St. Anthony reminds us we are never truly lost’ By Clare Lazzuri
Our family has recently found two items that were lost for extended periods of time. Our second set of car keys had not been seen since last summer when there was a constant flurry of exchanging cars as five different drivers, parents and teenagers alike, went to and from work, baseball practice and games, grocery store runs, fiddle lessons, beach trips, etc.
As with many other missing items over the years, we appealed to the celestial assistance of St. Anthony, widely known patron of lost things. It took him almost a year and, with classic St. Anthony humour, I found the keys when searching for the second lost item – my son’s wallet, which hadn’t been seen since Christmas. Later that day, St. Anthony came through yet again and said wallet was located stuck behind a dresser – just 12 hours before the owner of the wallet was leaving the country for six weeks.
God’s timing is rarely the same as ours. Usually when we want something, we want it immediately – like the location of lost items. But, as God well knows, there is value in having our requests go seemingly unanswered. Sometimes we need these waiting periods in order to grow in patience and trust in the Lord. St. Anthony of Padua, whose feast day approaches on June 13, learned this lesson well in his early years of religious life.
According to www.stanthony.org, the 12th – century Spaniard, born Fernando Bulhom, was drawn to a vocation to the religious life as a young man and subsequently joined the Augustinians at age 15. By the age of 26, he had spent nine years studying theology and was ordained a priest. However, after hearing about five Franciscan monks who were martyred at the hands of Muslims, he felt a strong call to give his own life in the defence of the faith. He sought and was granted permission to leave the Augustinians in order to join the Franciscan order.
It was at this point in his life that things did not quite go according to plan for St. Anthony, the name given to him by the Franciscans. Martyrdom was not to be as the young brother became gravely ill upon arriving in Morocco and quickly realized he had to return home. He was put on a ship headed for Spain, but storms pushed the vessel east, and he landed in Sicily, where Franciscan monks at Messina nursed him back to health. A seemingly “lost” voyage led to God’s true plan for Anthony.
St. Anthony soon connected with more Franciscans, who quickly realized the young man had a gift for preaching. St. Francis of Assisi was still alive at this point and asked Anthony to move to Padua in order to preach in northern Italy and southern France, where people were abandoning their faith due to disillusionment with preachers who were telling people to live virtuously and embrace poverty, but not doing so themselves.
This was no issue with St. Anthony, who embodied the spirit of poverty and quickly became well known for his personal holiness. He often spent whole days hearing confessions, accompanied by prayerful fasting. Because of his time studying theology, St. Francis asked him to teach other monks how to support their ministry with proper Church doctrine, while still embracing the Franciscan spirituality of poverty in all things.
So why do we pray to this medieval preacher to restore lost things? The story is told that St. Anthony had a treasured book of Psalms – a rare thing in a time when books were hard to come by – in which he had made many notes for his sermons and his teachings. The book was taken by a disgruntled monk who left the Franciscans. When St. Anthony prayed that the book be returned to him, not only was the item returned but the monk also sought reconciliation and was reinstated with the order.
Lest we fall into the trap of thinking that St. Anthony is a source of magic or superstition, the key to praying to him when something is lost (be it keys, wallets, or even one’s faith), is to be open to God shedding light on places in our lives where we can find him.
“When a house is shut up, the sun’s rays do not enter, and so we don’t see how much dust is found therein,” said St. Anthony. “But when the sun’s rays penetrate, we soon realize how full of dust the house is. Self – knowledge is just such a ray.”
While St. Anthony generally does come through with restoration of lost items, we need to use the opportunity of seeking something lost to grow in trust of God’s plan for our lives. Maybe we don’t even need the thing we’ve lost. Maybe there’s a better way to live without it. Maybe we simply have to trust that God will take care of the details of our lives better than we can.
Lazzuri writes from her home in Nova Scotia, where she lives with her husband, four of her six children, and her mom. She can be reached at clarelazzuri@gmail.com.
