A new month has begun, so I’ve popped over to Jen Fulwiler’s saint generator and spun up my final randomly chosen saint for 2014.
But, before I do this again in 2015, I’d like to rejigger my approach, and I’d appreciate any advice, O Readers.
The nice thing about using a random saint generator is that I keep finding saints I might otherwise not have run into and/or challenging myself to think about parts of the spiritual life that I might otherwise let lie fallow. Doing this once a month also gives me a nice Schelling time to look up a new saint (as opposed to doing it “occasionally”),
However, most months, I wind up doing nothing with the saint I’ve selected after writing the initial post announcing who I drew. There have been a couple exceptions (thinking about St. Zita specifically at work, St. Isidore when working with my sourdough starter), but it’s usually only worked out when I come up with a particular, situational peg for addressing my month’s saint in the first day or two after drawing them.
So, that leaves me with a couple options:
- I could focus much more aggressively on finding a specific trigger to think of my new saint for the month. (And the laziest possible version of this is probably taping a small picture of the month’s saint to my computer, which is what I’m going to try once I finish this post).
- I could just be ok with using the randomizer to discover one new saint per month, but to assume I won’t do much more than make their acquaintance briefly on the first and then move on.
- I could drop the randomizer and look for a different way to have the saints usefully intrude on my life. (A recommended collection of lives of the saints could become next year’s Monday book, since we’re almost done with Pope Francis’s Open Mind, Faithful Heart)
Suggestions? Habits of your own that you’ve tried?
(I used to have an excellent way of learning about new-to-me saints, but the friend who used to spontaneously bring them up to me has since entered a convent)
Meanwhile, speaking of convents, the saint I drew this month is Saint Bridget of Sweden, who was both a mother and a nun (after the death of her husband, she founded an order that lived in a double monastery). She’s particularly known for a set of 15 prayers meditating on Christ’s passion, of which my favorite is below:
O JESUS! Inexhaustible font of compassion, Who by a profound gesture of Love, said from the Cross: “I thirst!” and suffered from the thirst for the salvation of the human race, I beseech Thee, inflame in our hearts the desire to tend toward perfection in all our acts; and to extinguish in us the concupiscence of the flesh and the ardor of worldly desires. Amen.
So, suggestions on how to draw on the thirst of the saints to tutor my own?
You can check out other Saint of the Month posts here.
