In the Embrace of the Saints

Happy All Saints' Day!

I loooove All Saints' Day. I'm aware that's not for-real-English, but trust me, the italics and extra vowels are necessary. I really do loooove All Saints' Day.

And what's not to love about it? Every time we say the Creed we profess belief in the Communion of Saints, and what could be more exhilarating then celebrating the "great cloud of witnesses", known and unknown? What could be more inspiring then the chance to reflect on the lives of all our favorite saints and their heroic virtues, while also being reminded of those whose names we will never know, who lived out their lives in quiet fidelity to Love Himself?

I ended up at just the nicest place for Mass, too. Well, saying I "ended up" there sounds coincidental, I'm actually there fairly often, so it wasn't happenstance I should be there today. This church is absolutely one of my favorites: a Dominican church run by Dominican priests, Holy Rosary.

If you live in Houston and you haven't been to Holy Rosary, you need to go. It's beautiful. Someday I'll have to write a blog post about that church, but for now what you need to know is that it has seriously old-school stained glass windows. I love those windows, each one is a different Dominican saint. They line all four walls of the church: four over the altar, four or five down each side, and three in the back. 

That's important for you to know because the reason it was the nicest place to be was the priest who said Mass. He came out of the sacristy with a big grin on his face, and kept right on grinning all the way to the homily, at which point he let us in on the reason behind the grin.

Apparently, Fr. Juan looooves All Saints' Day, too.

He pointed out how the church Holy Rosary teaches us something about the Church: when we come, we stand "in the embrace of the saints".

We actually were surrounded by saints. In an obvious way, by their portraits in colored glass. But, also in a more real way, in a much deeper and truer way we are always surrounded by them, especially at Mass.

It reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from the beautiful book Death Comes for the Archbishop, where the bishop says to his dear friend: "Where there is great love there are always miracles. One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

And that's what happened at Mass today: you could feel their presence, crowding in and spreading beyond the walls of the church to all eternity. For a brief moment in the year-long litany of saints that the Church celebrates in the liturgical calendar, she calls us to pause, and have our perceptions made finer. As a good Mother, she knows we need the humbling experience of being reminded of the "great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue," so that our eyes can see and our ears can hear our elder brothers and sisters in the Faith who are there about us always. They reach towards us as guides, as companions, as those who encourage us with the words of St. Paul: "See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God!"

Mother Teresa famously said, "There is only one reason why you are not even now a saint. You do not wholly want to be."

In more slangy words: ya gotta really, really want it.

How many of us wake up every morning, and resolve to make the use of the day that of becoming a saint? We all should be. And if you're already doing that, great. Now, go for that being the use of every second. St. Alphonsus Ligouri wrote a prayer that offered Jesus his sleep and "every moment of the night." I saw a prayer once that implored the help of Our Lady to love Jesus more, and said "I cannot praise Christ while I sleep, so offer Him my heartbeats as fervent acts of love." St. Faustina would say before sleeping: "Goodnight, my Beloved; I rejoice at being one day closer to eternity. And if You let me wake up tomorrow, Jesus, I shall begin a new hymn to Your praise."

The saints by their offers of friendship toward us seek to instill in us the longing that led them to Heaven, the longing to be consumed by what Pope Benedict has called the "flame that burns but does not destroy, that, in burning, brings forth the better and truer part of man, as in a fusion it makes his interior form emerge, his vocation to truth and to love." We must ask that our hearts' cry becomes today's responsorial psalm, "Lord, this is the people that longs to see Your face!"

And, really, it's pretty simple (and mind you, I said simple, not easy): being a saint means being the version of ourselves we were created to be. It means living out our vocation, whatever part of our vocation we're currently in, with the burning charity God desires us to have. It's becoming yourself.

Our good Holy Father explains sanctity like this, "to become saints means to fulfill completely what we already are...the saints bring to light in creative fashion quite new human potentialities...One might say that the saints are, so to speak, new Christian constellations, in which the richness of God's goodness is reflected. Their light, coming from God, enables us to know better the interior richness of God's great light...Nothing can bring us into closer contact with the beauty of Christ Humself other than the world of beauty created by faith and light that shines out from the faces of the saints."

Do we think of the saints as being, new, creative, full of interior richness and light and beauty?

If not, open your eyes, and see what is there about you always.

C.S. Lewis says it really well: "How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints."

That's part of what we celebrate today, the glorious differences brought out by the one great similarity: all-consuming love for Love Himself. Let us sing with the saints, our truest friends, the words of the Psalmist:

"He is my Love, my fortress;
He is my stronghold, my Savior,
my shield, my place of refuge."

Then, at the end of all things, we may exclaim with all the saints, "Blessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, honor, power, and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen."



St. Joseph - Pray for us

Blessed Miguel Pro - Pray for us

Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati - Pray for us

Saint Gianna Molla - Pray for us

Saint Catherine of Siena - Pray for us

  

Blessed Chiara Luce Badano - Pray for us

Blessed Jose Sanchez del Rio - Pray for us

Saint Damien of Molokai - Pray for us




Saint Philomena - Pray for us




St. Gemma Galgani - Pray for us




All Holy Men and Women - Pray for us!

Not Only for a Moment

I love Jesuits. Unfortunately, I must explain myself. Because I’m not talking Georgetown Jesuits here, I’m talking for-real, hard-core, old-school Ignatian Jesuits.

Besides the fact that I will readily admit to having a somewhat Ignatian, militaristic spirituality (in case you hadn’t noticed that already) I find myself, as a pro-lifer, increasingly drawn to the smashingly glorious Jesuit saints: St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Edmund Campion, St. Isaac Jogues.

And, most recently, Blessed Miguel Agustin Pro.

Sigh.

Smashingly glorious.

If you don’t know him, I beg you, look him up.

While you’re looking him up, get the movie called Padre Pro – Miguel Agustin Pro Martyr of the Lord, and watch it. I watched it about 2 weeks ago, and my first reaction to that movie was, “Oh, Lord, let me be shot to death as a martyr exactly like that, please.”

After a while though, I realized that wasn’t necessarily what I was supposed to learn from this beautiful priest, this other Christ. Padre Miguel Pro was a man from Mexico, a man forced to leave his country as a seminarian because of the political climate. He went to Europe, had formation in Spain, was ordained in Belgium, and sent back to his homeland to begin his ministry just as a ban prohibiting worship (essentially the practice of the Catholic faith) was announced and two weeks before it was enforced. He went undercover, using disguises and his own bold nature and lively sense of humor to work right beneath the noses of the police (literally, at times) to be a true spiritual father to his people and bring them the sacraments. Finally falsely accused by the government of taking part in the attempted assassination of an official, he was condemned to death on this pretext, but in reality, because he was a priest.

The president, Calles, ordered the execution photographed, in order to display photographs of what he supposed would be a groveling Catholic priest begging for mercy and his life. His hope was that the underground Mexican Catholics would grow both disillusioned and disheartened at the loss of their beloved Padre Pro.

Calles picked the wrong man. Within 3 weeks he declared it illegal to possess the photographs of Padre Pro’s martyrdom. Look them up on the internet now, and you’ll see why. Any secular anti-Catholic government would be horrified for people to see those pictures.

Standing before the firing squad, Padre Miguel Pro was asked what his last wish was. His response: “I want to pray.” Scoffing, the soldiers allowed him to kneel. Before rising the priest drew a Crucifix and Rosary from his pocket, and placed one in either hand. He turned to face the guns, and as the men raised their rifles, he stretched out his arms, cruciform, looking resolutely ahead of him. Moments before the fatal cry of “Fuego!” and the sound of the shots, the martyr shouted, "¡Viva Cristo Rey!"

                Who was this man?

                Poet. Cartoonist. Master of disguise. A man whose students described him as "the best teacher in the world." A man who strode out towards death as he had towards his everyday earthly life: with radiant joy. A man who faced a firing squad and saw not just the bullets rushing towards him, but eternity. A man who stretched out hands cradling the promises of the Christ’s Passion and Mary’s protection  in death as he had in life. A man who looked into the eyes of death and saw not terror, but freedom and the reward promised by the Lord he gave his life to serving. A man who, when he reached his arms a final time towards his Crucified Love and saw Him reaching back, was filled with such overwhelming joy at the sight that his final words were a cry of victory and triumph, “Long live Christ, the King!”

                The anti-Catholic President Calles had some serious damage control on his hands. He made it illegal to attend the martyred priest's funeral. But 30,000 Mexicans flooded the streets in procession behind the body of their beloved Padre Pro, singing from the depths of their hearts:

“Long live the Martyrs!

Long live the Mexican Clergy!

Long live the Catholic Religion!

Long live Our Bishops and Our Priests!

Long live the Pope!

Lord, if You want martyrs, here is our blood!”             

                Again I say: sigh. How one’s soul aches and yearns at the beauty of it. But, sighing alone does not, alas, lead to sanctity.

                After a few days of thinking about him almost constantly, I came to the conclusion that what I was meant to learn was that Blessed Miguel Pro was not a martyr of a few moments, but a martyr of 36 years. The man could not be turned back by the taste of death because he had already tasted it, had already drunk the chalice of suffering and so could not be frightened at the sight of it. He had died to himself a hundred thousand times already. Blessed Miguel Pro did not suddenly attain heroic virtue in his final moments. He could not have died the death he did without living the life he did.

                When he left his beloved Mexico in order to receive the formation he needed to come back as a father for his country and his people, when he persevered in the Jesuit order as a student whose teachers did not consider him very intellectually gifted, he was a martyr. When he ached at the absence of his family at his ordination Mass and returned to his room to give his first priestly blessing over treasured photographs of them and wrote to tell them of it, and when his beloved mother died while he was still abroad, he was a martyr. When he suffered operations  attempted to cure him of painful stomach ulcers which crippled his newborn priestly ministry, he was a martyr. When he returned home to a country which forbade him the public celebration of Sacraments of the Church he had given his life to and even forbade him his priestly cassock and collar, when he risked his own safety countless times to bring the healing of Baptism and Confession and the food of the Eucharist to his people, he was a martyr.

In dozens of big ways and hundreds of small ones, thousands of unseen, small, daily acts of self-sacrifice, Miguel Pro offered himself as a true priest, another Christ, a living immolation for the soul of his country. He lived out a dying to himself that meant when it came time to meet death, he found himself meeting the truest freedom and everlasting life instead. As the Son who is the light of eternity began to reach into time and gather the soul of this faithful son into His Heaven, the response of the well-refined gold of the priest’s heart was to blaze up in splendor.


"¡Viva Cristo Rey!"

Oh Lord, through the intercession of Blessed Miguel Pro, grant us the hearts of faithful martyrs, so we may live every moment of our lives in holy love as true witnesses to Your Love, and so lead the world to intimacy with You. Amen.

Location, Location, Location...

I’m curious: ever played that game where you want an answer to something, so you open the Bible to a random spot and let your eyes fall on a verse and hope the verse will solve your dilemma? Or did you, at least, ever think about doing it? Be honest.

I’ll go first: yep, I have.

My friend calls this “Bible roulette.” As in, Russian. Not the casino game.

How appropriate.

No, really.

It doesn’t always work, more often than not you seem to fire the blanks with something like “So-and-son begat So-and-so, who begat So-and-so…” But sometimes, you end up with the one round staring you in the face. “Pow!” and life as you knew it is over.

In my mind, cities are not just groups of buildings; they sort of have their own personalities. People talk about their countries as a “She”, their motherland. Cities, I think, are the same way. There are cities I have loved.

And Houston, she ain’t been one of ‘em. I’ve been here nearly half my life now, and spent the majority of that time not living in Houston but merely being located in Houston. Sneaking back along the supply lines instead of shoring up the trenches, so to speak.

On one of the many occasions I was trying to retreat from Houston instead of digging in, I played Bible roulette, and got the loaded chamber.

I ended up in a face-off with Jeremiah, which, if you’re trying to make excuses for anything and get away with it, isn’t the place to be. And the seventh verse of the twenty-ninth chapter has quite a kick.

Are you ready for this?

“Promote the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you, pray for it to the Lord, for on its welfare depends your own.”

Pow.

Where you’re born, or where you’re comfortable for that matter, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the place God wants to lead you to bring you to sanctity. For example, Saint Anthony of Padua wasn’t actually from Padua – he was from Lisbon. Saint Therese of Lisieux wasn’t really from Lisieux, she was from Alencon. Blessed Theresa of Calcutta wasn’t from Calcutta – she wasn’t even from India. She was Albanian, and her life as a nun started off in Ireland, of all places, before she came to Calcutta.

As G.K. Chesterton would say, “The patriot knows, as any mother knows, that you must love a thing to make it loveable.” I’m called to love Houston, to act on that love, to promote its true welfare, to pray fervently for it to the Lord.

And, I think, so are you, wherever you are. Wherever it is, be there. Set your hands to work in your earthly place of exile, and fix your eyes on a heavenly destination.

Because, in reality, in this life, we’re all exiles.

Plunging Into Chaos

While being short on time and long on writer’s block lately, I’ve been praying God would just go ahead and give me a neon sign or something clarifying what in the world I was supposed to be blogging about.


I found something the Holy Father wrote the other day about Jesus on Holy Thursday, going from His Last Supper to His Agony in the Garden. I copied the page and I’ve been carrying it around for a days now, knowing I wanted to use it in the next blog somehow.

And then, last week was been one of “those” weeks.

For example: in just one day, it took two hours to get to work due to a fatal accident on the freeway I usually take. Then, the third ambulance in four months showed up at the new Planned Parenthood to take somebody to the hospital, (proving yet again that Planned Parenthood is NOT about women’s health, just about money). Something else very disturbing and apparently completely inexplicable occurred, just before we were sent an e-mail informing us of videos posted on YouTube which documented people mocking and desecrating the Eucharist. Finally, a woman called our office seeking information about an abortion for her 18-year-old daughter who already had another child and “just couldn’t take care of another one”.

Kyrie, Eleison.

It occurred to me at some point that afternoon that this was it. God was making it really obvious. What, in the midst of all this, was the thing to remember. And it tied perfectly to that copied page of Pope Benedict XVI.

The emphasis is mine, but this is what Papa Benedict wrote:

“He went out…He went out into the night. He did not fear the chaos, did not hide from it, but plunged into its deepest point, into the jaws of death: as we pray, He ‘descended into hell’…Faith always means going out together with Jesus, not being afraid of the chaos, because He is the stronger one.”

A seminarian we know recently came back from a trip to the Holy Land, and we were able to hear a little about his trip. One of the things he told us that stood out in my mind was the church that stands in Gethsemane now: the Church of All Nations. All Nations, because Our Lord sweat His Precious Blood in agony over all of us, prayed for all of us. The seminarian told us the church is built and kept so that it always looks like night there, to bring us closer to Christ’s Agony. To bring us face to Face with Him in that moment when he plunged without hesitation into the chaos, striving mightily for our souls.

And He beckons us after Him, stretching a scarred Hand towards us and calling “Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one, and come!”

You know, really, at the end of the day, I’d rather be in this job encountering these things than anywhere else doing anything else that seemed less…chaotic. Because these things, these terrible things, they do happen. They happen every day, and for some reason, I get a shot at helping do something about them. In reality though, there’s something everybody can do about them. But where are these people? Somebody showed up at Planned Parenthood today expecting a big crowd of people outside praying and said “Where are the others?”

This is something I and my coworkers often really struggle with: where are the others? We’re the Church Militant! Are we praying? Fasting? Serving in one capacity or another? Where is the active response to the God-Man who reaches out to us with a hunger and thirst for our salvation?

One reason, I think, is fear. For a lot of people, in a lot of different ways. Fear of going out alone, fear of what we might find if we do go out, fear of what will be there in the unknown place to which we are headed. We let fear, in big ways and small ways, stop or diminish the person we know we ought to be becoming.

But we must not let fear stop us.

The Holy Father continues: “This setting out on the path of the Passion, when Jesus steps outside the protective walls of the city, is a gesture of victory. The mystery of Gethsemane already holds within it the mystery of Easter joy. Jesus is the ‘stronger Man’. There is no power that can withstand Him now; no place where He is not to be found. He summons us to dare to accompany Him on His path; for where faith and love are, He is there, and the power of peace is there which overcomes nothingness and death.”

So, “Arise, beloved!” Fix your eyes upon the Light of the world, enthrone the Prince of Peace in your heart, bind your hand to the Blessed Mother’s with your rosary, and, with the saints and angels at your side, set out into the darkness, plunge into the chaos and despair at their deepest point.

"Be not afraid!"

Fight back.

No Such Thing as a Limp-Handed Saint

I grew up in a pro-life family. Way pro-life. My dad, an uncle, and both grandmothers went to jail for rescuing. My uncle helped start the Gabriel Project. I distinctly remember “helping” set up the first Celebration for Life banquets in Corpus Christi, Texas, however much help somebody of such scant years and short stature could possibly be. Processions, Marches, prayer vigils, sign-holding . . . honey, been there, done that.


I actually work at a pro-life non-profit now. We help organize prayer vigils, spread the word about Planned Parenthood’s agenda of death, sidewalk counsel, give talks, and more.

And you know what? I feel like I should be ashamed. In fact, I am ashamed.

I’m working on reading Fr. Tom Euteneuer’s new book, Demonic Abortion. Let me just say: I have given presentations focusing on the spiritual battle that goes on around abortion mills, and yet I feel like I’m having my eyes opened.

For my lack of conviction, for my tepidity, for every time I shrug and say casually that well, ya know, we tried . . . Father, forgive me.

Here’s the problem: the Church, our beautiful, glorious, Blood-bought Mother, the resplendent Bride of Christ, the beating heart of Christendom, has apparently been recently populated by many, including myself, who assume we can get to Heaven by settling for being limp-handed saints.

The only problem with this being the following: there is no such thing as a limp-handed saint.

Allow me to explain.

I have always loved art museums. Real ones, anyway – not the ones full of those weird offerings of chaotic, yet strangely bored and boring static they call “modern art”. Yikes.

No, I love walking down halls of storm-tossed ships, sun-dappled forests, stern-faced barons and silken-clad ladies. I often wonder what the artist was thinking or feeling or dreaming when he once stood working where I stand now, gazing. I love the long, involved stories traipsing across a canvas with a story in every corner, oil-covered heights towering above your head inside their gilt frames. I love meeting the eyes of some brilliantly painted child, who gazes serenely out at you while you wonder what they grew up to be a few hundred years ago.

And the saints: sometimes you come across a really good saint.

I’m a harsh critic of the painted saints though.

I really, really don’t like the limp-handed saints.

This is more the term I use for a particular kind of painting than a consistent defect. Regardless of their hands appearing or being limp, they give the impression of being limp. Do you remember their hands? If not, that’s a limp-handed saint.

As much as any given artist was surely full of reasons he was doing it right, so I am often full of reasons of why I think he did it wrong. For example, I honestly don’t agree with John the Baptist looking like he’s half-cracked – surely there was never a man more in his right mind. Intense: yes. Focused: yes. Strict and stern and painfully honest: yes, yes, yes. Feverish and with the appearance of being hallucinatory: I definitely have my doubts. Almost worse then the crackpot “Johns” are the far-too-mild-mannered ones. I don’t think this voice crying out in the wildreness was afflicted with a pair of lily-whites. The man did live in the desert, after all. The Jordan isn’t exactly flowing with milk, and I feel fairly certain that honey they say he had wasn’t being used for moisturizer. Last I checked, locusts aren’t much known for promoting even skin tone and a youthful glow. I like the feeling in Simon Vouet’s painting of John – he looks like he just heard something and he’s standing upright to listen. His hand is raised in front of his chest as though he’d been talking and gesturing expressively, but froze at this all-important Voice that sounds in his ear. Time suspended, eternity touching earth as it whispers in the ear of the Baptizer and halts his unwearying hands.

Anybody who actually thinks this thunderous opponent of an incestuous king Herod, this camel-clad John who apparently had no problem about calling some of the locals a “brood of vipers” actually poured water from a shell over the Sacred Head of the Savior Whom the Baptizer assures us came “to baptize…with the Holy Spirit and fire” , please stand.

Sure. Right. Poured.

Not.

Seriously, I’ll betcha a whole lot the Baptizer baptized in the good ol’ dunking style. He was using a river, after all, and not a hip-high shallow-basined marble font. I honestly cannot think of a single male I know who could resist dunking his cousin in a river given license to do so. Once convinced his Savior was really insisting on being baptized by one “not worthy to untie the straps of His sandles” , I envision the locust-eating desert man went all out, and the Messiah went all the way under the muddy Jordan. Mark speaks of the Holy Spirit’s appearance as a dove above Jesus “when He came up out of the water.”

Sounds like dunking to me. John the Baptist was no limp-handed saint.

I also don’t like John the Apostle looking like the baby-faced kid Apostle. Possibly he was, but a nickname of the One he followed makes me seriously doubt that: Son of Thunder. He was the one following the Baptizer around before Jesus showed up and the Savior’s forerunner “looked at Jesus…and said, ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’”. He was the one who endured mental and emotional martyrdom at the foot of the Cross. He ran to the tomb with the big fisherman on Easter morning. He was the one who recorded “thunder”-ous Revelations. Johnny the Kid? Gimme a break. I really don’t think the point of John explaining how he was the one resting on the bosom of his Lord at the Last Supper was to make a show of him being meek and mild. To me it seems more to say: “See? I, even I, the one the Maker of thunder calls a Son of Thunder, the seeker, the one too impatient to sit still and wait for life to come to me – I rest here. Here, I have found my peace. If I can be at rest here, so can you.”

As far as depictions of saints go, it seems to me that their hands should be second only to their eyes. I read a book about St. Catherine of Siena once, and two things stand out: her beautiful, radiant, luminous eyes… and her hands. She was always serving; her family, the poor, the sick. If eyes are the windows to the soul, maybe hands are windows of the heart. Where your heart is, there your hands go to work. And isn’t that one of the ways we can “pray without ceasing”? To offer up the work of our hands as a sacrifice of praise; surely this is a means of sanctification.

And how could the hands of the saints be weak or limp? The Shroud of Turin shows the hands of a man nailed through the wrists, muscles and nerves affected in a way that leaves the hand in a stiff, claw-like position. The hands that carpentered, cleared blind eyes, released mute tongues, opened deaf ears, cleansed leprosy, multiplied loaves and fishes, raised sinking Peter from the waves, gave life to the dead, wrote in the dust beside the adulterous woman, consecrated ordinary bread and wine into His Most Precious Body and Blood, held the reed as a scepter in His bloodied Hands, and cooked breakfast on the shore for the hesitant fishermen. To follow Him, take up your cross, and how to do this but with your hands?

St. Joseph., Guardian of the Infant Jesus, Terror of Demons, Pillar of Families. Joseph, the carpenter. Carpentry - imagine what the hands of Our Lord’s foster father would have been like!

Peter, dear Peter. The Fisher Prince would have had unimaginably roughened hands from his work with ropes and nets and oars and sails and sun and salt water.

St. Francis of Assisi, stigmatist and rebuilder of churches.

St. Gianna Molla’s husband Pietro said he never remembered her hands being idle in their home. Quiet, gentle, and steady at her work.

The hands of Mother Teresa . . . they’re difficult to miss when you see them in her photographs. Those are no limp hands.

Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati’s sister Luciana tells of her 24-year-old brother insisting on writing a note himself within days of his death, with directions about which poor man the medicine Pier Giorgio had been carrying in his pocket ought to go to. He scrawled it with his own hand: crippled by polio, driven by holy love.

This is a lesson for all of us who call ourselves “pro-lifers”. We find ourselves in the midst of a spiritual battle with eternal ramifications. In this war for our country, our children, our souls – there is no longer time for us to shrug, or sigh, or make excuses. We all must do all we can, whatever that is. Write, pray, stand, speak, suffer at the foot of the Cross in witness to Love. And for those who are able, often the foot of the Cross is at the doors of the abortion mills, where we are called to defend His smallest ones. It has been beautifully said by many pro-lifers that we are called to stand with our unborn brothers and sisters as they go to their own Calvary, and to be the only love they may ever know in their all-to-short lives, so they might not die alone. We are called to witness to the truth of their lives, to plead on their behalf. We are called to be saints, and saints of strong hands.

Surely the hands of the saints should reflect their hearts. Not limp or idle – but yearning, stretching, beseeching. Seeking. Finding. Rejoicing.

The hands of the Church Militant.