Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
How Big Is Your God?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come forever and ever.
—Walt Whitman
Your life depends upon this book.
The pages that follow are a spiritual first aid kit for those moments in our lives when we scrape our souls against the jagged surfaces of everyday life. Feeling unfulfilled in your job? Confused in a relationship? Short on money? Suffering from an illness? Trying to sell your house quickly? Or do you just feel lost in your own thoughts and emotions and as though you have tried everything possible to break free from being overwhelmed? If you’ve answered yes to any of these, well, there’s just one thing to do: Drop to your knees and pray. But don’t do it alone. Ask Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the saints, and the angels to be by your side.
This book is about Catholic devotions—prayers, meditations, and small actions you can take right now that will assist you in directing your life toward the greater good, helping you to find solace, healing, and direction when all seems lost. Think of them as a form of crisis intervention or spiritual 911—methods of communication that not only bring us closer to God but also offer reassurances that we are never, ever alone.
Though there are many ways of praying, devotions often involve some form of intercessory prayer, or praying on behalf of another. When we pray to saints, angels, or the Virgin Mary, we are asking them for help—assurance that we’re not alone and assistance in helping us to know God better. Moreover, we are asking them to pray for us, just the way you may ask me to pray for you during a difficult time. Not many people would object to a prayer on their behalf, would they? But there is a big difference between me praying for you, and our friends in heaven praying for you. As much as I want to be super close to God, the saints, angels, and Mary are in union with him. So they have more knowledge, compassion, and influence in the heavenly realm than you and I. We reach out to these heavenly helpers not as if they were gods, but as if they were friends with solid advice or experts who can shed light on a problem.
This may all sound like some obscure practice, but consider this: A seventeenth-century cartographer gave Cupertino, California, the home of Apple, its name after his prayers and devotions to the levitating mystic St. Joseph Cupertino helped him find his way through the wild country of what is now the Santa Cruz mountain range. Musician Jack White’s mother named him after St. John the Baptist. Pope John Paul II had a lifelong dedication to the Virgin Mary and cites her intercession as what saved his life during an assassination attempt in 1981 (is it a coincidence that the attempt took place on the feast day of the apparition of the Virgin Mary known as Our Lady of Fatima?). Actor Danny Thomas’s devotion to St. Jude led to the founding of the St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, an organization that provides free medical care to children with cancer. Acclaimed author Paulo Coelho, the international bestselling author of The Alchemist, eventually developed an affection for the Immaculate Conception (another name for Jesus’s mother) when he returned to his Catholic faith after spending a number of his early years dabbling with drugs and black magic. Martin Sheen prays the Rosary. Comedian Jim Gaffigan and entertainer and actor Harry Connick Jr. both have a special devotion to the Divine Mercy of Jesus. Late-night TV host Stephen Colbert’s favorite saint is Peter, Jesus’s flawed friend who, regardless of all his thickheadedness, became the first pope. Actor and activist Gary Sinise finds comfort and meaning in Father Mychal Judge’s “Lord, take me where you want me to go” prayer. Many call Father Judge, a chaplain for the New York City Fire Department, the Saint of 9/11; he died of blunt-force trauma to the head while serving the dead and injured in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Hollywood producer Roma Downey upholds a devotion to the holy angels. Novelist Nicholas Sparks looks to St. Anthony to help him when he’s absentminded. This is not to mention the millions of people around the world who turn to prayer and devotions when they are looking for miracles in their lives. And if you think nothing miraculous happens in our day and age, well, you might just be surprised . . .
Consider, for instance, Dafne Gutierrez, a mother in Phoenix who suffered from benign intracranial hypertension, which caused her to lose her sight in both eyes. In January 2016, Dafne began praying to St. Charbel Makhlouf, a nineteenth-century Lebanese monk, and visited his relics that were on display in a local church. After a blessing by a priest, the woman went home and felt that something inside her had changed. A week later her eyesight was restored to 20/20. As of now there is no medical explanation for her recovery.
Or consider the famous case of Monica Besra, from West Bengal, India. The woman suffered from a dangerous abdominal tumor that protruded from her body. Doctors were convinced she was going to die. The Missionaries of Charity, a religious congregation started by Mother Teresa in 1950, began taking care of the woman in May 1998. Over the next few months and after numerous treatments at local hospitals, Monica continued to deteriorate. In time, the pain became so intolerable Monica found it nearly impossible to sleep. The Catholic nuns in charge of her began praying to Mother Teresa (who had died a year earlier, in 1997). Asking their beloved founder to intercede with God for this woman, the sisters placed a devotional item, the Miraculous Medal of the Virgin Mary, on her stomach. Monica fell asleep. Hours later when she awoke, her engorged abdomen had flattened. She was no longer in pain. Medical professionals later confirmed that her tumor had vanished.
Then there is the report of Father Peter Smith, a priest in Glasgow, Scotland, who was suffering from cancer. According to the Catholic News Agency in February 2017, doctors “discovered a blood clot on [the priest’s] lung and a deadly infection attacking body tissue from his hips to shoulders.” Smith was not expected to live longer than forty-eight hours. But after he said prayers of intercession to Margaret Sinclair, a young Edinburgh nun who died in 1925 (and whom many believe should be declared a saint), the priest survived. As Father Smith explains, “We don’t expect miracles—and I’m not sure I expected one either; after all, my cancer hasn’t gone away—but I’ve been around long enough in ministry not to be surprised. I’ve seen it happen.” By “it,” Smith means the sometimes miraculous answer to prayers.
These three accounts are extraordinary and, some might say, sensationalistic. Critics will argue that any healings that took place were the result of previous medical treatments or the body’s natural ability to repair itself. Moreover, there are plenty of people who have prayed and never seemed to experience miraculous effects this dramatically. But Father Smith is touching on something important here. Most of us don’t expect miracles. Many think of them as parts of fairy tales, bits of wishful thinking, sometimes even a form of abuse that raises false hope for hopeless cases.
But what if expectation is a necessary component for allowing miracles into our lives? What if we need to think bigger? Father Smith experienced something extraordinary, though, as he admits, he may not have been focused on anything miraculous. Yet, he still prayed, which meant he was open to the mysterious healing power of prayer. It’s hard to believe the priest wasn’t hoping for a healing in the back of his mind.
What if we all expect too little from God? What if the God most of us believe in is too small? What if we embraced what Jesus, the archetypal miracle worker said: “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these. . . . If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it” (John 14:12, 14)? What would happen if we really lived by these words? What would our lives be like? What would our world be like?
It would be heaven on earth.
Prayer and devotions draw us closer to Jesus, closer to God, and closer to heaven, and as we inch toward the eternal, we not only experience less worry and more peace, we become conduits for the miraculous. I know that for myself, prayer, devotions, and a healthy belief in miracles (meaning I believe God answers our prayers, but I’m not going to try and walk on water) have strengthened all aspects of my life—physical, emotional, and psychological. This mindset moves us toward spiritual transformation, ways of bringing the marvels of healing, peace, compassion, mercy, and love to ourselves and the world around us.
As many Catholics know, devotions are the short practices found on the back of prayer cards, or they involve rosary beads or using small medals that can be found in churches or local religious bookstores. For those who may be new to devotions, these are time-honored spiritual traditions, many of which have survived for well over a thousand years because, well, they work.
The contents found in Life Everlasting—if followed and embraced with a healthy mix of desire, commitment, and faith—can radically alter your life for the better, ushering in a new awakening and a heightened awareness of God’s abundance in your day-to-day life. Lost causes can be won by beseeching St. Jude, healings can occur by praying with the Miraculous Medal, prayers to St. Matthew (a tax collector and apostle of Jesus) can aid you during financial difficulties, and prayers to St. Gerard have been known to help mothers during difficult pregnancies. Though only God can work miracles, the practices in this book can help us live in a state of the miraculous by making us aware of the signs and moments when heaven and earth intersect in unsuspected and meaningful ways. And all it takes is the decision to do one simple thing: embrace a devotion with enthusiasm and faith.
Many people claim to be on a spiritual path. We pray, meditate, maybe go to church or synagogue, or practice yoga during our lunch hour. We may read some of the thousands of self-help or spirituality books that have been published over the past fifty years. We’re trying. We’re striving to answer the ineffable call that many of us feel inside for something else, something we don’t understand, but something that makes us ask, “Is this it? Is this all there is? Or is there a secret meaning to our lives?” Yet, this holy longing, this yearning that sometimes grips our hearts and begs us to find something deeper and more meaningful, can often leave us feeling confused, empty, and lost.
Moreover, we live, like many generations before us, in a time of great anxiety. Our problems and challenges, of course, feel more pertinent because we’re living through them right now. Terrorism, political divisions, economic uncertainty, cultural upheavals, shifting religious demographics, and the disturbing rise of drug abuse and addiction across the country leave many of us feeling confused, nervous, and irritable. In a pervasively digitally connected world, young people are prone to suffer from constant nervousness (and not just young people—more and more men and women ages thirty-five to fifty-four find themselves using social media more than ever before). We are in the midst of what author George Packer calls an unwinding, in which “everything changes and nothing lasts.” Many of us want to take action—to do something—but we can’t seem to move. We’re standing in a road, there is a tractor trailer barreling down upon us, and all we can do is watch.
Yet, in many instances, we can move out of the way; all it takes is one small shift in a new direction to avoid disaster. Devotions can often be that simple shift.
Imagine for a moment what it would feel like to live a mostly worry-free life (let’s not overpromise), a life in which you weren’t afraid to be yourself, weren’t afraid of not having enough money, weren’t afraid that people would abandon you, weren’t afraid of being on your own. A life in which you felt protected at all times. What would your life be like if you weren’t anxious or uneasy?
In the past twenty years of my own spiritual journey I’ve come to realize that the times I felt close to God were the times I felt less tense in my life and most joyful. There is a direct correlation. When I prayed, things seemed to, well, open up. Questions were answered. Signposts appeared that pointed me in the right direction. And doors appeared that often led to new opportunities or fresh ways of thinking. I don’t mean to say that help arrived in an instant, though there were plenty of times when this did happen. I share some of those stories in this book. And I don’t mean to say that problems necessarily went away. But I certainly could deal with them better when I knew God was there to help me through life’s ups and downs. Think about it: don’t we often feel better if we call on a trusted friend or parent who reassures us that no matter what we’re going through, he or she is there to support us? I know it works for me.
During my journey, I’ve also come to see the need for all of us to draw nearer to the sacred. The closer we draw to the light of God, the more radiant we become. There are many ways to do this, but what I’ve found to be most effective is to find something or someone you can dedicate your life to and then allow the transcendent to reveal itself to you.
All the great saints did this. St. Francis’s dedication to the poor and to nature drew him closer to God. St. Thomas Aquinas experienced revelations of the Almighty through his commitment to expanding the intellect. St. Thérèse of Lisieux embraced God through the simple things in life, such as the beauty of flowers and the sound of her broom when she swept a floor. St. Catherine Labouré encountered God through her devotion to the Virgin Mary. St. John Bosco’s pledge to help and educate children provided a unique doorway to the divine.
