Invincible Communion: A Toast
St. Anthony by Francisco de Zurbarán
Eight hundred years ago, a Portuguese priest died in Italy, and now he helps me find things. This is a toast to St. Anthony, the closest friend I’ve never met.
The friendship began the summer I studied literature on San Servolo, a satellite island of Venice. I remember those weeks as a series of scents and colors—heaps of jasmine blooming on lampposts at dusk, ropes creaking as boats were pulled dockside, bright yellow walls and floors and furniture in my room, thunder over San Marco during the consecration. My school program sprang for a gondola ride in the city one evening, and I kept closing my eyes for the pleasure of opening them again on the glittering houses along the banks. I was the luckiest nineteen-year-old in the world.
There were difficult elements slipped in, too: my grandfather died while I was away. Later, I had a nightmare so believable that when I woke up in the morning, I found myself staring at the yellow walls and thinking, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, it’s not real,” before I even remembered the dream.
And, of course, I lost my passport.
I felt the embarrassment more than the inconvenience. My father was in the Army; I grew up overseas, trained to keep track of IDs and to protect my bags from pickpockets. But after turning my room upside down, I had to accept that the passport was gone.
When I picked up my phone to text my parents, a long message was waiting from Dad. He was so proud of me, he wrote, for taking on this big trip by myself. I wrote him back, thanked him, then told him I lost my passport. So much for that, I thought.
My parents and I didn’t relish the possibility of my taking a solo trip to the consulate in Florence. I told them that before we scheduled anything, there was one more place I wanted to search, a store in Venice where I’d bought a cheap phone for international calls. I’d had to present my passport for the purchase.
It took me several days to get there, since I had classes on San Servolo every morning and afternoon, and when I did take the boat into the city, the store was closed. I prayed with a little more panic for St. Anthony’s help. Remembering how my dad’s friend Anton got his name, I promised that if Anthony helped me, I’d name a child after him one day. I didn’t mind the name, so it didn’t seem like a bad trade-off.
Finally, after other misadventures, I got to the store at the right time. A tall Italian man stood behind the counter, waving my passport.
“We’ve been trying to call you!”
The next evening—June 13th, a Tuesday—I hopped a boat back into Venice for the late daily Mass at San Marco. It seemed like the best way of saying thanks. At the liturgy, I learned it was St. Anthony’s feast. That was the day a plaster statue, a name on a medal, became real and a friend.
I’ve met him over and over since. Two weeks after the passport incident, I got to thank him again at the basilica in Padua, where my class stopped to see his relics. Years later, I watched as his statue seemed to float on a wave of revelers in Boston’s North End. And dozens of times I’ve enlisted his help in finding lost items, lost people, lost peace of mind. I think I’ve made that child’s-name promise more than once, leading to debates among friends about whether I’m obliged to name several children Anthony, or one child Anthony Anthony Anthony etc. I think he’s kind enough to let me milk a single usage.
Though it may seem strange, his recurring help has taken the focus off of my missing stuff and alerted me, instead, to the presence of a companion. I almost enjoy it when I lose my belongings. (Almost.) In this life, where I can’t sit down with a saint from Heaven, these exchanges of prayers and lost items are our conversations. Luckily, I lose things a lot.
Why Anthony seems to be in charge of misplaced keys, no one is sure. Recently, I read that doctors who examined his remains in 1981 determined he may have died of exhaustion. That, to me, explains his patronage better than the apocryphal stories do. He’s simply a busy man. He worked constantly on earth, and there’s no reason to believe he isn’t working now—humble work, almost busywork. It’s what a Franciscan would choose.
I realize as I write this how quaint it all sounds, how understandably someone might dismiss it as superstition, how cringeworthy it might seem even to some Catholics. It begs to be labeled “old church lady” stuff, or confirmation bias.
I can say little to such objections. Old church ladies do believe in friendship with the saints, and I do want it to exist. I can only say that if there is such a thing as a soul, and if Heaven is a state of being beyond space and time, then an exhausted priest from 1231 A.D. can take an interest in me. And if he can, I have plenty to show he does.
Thornton Wilder’s wonderful play Our Town gets one thing slightly wrong: he depicts the dead as striving to abandon earth wholesale. On the contrary, the blessed dead should now be able to love earth the right way, as a sea whose true breadth and depth are opened to their nets, without the threat of dragging them down.
When the saints do reach back into the water, their very presence reassures us that life’s turns are resolved in God. An earthly friend can never, through his or her own example, prove that all suffering will ultimately be glorified. But to be touched by a saint is to sense a hand offered from the place of total redemption. It is the light brush of an invisible, invincible communion.
So this is a toast to the things I’ve lost: passports, keys, wallets, cats, students’ quizzes. May there be many more. And may their loss and retrieval make me aware of the offered hand— the hand of a friend who knows what I’m really looking for, and who does not want me to become one more lost thing.
