God’s Door Man

The saints are an important part of a Catholics life, we as Catholics look to the saints as examples of how we should live our lives. Many Catholics have very strong devotions to one saint or another. Mary, the mother of Jesus being one such saint, and I think that Saint Francis is a safe bet for even non-Catholics, who doesn’t like a peaceful animal loving saint? Other Catholics love different saints for different reasons, one is the saint of backers and another is the saint of snowboarding, whatever your interest or vocation, the Catholic Church has a saint for it.

I feel that the part of the beauty of the Church is the fact that we do honor our brothers and sisters who have gone before us, the ones who we can look at and say, “Yah, I want to be like them.” It’s a powerful thing, having saints to look up to, it gives us something to strive for, someone to emulate. Now some are saying God gave you Jesus, you don’t need a saint to look to, look to Jesus. And I would agree 100%, God did give us Jesus, and I would agree, that is all we need, Jesus. But we are of fallen nature, and we tend to look for people we can relate to, people like ourselves, or people we want to be alike.

We do it in our daily life; we look to rock stars or sport stars, actors and other personalities. We seem to need this in our lives, and once again I would say it’s because of our fallen nature, because we are all sinners and we feel unable to reach the perfection of Jesus, but we know we can be like Saint whoever, after all they sinned and where just as human as I. To me that works, I’m good with that, because in the end, I am trying to better myself, to model myself after a saint, who in their lives modeled their lives after….JESUS… So it all works out. Not sure if my reasoning is sound, but I believe it is.

All this set up about saints was to lead to the idea that I need to, in my personal life, work harder on my faith life, I need to look to my Saint of choosing and really work on putting in to practice their spiritual life, of course making it my own. So I look to Father Solanus Casey, a simple man, who just wanted to do God’s work. What I want to take away from him is one aspect, one thing that he did, that to me is what my life is to be all about. Fr. Casey was the door man, he opened the door of center where he was, and he let people in. A simple act, but one that changed many lives, now there is more to Fr. Casey then that, Fr. Casey, not yet a saint but soon will be, was a mystic, he had powers to see in to people, to heal people and much more. And all this was done because he did one simple act first, he opened the door, he let them in. That’s what I hope to do with my ministry, my life’s work, I hope that I open doors for the youth, I let them in, and I will leave the healing and other acts to more qualified and holy people then me. Me, I just want to be Gods door man, nothing more, nothing less. But like Fr. Casey, the first act in healing anyone one, is opening the door, and letting them in.

All this talk about opening doors makes me think of Paul McCartney’s “Somebody’s Knocking at the Door”, great song. But I am moving off track, back to Fr. Casey.

So please allow me to open the door for you, allow me to invite you in to the Catholic Faith, come and see the wholeness of truth, come and taste the goodness of the Lord. And if I can ask one favor of you, please pray to Fr. Casey and ask him to pray for me, so I too can be a simple servant of God, God’s door man.

Paul