave a mule a choice between his feed or the Eucharist. The mule had been starved, but chose to kneel in front of the Eucharist instead of eating.)

I am a poor dumb mule,

     starved for a day and given a choice:

my feed or the Food of the Universe.

I knew Him:

He was the Baker who kneaded my life.

He was the King who once lay in the cold before my kind

in the form of a baby.

My knees were not made for this.

I am constructed awkwardly.

But my choice was simple:

      I knelt before the Bread of my life.

      I knelt before my Maker.

(Susan Fox)