First of all, thanks for the saint uquiz. It was fun :) and I like reading your poem snippets. Compelling. Do you know Saint Anthony, he’s good at finding lost things. I always thought that was kinda poetic if not just practical. Also I went to catholic elementary school and they taught us about saint philomena, patron saint of lost causes. She was a little girl who went through terrible things bc she refused marriage from an old emperor. Like why did they tell us, a bunch of little girls about that?
you are so welcome!! it was fun to write :) (i was in a religious fugue state for several nights sobbing in miffy's inbox over the hail mary)
i am not fully acquainted with saint anthony actually! i had my very specific set of saints as a kid and then i Stopped Believing In God so i know other saints only through brief mentions (though i do remember hearing that he was good for praying to when you'd lost something! maybe when i was going through our book of saints looking for a confirmation name). you're so right though there's something so poetic about reaching out to a figure held up in divinity above all else and only below god and asking them to help you find your keys. to point you toward where you left that letter you needed. for the divine to be domestic. smth about the safety of saints... god is not to be invoked except in dire need and even then all defaults to his plan for you. saints come down from the heavens for a moment to take your hand and lead you back to the necklace that you thought you lost all those years ago. lives in my head forever and ever. (can't remember if i put this line in the quiz??? but i wrote smth in the poem i chose lines from about how a saint comes down through the rays of light from the stained glass windows to hold your hand... same feeling.)
and god. yeah. the way they handed us those stories of extreme suffering as if it would do nothing to us... for a second, i thought philomena was in my childhood book of saints, since her story sounded familiar, but i went to look on internet archive and she wasn't there; p sure who i was thinking about was saint agnes, whose story is very similar.
(her page was also right across from saint sebastian, so i'm sure i read her story more often than the others, when i went back for my constant visits with him.)
really though, saint philomena and saint agnes and saint maria goretti... how many catholic kids were just presented with stories of awful suffering, often of people not much older than them? st. tarcisius is another saint that i was a teensy bit fixated on as a kid (not as much as sebastian and cecilia) but the entirety of his story is that he was a boy carrying the host in the streets of rome and when he refused to give it up to a gang of men, he was beaten to death. i would go back and read his little passage over and over again. there's a miracle within that story, but really... the stories of martyrs are So Much of what makes me the way i am now. guarantee.
