The Feast Day of My Favorite Saint

Today I will talk a little about my religion. I don’t mean to offend anyone. It ties into the care of my elderly residents. I want to let everyone know up front.

During Covid I had a religious epiphany. It seemed like so many of the major institutions that I trusted suddenly became crazy. People were turning against their friends and family depending on what side of the debate you were on.

Governments seemed drunk with power. Riots were called ‘peaceful protests’. The world seemed like it lost its collective mind.

I looked for something solid through it all and found the Catholic Church. Yes the church has had its share of scandals and troubles. But what they teach has pretty much stayed the same for 2000 years.

So I took the step and enrolled in RCIA training and became a Catholic. As part of this training, I was told to pick a saint to follow.

Within one or two days of that class, I met with a doctor about my assisted living homes. She was Catholic as well. One of the first things she did was give me a small medallion of a Lebanese Catholic Saint named Saint Charbel Makhlouf.

I took it as a sign. This was to be my Saint.

Today is Saint Charbel’s feast day.

Saint Charbel left his family and trained as a monk in Lebanon. Later he became a priest and was granted the privilege of becoming a hermit for 23 years living alone in a hermitage until he died of a stroke on Christmas Eve, 1898.

In 1950 and 1952, people opened his tomb and found his body had not decayed at all. He was declared a saint in 1977 by Pope Paul VI.

The Church credits Saint Charbel with many miracles of healing. Even after his death. The most famous happened in 1993 when a 55 year-old woman had her partial paralysis healed. Nohad El Shami said one night she dreamt of two marionite monks coming to her bed. One put his hand around her neck and operated while the other put a pillow behind her back to make her feel more at ease.

When she awoke, she found two wounds in her neck, one on each side. She completely healed and suddenly could walk again.

In total over 33,000 miracles of healing have been attributed to him.

I pray to Saint Charbel on a regular basis on behalf of my assisted living residents, their families and my family.

As part of what I try to do in my assisted living homes is to have faith in our efforts to help people heal.

Faith plays a huge part in people’s health, in my opinion. Lots of doctors seem to agree with me. Even if it isn’t Christian faith, faith in a higher power, or something that will heal you, often produces results.

It seems that people who don’t have faith in something tend to have much worse medical outcomes. When you don’t have faith, you tend to have a lot more anxiety, stress and worry.

Living in that fear state can wreak havoc on your health.

Please try to have faith. It’s often hard to cling to some kind of faith in this crazy world these days. I find faith has helped me through many hard times in my life. You may want to try it sometime?