Remembering Saint Gerard, as usual for this week

As any of my regular visitors remember, devotion to Saint Gerard was a great favourite of my mother's - and she tended to achieve amazing results with his novena. For those who wish a bit more on the topic (in the sense of my reflections, not hagiography per se), here are a few previous posts:

• San Gerardo mio, prega per me!


• I tell his grandmother to tell his mother to tell him!


• The more bizarre in the miracle department

Yesterday, I was speaking with someone I had met by chance (not previously known to me in the least), who has a great devotion to Saint Gerard. With its being his feast day, I'd naturally brought him some petitions, one of them being relief from my aching shoulder (it's keeping me up at night, the more if the cat nestles in the window and leaps on to my shoulder at 3 AM...) That was the least of my concerns (the others are too personal to share on a blog), but, as it happened, the lady with whom I was speaking laid a relic of Gerard on the aching spot as we spoke, just feeling that this was necessary.

No - the shoulder is not healed. Yet I had the feeling that I needed a reminder of the sort of simple faith which Gerard and my mother had. I also was moved by the similar devotion I saw in the new acquaintance who blessed me with the relic.

My only concern was that she mentioned how God blessed Gerard because of his extreme physical mortification. Indeed, that was one of Gerard's practises, but it would be unwise for nearly everyone.

God reaches us as we are, where we are. My love for Gerard, and my thinking him to be a great saint, does not erase that he was most unusual (...not that holiness is ever commonplace, but I mean odd in other senses.) Much of what he did (see previous posts!) would be crackers coming from nearly anyone else. Always sickly, it is likely, I believe, that Gerard's physical penances contributed to his having such a short life (died at 29.)

Gerard's individual actions would leave most of us acting like half wits, or lapsing into dangerous self punishment. In his case, I gather that he was extremely literal minded, and he acted with such simplicity and love that divine grace transformed even the oddest actions into expressions of devotion.

With Gerard and many other saints, it is very true that they had their weaknesses, odd behaviour, even somewhat bent way of looking at the world or God. (I love Francesco and Caterina and cannot praise or quote either of them enough - but models of sanity they were not.) This does not cast a slur on their holiness, but shows that God can work with whatever material we happen to offer. Nonetheless, we need to be careful of imitating saints in the particulars.