Okay everybody, time to roll up your sleeves. Monday is the feast day of not-a-saint-yet Mother Teresa. We need to take care of that 'not a saint yet' part. It's embarrassing.
For those of you unclear on the rules, the criteria for sainthood is really easy breezy lemon squeezy. Dead+In Heaven=Saint. Everyone who is in heaven is a saint. No one who is alive is a saint. The Church never ever declares that any dead person is anywhere, not heaven, not Purgatory, not Hell. Not even Hitler (at the last moment he could have gone, "What was I thinking!?").
Except when the church canonizes someone. Then the church is saying the person is definitely in heaven and is worthy of the veneration of the faithful.
In order to do this the church has to prove the person is in heaven. The devil doesn't do nice things. The only way to prove a soul is in heaven is if a living person has a miracle bestowed upon them after asking for the intercession of the saintly candidate.
Now get this straight! We're talking miracles here, not this junk people CALL miracles! Not, "I found a parking space!" Not, "My cat hid in the armoire when we were moving and was transported across North America by Allied Van Lines locked in the armoire with no food or water for five days and arrived in Alaska still alive and well."
Not even this (true story):
A man in Santa Monica suddenly has the irresistible urge to jump up and walk his dog in the middle of the afternoon. He never walks his dog in the middle of the afternoon, but out he goes. While he's gone a construction worker hits a gas pipe and the dog walker's house blows to smithereens.
Is it a miracle? No. It's great for him, but it's not a miracle.
A miracle only qualifies as a miracle if the event is spontaneous and unexplainable. If the man had left his house to walk his dog BLIND and come back and SEEN that his house was blown to splinters that would be a miracle. Spontaneous+unexplainable+good thing=Miracle.
So in order to canonize the Blessed Mother Teresa (the fact that she's called "Blessed" means she already has one miracle under her belt) she needs another miracle attributed to her.
This is where you come in. Start praying for the miracle you need by asking for the intercession of Mother Teresa. You separated brethren can just calm down. You're just asking her to pray for you, just like you ask your other friends to pray for you when you need a miracle. And don't give me this "I Just pray straight to Jesus" malarkey. Really? You never ask anyone to pray for you? Good. That'll save me some time every day....
......ugh....I'll be praying for you anyhow......
When you get your miracle contact someone in the Catholic church. Someone important, not the old lady next to you in the pew mumbling through her rosary when she should be paying attention to the Mass. (Not that she's not important.....you know what I mean. Anyhow, she can't even focus on the task at hand. I wouldn't trust her with my miracle.) Be sure and follow up to make certain your important person actually got a hold of someone even more important that can get your case to the folks over at the Causes of Saints. Unless your important person was the Pope.
Prepare to be investigated. We're not taking your word for it. Sorry.
Get busy people. We'll talk more about why Mother Teresa is most definitely in heaven when we celebrate with her on Monday.
13 comments:
in reading your blog today i realized that i havent the foggiest idea on how to ask for a saint to pray for me properly! i recently purchased your st rita bracelet and it says "pray for us" on the back. so, ihave been catching myself saying things like "pray for us st rita, that i should become a better wife and he shall become a better husband." but it doesnt seem to be getting through. why just this afternoon he fussed at me and said i was making a mess where he had just cleaned (i had set my cell phone down on the counter in the kitchen when i had come in the house.) i tried to tell him he was being unreasonable becasue i didnt think that my cellphone had constituted a "mess" but he disagreed and all of a sudden i didnt appreciate the work he does around the house!
that in mind, if you have a specific prayer that i should recite to catch saint rita's attention, it would be greatly appreciated.
"it is the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ".
While researching Mother Teresa, please spend some time on the true history, not just on the myth beleived by the masses.
Just a
few sources
for researching
Mother Teresa
"The suffering of the poor is something very beautiful and the world is being very much helped by the nobility of this example of misery and suffering."
Thank you Christopher. I'll be sure to pray to Bl Mother Teresa for you.
Dearest Sister Mary Martha,
Will I go to hell because I have had to miss the past two Sunday's masses because the stupid cows keep jumping out right before I have to leave? Are cows Satan in disquise?
Amaupino, I'm not St. Rite OR Dr. Phil. But I do have to live with other people who can be really annoying.
Here's my simple advice. When accused apologize. Put your cell phone in the wrong place? Oh..sorry.
Discuss it later. Ask him why it bothered him so much.
You're doing fine with St. Rita. You might also call on St. Teresa, the patron saint of people who are annoyed by the annoying habits of others and St. Dominic Savio, the patron saint of the wrongly accused.
sister mary martha
In my personal experience, yes, cows are Satan in disguise. Also pigs.
When I was a little girl my family went to visit some farmer friends. We had driven way out to the farm and when we got they no one was home. It had been a long drive and we decided to wait around for a while.
My mother and I climbed over a fence in the barnyard where two or three pigs were milling around up by the barn. My mother thought she would be funny and yelled, "Sooooo...eeeeeee" to the three pigs.
About 400 giant pigs came thundering from behind the barn. We fled in terror. Who knew they really came when you yelled that?
Anyhow...I think it's probably still a sin...definitely if it's happened more than once you need to plan better.
Sister Mary Martha
Christopher, you should be still standing in the corner for your last remarks.
What are we to believe, that everything about Mother Teresa was hype? That she and her order helped exactly no one? That the Nobel Prize Committee watched a ten minute clip that her PR firm put together and handed over the medal?
Don't worry yourself over her sainthood. There are levels to Purgatory and the clergy suffers the very worst torments. Which should also set your mind at ease about your fourth grade nun.
I'm not here to tell anyone what to believe or not to believe. I just don't like to see people blindly agree with popular ideas without checking into them a little bit. You'll notice I did not express an opinion one way or the other in my previous post.
The websites I provided did contain opinions about Mother Teresa, but ones backed up by some first hand experiences and facts. Now for my opinion: Personally, I believe that she was not a great humanitarian, even though she probably thought what she was doing was righteous. Her documented belief that suffering is beautiful was all I really needed to hear.
The Nobel Prize was awarded to her after she had already become world renowned. I'm sure, like most of the world, the committee never even considered that her reputation may not have been warranted.
I don't know all the facts about Mother Teresa, I never met the woman, I've never been to Calcutta. I just think it is good to have a skeptical mind. Gather as many facts as you can and base an opinion on those facts. I guess that is why I never made a very good Christian. I'll be looking forward to reading your expanded post about Mother Teresa.
And to set the record straight, every single nun I had for a teacher from kindergarten through eighth grade, was never anything but awesome.
wow, Christopher were YOU ever lucky. I had Sister Marillia in the fifth grade. I still have nightmares. She meant well.
thanks! i just submitted an alchemy request for you on etsy! hey! you give good advice, dr phil's got nothing on you!
Christopher, I think it's reasonable that when discussing the beauty of suffering, Bl. Mother Teresa included, and perhaps considered first, her own. Nearly all corporal works of mercy can reasonably be considered (and offered up as) suffering.
"it is the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ".
This is hard to understand if you aren't doing it. If you are suffering and keep asking "why me" and being sullen and upset about it, if you can't see beyond yourself to the world around you and the redemtive power of sharing in Christ's suffering, then this quote won't make any sense. My husband and I lost our baby boy through a miscarriage on Saturday, Sept. 11. I have never suffered more (physically and emotionally) and I have never felt more blessed or more united to the heart of Our Blessed Mother, Mary and her Son, Jesus. We've seen so much good and so many blessings already. My husband and I have been brought closer together as a couple and closer together with God. The pain I felt as my child's body was being expelled from my own, the amazing amounts of blood that flowed...it was redemptive. My husband and I were given the blessing of being allowed to participate in creation with God and then the additional blessing of participating in redemptive suffering with Christ. Our precious, beautiful, innocent baby boy is in heaven. There is great suffering in our earthly loss but there is even greater joy in knowing our son is in heaven. God gave us what every parent works for their entire life...our child is in heaven.
"The suffering of the poor is something very beautiful and the world is being very much helped by the nobility of this example of misery and suffering."
Just a note...the poor doesn't always mean they have no money. You can have all the money in the world and be poor. Poor in spirit, poor in health, poor in community, poor in sanity, poor in common sense...there are many ways to be poor and many ways for poor to suffer. Any and all suffering can be redemptive, if you are open to it. When you are - great beauty and blessings can be manifest. Souls can be saved. I don't think there is anything more beautiful than that.
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