Column for St. Blaise day-Feb.3

Catholics of a certain age may have awakened this morning, and a vague sense of unease about health appeared. This is St. Blaise Day. When I was a boy, we would get special blessings for our throats today. The story I learned said that he was a physician before he became a bishop in Armenia, in the early 300s. A woman brought her son to him in desperation, as he was choking on a fish bone. The bishop was able to have the boy be relieved of the bone. S, a blessing ritual could include two candles, crossed, and the base of the “V” was placed on the throat for protection and healing of its ailments. Other stories about him include a period when he was driven into the wilderness during persecution. Birds brought him food and waited around until he blessed them. Hunters were unable to get game in the region where he lived. Once a wolf took a woman’s prize pig, and the saint smiled and the wolf returned with the pig, unharmed (the pig, and the wolf). As a martyr, he was tortured repeatedly, but I won’t go into detail. OK, we are in the realm of legends here, but these stories met felt needs in communities.

The ritual was one of my first religious crises. I got strep throat not long after having my throat blessed. I could not understand how a germ could defeat the power of St. Blaise. I think I consoled myself with the thought it could be worse, and the medicine made me feel better fast. Plus, my mother always got us ginger ale when we were sick, and I knew I could get a nickel back for the big bottle when I returned it to the store. I then struggled how someone who had the power of healing could then be martyred but gave up on that difficult mental exercise.

The stories of saints, the proliferation of days dedicated to saints immerses a careful, pious person into a thoroughly religious environment. Saints cover the panoply of human experience and situations. In a way, they are human exemplars of the Celtic way of prayer where prayers exist from the time one awakes, to lighting a lamp, to work, to retiring at night. Rituals such as that of St. Blaise have gone out of favor, it seems to me. In part, it feels a bit like a plea for magic, and our technology has obviated the need for it, at least at times. Upon reflection, I still miss those sorts of rituals, as we live in a time when we are ritually impoverished. We don’t know how to share depth experiences well in common, so we feel as if we have to make everything up from scratch. Otherwise we somehow feel as if it is impersonal and inauthentic.

Saints are not meant to be perfect. Such is not our condition. They do demonstrate a trait, a decision, a virtue toward which we can aspire. In Christian theology we are all called toward a saintly life. Indeed, the Creed speaks of the communion of saints. In baptism, we are all family, all sisters and brothers, connected by that common property of water. In a sacramental sense, the simplest thing can be a pointer toward divine presence, divine reality, within the physical. the physical is the gateway to the spiritual, not its opposite, not is lesser cousin. That includes this life we live, right here and right now. How would it affect your relationships to seek the saintly qualities in others, to see them as saints? How would it affect your sense of personal worth, to realize that you gaze at a saint in the mirror?