Two Stories on the Veneration and Intercession of the Saints
On the veneration of Mary and the Saints
My parents visited me a few weeks ago and on that Sunday they went with me to church. They met some of my new friends, one of whom especially said some really nice things about me and closed with "of course, that's all a reflection on you and is to your credit."
And I thought "what a great explanation of veneration of Mary and all the saints!" God is glorified in His saints, and the great things we say about them are *because of Him* and therefore praise of Him, ultimately.
We call Mary Mother of God because of her Son. We call her "More Honorable than the Cherubim" etc because those bodiless powers serve God and He rides/sits on the Cherubim, but He lived inside and took flesh from Mary.
We could go on and on, and the Church does in the daily honoring of Her saints with hymns. Reading these short daily verses, you can see that the honor given the Saints is due to and passed on to God.
"Praise ye God in His saints; praise Him in the firmament of His power."
Part 2 - Intercession of the Saints
A man who enjoys adventure sports was riding his mountain bike on some steep terrain. Heading into a curve with too much speed, he crashed and slid in the dirt over the edge of a precipitous drop. Horrified, a hiker who witnessed the incident ran to the edge. Peering over, he saw the cyclist laying on his side, bloodied, and clinging to a sapling growing on a narrow ledge above a vertical drop of several hundred feet.
"SAVE ME!" cried the injured man when he saw the face looking down from above him.
The hiker ran back to the crashed bike and hurled himself down the trail to the parking lot where he found another cyclist pulling in. He rode up to the vehicle and said breathlessly "You gotta save this guy! He fell over the edge up there on the point!"
The guy in the car says "Get in!" and they speed off down the road to the ranger station. Arriving and entering, the men both start to frantically tell the ranger about the problem, but all the ranger understands is that these two guys are talking about saving an injured party up on the mountain. Knowing the terrain is too rough for vehicles, he tells them to calm down and picks up the microphone to the radio on his desk. Keying the mic he calls to the airborne division, describing to the dispatch and the helo pilot and rescue medic the location of a man in need of rescue on the side of the mountain.
The helicopter is on scene in minutes, arriving just as the ranger, the hiker, and the motorist get to the edge above the ledge where the unfortunate cyclist is still clinging to the tree, but obvious to everyone, he is in very bad shape.
Finding the cyclist's contact info in a bag on the mountain bike, he has called the wife of the injured man and told her that he had been hurt and was being airlifted to the hospital in the valley. She says she'll meet them there.
As the helo lands and the injured man is wheeled in, his wife is shocked by his appearance and begins to weep. The trauma doctor and team meet the gurney and start rushing down the hall to the OR as the wife cries out in tears "Save my husband!"
The cyclist did make a full recovery after a long surgery and much rehab. He's back on his bike, but maybe rides a little slower.
But...who saved the cyclist? The hiker? The motorist? The ranger? The pilot? The medic? The Doctor?
This is the invocation of the Saints. We ask the Saints to pray for us; to "save us" by going to God on our behalf, as we also go to God, just like our friends on this side of heaven "save us" from the trials we ask them to pray for as they do pray and share our need with others.
Our friends, saintly and earthly, see that we are in dire straits, clinging to a little sapling, on the edge of doom and despair. We ask them to "save us," to pray for us, and they do, and they go and tell their prayer chains and FaceBook friends, and the word spreads, and soon our hikers have hailed our motorists, and so on, setting into motion our rescue from danger.
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