A Sunday Thought About Saints Who Help Us at Work

As Catholics, we understand the concept of the intercession of saints: we can ask them to intercede, or pray, for ourselves or others. Indeed, we hold this belief in common with Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, even some Lutherans. So with this in mind, we're going to start a series of posts of saints to whom we can pray to help us in our work. Here's how we'll proceed.

We'll simply note certain facts about the lives of a particular saint and then think about how these might apply to us in our work. Then we'll ask our saint to help us to both sanctify our work, to lend a hand to some aspect of our work that could use some help. There's no list of appropriate saints that I know of to tap into for this project. I'll just pick saints whose lives strike a chord in this respect.

Looking at the calendar, you'll notice that All Saints Day is almost upon us, so this is timely. All Saints is one of my favorite holy days of obligation. It comes in the "lead up" to Christmas that I've talked about from time to time. We used to be off on All Saints Day when I was in grammar school. In may last job as an employee (I run my own business now), I used to take off on All Saints Day, using one of my vacation days. Now that I do run my own show, I've had a goal of taking off holy days, but that hasn't worked out so well so far, since the sole proprietor's life doesn't lend itself to taking any time off! But I'll continue to plead for this and maybe someday I'll get there.

In any case, a few points before we start:

First, let's remember that saints are the Church Triumphant; we are the Church Militant. They have their reward in Heaven; we're still struggling here below. So we'll be calling on them to help ourselves and others in our struggle here. That's just basic Catholic stuff.

Second, you can call on any saints you think can help you. All we're going to do here is provide a way to pray to a particular saint for help in our work with this caveat: I'm no expert at this. I'm just an ordinary Catholic guy who's just using what little knowledge I have of our Holy Faith as an aide in identifying certain saints whose lives strike me as providing a particularly good example for us Catholic men in pursuing our daily work: to sanctify it; to help us in some aspect of our work.

That's it. Simple, yes?

What I like about this is that it's one more way to see ourselves and live our lives as part of the Body of Christ. It makes the doctrine that we are all members of his Mystical Body come alive for us, specifically in that activity that, for most of us, takes up such a huge part of our days - work. Learning about our faith is critically important, but living it is even more so.

So let me put a little thought into this and I'll come up with our first saint soon. Meanwhile, feel free to pursue this idea - if you like it - on your own. Think about saints you know. And if you have any ideas you want to share with the rest of us, please feel free to do so in the "Comments" box.