Patron Saints and How I met Mother Mary

Sunday, July 31, 2022

I can’t sleep, half because of moving anxiety, half because of caffeine too late in the day, basically up until bedtime. At 1:15 AM, I’m getting out of bed and traipse to my computer. Searching YouTube for something good to watch, I find a video by Fr. Chris Alar about St. Charbel Makhlouf from Lebanon, supposedly the greatest miracle worker among the saints. Funny, I’ve never heard of him.

Fr. Chris starts with a question a lot of people ask him: “How do I find my patron saint?”

Interesting. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a patron saint for individuals, other than the name you pick out for your Confirmation. Poorly catechized as I was, I chose “Mary,” and when Deacon Tom asked which one, I said, “Her,” pointing to the large statue at church.

“The Holy Mother?” Deacon Tom asked, incredulous.

“Yes,” I said stubbornly. “Isn’t she a saint? I saw her once, you know.”

At least I thought I did. Now I’m not so sure what exactly I saw. When I met Mother Mary, the most amazing thing was that at the time, I neither had a Catholic background nor was I a practicing Christian (though I did believe in Jesus and felt very close to VatiGod*). The occasion wasn't what most Christians would expect either: She appeared to me during a Tarot reading I was giving to a client, of all things…

FLASHBACK TO THE YEAR 2000. A normal workday at the Center for the New Age in Sedona.

The client is a sweet, middle-aged woman named Rosemary, the epitome of childlike innocence. Our session is really more spiritual counseling than Tarot reading, which means she does most of the talking, but that’s okay; I am used to it. This is the kind of session where my psychological training really pays off.

She tells me the story of her miserable childhood, how she’s been emotionally and physically abused by her schizophrenic mother, how she grew up functionally illiterate, which she still is to this day.

One day, Rosemary tells me, she had a vision. She doesn’t know that word, though. “It was like a dream, only that I was awake,” she says with a shy smile, always painfully aware of her shortcomings. The vision was of a glowing book floating in mid-air in front of her, and she saw that it had her name on it.

Then she heard the voice of God telling her that He wanted her to write a book of poems about peace and love and war. “I couldn’t believe it—I, a functionally illiterate person, was supposed to write a book?”

But even though the task seemed overwhelming and she often despaired over it, she did it anyway. Writing even a small booklet was a daunting piece of work. Nearly every word had to be painstakingly looked up in a dictionary, and stringing them together in a not just coherent but pleasing way seemed almost impossible. “It took me many months, and I cried the entire time.”

Finally, Rosemary self-published her booklet of poems (this was during the first Gulf War). Soon, she was invited to read her poems to audiences, first at local churches and libraries, and then spreading farther and farther. At one church on Christmas Eve 1990, she had a captive audience of over 500.

“There were so many people starting to cry when I read that poem,” Rosemary says, tears welling up in her eyes. “I felt so bad; you shouldn’t make people cry. That’s just not right.”

Her naiveté stuns me. “But you weren’t making them cry in a bad way,” I say gently. “They were crying because your poems touched their hearts. That’s a good thing.”

She looks at me quizzingly, as if she isn’t sure whether I’m being serious. She says people suggested she should sell the book, but “it didn’t feel right to me to take money for it.” So whenever someone insisted on giving her money, she donated it to the local animal shelter.

She says at one point, she began to mail the booklet all across the world. In response, she received personal thank-you notes from the Vatican, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the United Nations, former British Prime Minister John Major, and Congressman Jesse Jackson.

She even had one of her poems translated into Croatian so she could send it to a man at a Balkan refugee camp whose name she had picked out of a newspaper article.

“I never heard back from him, but three years later, I got a letter from some girl in Croatia I didn’t know. The letter said that the girl’s grandfather had died, and when his family went through his stuff, they found my poem.”

He had kept it neatly folded in his wallet, the paper yellowed and creased from frequent handling. My grandfather used to read that poem to us kids in the refugee camp over and over, said the letter. I just want you to know that he genuinely loved you. He said you were his best friend in the world.

I ask Rosemary if she has one of the poems with her, and she does. She agrees to read it to me. The words are simple and childlike, the rhymes don’t always work perfectly—but there is something so magical about them that I have to hold back tears.

During our session, Rosemary does her share of crying too, pacing back and forth as she talks. Even though her schizophrenic mother treated her with great cruelty, Rosemary weeps for her poor soul: “She must have been so confused and desperate to do things like that.” She weeps for the abandoned and abused animals in the world… and she weeps for all of mankind and the dark path it is going down.

And then it happens. Suddenly, the figure of this petite, middle-aged woman changes before my eyes, and she starts glowing from within, in an intense white-golden light.

She is so radiant now that I can only make out a vague feminine outline. She seems to have grown taller, too, and to wear a cloak and a veil covering her hair, much like the depictions of Mother Mary.

I am speechless. There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m in the presence of the Divine. It not even so much her appearance than that otherworldly aura of warmth, love, and compassion. It makes me feel like a little girl being wrapped in a soft, warm blanket. I’m sincerely tempted to fall on my knees in front of her, but I don’t.

The vision lasts just a few minutes or less, and then everything’s back to normal. Rosemary is flabbergasted when I tell her what happened.

“I don’t know who Mother Mary is,” she says.

“She’s the mother of Jesus Christ.”

“I don’t really know anything about him either.”

I summarize the entire Gospel in about 10 sentences, but she’s still confused as to what it all means—the apparition, the radiance. So am I. I have no idea to make of it. Why her? Why now? Why me?

Rosemary looks taken aback when I refuse to take her money. 

"Give it to the animal shelter," I reply.

She promises to do so.

Later, when I tell my fellow psychic readers the story, I say, “Would you charge God for a reading?”

***

Here is the poem she read to me that day, which she wrote in the midst of the war…

JUST LIKE YOU

Daddy, why ya gotta gun?

Are you gonna shoot someone?

Does the enemy have an army too?

Do they have guns, just like you?

Are you gonna shoot those men,

Who are just like you?

Daddy, do they have little boys too?

And, and do they live in a house?

And have a wife just like you?

Daddy, will she cry if he dies,

Like Mommy would for you

And what about his little boy,

What’s he gonna do?

Oh Lord, how can I answer

All this, to my son

When I’ve always taught him

To be kind to everyone

Because they’re

Just Like You.

***

Disclaimer: I don’t know if what I saw that day was really the Blessed Virgin Mary. During a recent Eileen George Prayer Group, Father L. mentioned that Eileen would sometimes see people glow, and apparently she was not the only person that has happened to. I guess there’s no point speculating what this vision really was… Rosemary’s own innate humility and kindness or a truly angelic/divine apparition. All I know is that it gave me the feeling of being unconditionally loved… a love more intense and pure and real than anything I’ve ever encountered among humans.

Back to Fr. Chris. He says there are different ways to find your patron saint: For example, based off your name. Let’s say your name is Theresa—then it could be St. Teresa of Avila, St. Therese of Lisieux, or Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It could also be someone who shares their Feast Day with your birthday.

“But there’s a little-known way to get a patron saint,” says Fr. Chris, “and that is—they’re assigned to you, and you don’t even know it. And God will keep bringing that saint to you in different ways.” He says when he was a seminarian, people kept handing him prayer cards of St. Rita, for no apparent reason. “And then I found out that she’s the patron saint of impossible causes.”

Fr. Chris says that St. Charbel “is one of the biggest power hitters in the history of the Church, and people don’t know about him.” He has 29,000 (!) miracles attributed to him, only surpassed by St. Vincent Ferrer—another saint I’ve never heard of—with over 80,000.

St. Charbel was a Maronite priest who came from a farming background. As a boy, he was in charge of the family’s only cow and would sometimes take it down to the grotto to pray. In 1851, like St. Faustina,  he left home to enter a monastery without telling his parents.

Fr. Chris says that’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)

He did not literally mean hate your family, but love them less than God. Fr. Chris says if God calls you, you must go. That reminds me of the time when I up and moved because God was calling me to the United States of America, specifically Sedona at the time. All of my relatives shunned me for leaving my “poor old mother” behind, but I just knew in my heart that I had an extremely narrow window of opportunity, and it was now or never. I’ve beaten myself up for leaving like that, but Fr. Chris’s words make me feel a lot better.

Despite the many miracles St. Charbel worked for both Christians and Muslims, most people didn’t get to see him eye to eye. His eyes were always cast down to the ground in humility… or up to Heaven. He never focused on the in-between sphere where the rest of us live, says Fr. Chris. When he was at church, he always faced the altar. In 1875, he was granted permission to become a solitary monk, a hermit. He was very devoted to Mary and wrote about his temptations, the two biggest of which were wealth and comfort.

St. Charbel taught the value of poverty, self-sacrifice, obedience, chastity, and prayer by the way he lived his life. “This began to bear fruit: he started levitating.” Unlike other hermits, St. Charbel felt he had a place in the world—he offered up his prayer and sacrifice so the world could return to God. He died of a stroke in 1898, at age 70, with the Holy Eucharist still in his hand.

I look him up and discover an amazing YouTube video of a woman with terminal cancer who went on a pilgrimage to this holy site and met a monk there who offered to pray for her, only to find upon her return home that she was completely cured. Her son took a snapshot of her and the monk standing by her car, and it sure looks like it was St. Charbel himself talking to her.

After St. Charbel died, monks saw a light around the tabernacle and around his body, and after his burial, another light shone over his tomb for 45 days. Later, his body was found incorrupt but still bleeding. They also found blood and water flowing in his body, decades after his death, although it later decomposed.

Fr. Chris says we should pray to St. Charbel to bring the Eastern and Western Churches back together, and also for the Muslims, that they may encounter Jesus Christ and convert.

The graces and healings are manifold. Miraculous healings by St. Charbel have occurred by people visiting the saint’s sanctuary at the monastery of St. Maron, attending Mass there, being anointed with his blessed oil, or through reciting his Novena. These healings don’t just include physical but also spiritual ailments. Countless visitors to the monastery who had fallen off the faith have repented and come back to God.

Fr. Chris says that all miracles require faith, which is an act of the will. Even Jesus couldn’t heal those with no faith in his hometown.

On one occasion, a few decades ago, on the saint’s Feast Day (July 24), thousands gathered at the shrine in Lebanon in front of a big statue of St. Charbel. All of them witnessed the statue coming to life and blessing the crowd with the Sign of the Cross.

Fr. Chris says recently miracles have been skyrocketing in Lebanon—at the same time that Christians there are being viciously persecuted by Islamic terrorists.

“Where sin abounds, grace abounds more,” he says, paraphrasing Romans 5:20. VatiGod, I hope that is true for the United States as well. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was a huge win for you, but overall, we’re not doing too well.

The woke, Marxist cancel culture is not just godless, but truly anti-God, hating and trying to destroy anything to do with traditional Christian morals and values. The witch hunt is already in full swing, with Catholic Churches and crisis pregnancy centers beings vandalized and burned down, and conservative Christians smeared in the mainstream media. The latest derogatory term from the Left—fully supported by government and its various agencies, including the FBI, Department of Justice, and Homeland Security—is Christian nationalists, which is now coming to mean the same as “white supremacists” and “domestic terrorists.” True persecution can’t be too far away.

“Jesus said now is the time of mercy,” Fr. Alar says fittingly in the video. “Please don’t let it pass you by, because after the time of mercy will come the time of justice.” He says at the shrine, they’ve been seeing more miracles in the past two years than they have in the past two decades. “Something’s going on.”

He talks about a man whose eye was damaged irreversibly in a work-related accident and who prayed to St. Charbel to restore his eye sight. He had a dream where the saint came to him and asked him to make a pilgrimage to the shrine. After praying in front of the saint’s tomb at night, he was completely healed the next morning.

But the miracles aren’t just happening in Lebanon. A recent one in Arizona: A woman said she was fully healed from blindness after venerating the relics of St. Charbel.

Fr. Chris points out that many saints as well as Jesus himself performed miracles even when the sick person him- or herself didn’t believe but their family members did. “You can bring your loved ones back to the faith,” he says, “by praying the Rosary and praying the Divine Mercy Chaplet” on their behalf.

He says the Rosary and the Chaplet are basically the two parts of the Mass.

“The first part of the Mass is meditating on Scripture. What is the Rosary? The Rosary is not a bunch of Hail Marys, the Rosary is meditation on Scripture… The second part of the Mass is the Liturgy of the Eucharist. What is the Liturgy of the Eucharist? Priests offering sacrifice. What is the Chaplet of Divine Mercy? The priest—you, in your common priesthood… by the purpose of your Baptism, you are priest, prophet, king—you pray the Chaplet, you offer sacrifice. ‘Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.’”

It’s also important to let others see your joy in Christ, he says. You won’t be able to inspire anyone through your faith if you’re being a sour-puss about having to drag yourself to Mass Sunday morning.

What an amazing video. Thank you for converting me, Jesus—every day, I feel more blessed to be a Catholic.

[*VatiGod: “Vati” means “Daddy” in German and is pronounced “Fuh-tee.”]