The other day, my wife was frantically looking for her hair brush. She told me she hadn’t seen it for several days and her hair was beginning to “mushroom cloud.”
I assured her that whatever brush she was using made her hair look just fine, but she insisted this particular brush produced far better results than any other brush in her arsenal of hair doohickeys.
After ransacking the house and interrogating each kid, my wife decided that the brush must have fallen into the domestic black hole, the same one that consumes random socks, gloves, scarves, ear muffs, earrings, ear buds, remote controls, and Happy Meal toys.
I stood in the middle of our bedroom completely dumbfounded. The brush couldn’t simply disappear. So I decided to take the search to the next level. I decided to say a prayer to St. Anthony.
Now, I have always been a little hesitant to use the St. Anthony card because I feel like I’m putting our Lord to the test – by asking St. Anthony for his immediate intercession, I am expecting an immediate result which, I know, would not necessarily be the case.
When I sent up my prayer, I nearly simultaneously had a vision of exactly where the brush was and, further, how it got there.
I bounced to my daughter’s bedroom, pulled the bunk bed away from the wall, reached down, and pulled out the brush like Arthur’s sword from the stone. Apparently my daughter had “borrowed” the brush and tossed it on the bed. That evening the covers were pulled back, flipping the brush down between the bed and the wall. I paraded that brush around the house like the Olympic torch before presenting it to my grateful wife.
Not long after, I get a text from my oldest son: “battery dead.” I tell him to use our van to purchase a new battery, and I would help him install it. What should have been a simple process turned impossible when a bolt that helped secure the battery stripped and wouldn’t come out. Out comes the smart phone, and in a minute or two, I’m saying a quick prayer to St. Eligius, patron saint of mechanics. Soon I was able to get the battery out and install the new one.
The moment I’m back in the house, my wife informs me that the toilet is clogged. I trudge up the steps, past my two giggling youngest boys, and into the bathroom to assess the damage. I begin plunging and plunging. Then a trip down the basement for the snake. Then more plunging. Nothing is working. My arms are tired, the floor is drenched. I begin to wonder what saint would have jurisdiction over a mess like this.
Out pops the smart phone and up goes a prayer to St. Vincent Ferrer, patron saint of plumbers. As my wife is calling the family to dinner, the glug-glug of the toilet flushing is dinner music to my ears.
Then I start to wonder why I don’t tap into this amazing power all the time. I regularly ask St. Joseph for his prayers to help me as a father and a husband, but there is a whole slew of saints out there just waiting to be addressed.
It is comforting to know that there are so many people out there who are willing to pray for us, in heaven and here on earth. And all we have to do is simply ask.
Then I thought that I needed to be careful not to take these things for granted. I need to be careful not to use the saints as my personal concierge. I need to remember from time to time to send up a “thank you” for being there, even when it’s not in a time of crisis.
Oh, and St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers, well, you know.
Dean P. Johnson teaches English in Camden and is a member of Mary Mother of Mercy Parish, Glassboro.