Growing in Friendship with the Saints: Saints for Healing – Healing 2024

Summary

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God gives us this beautiful community both within the Church on earth and the Church in heaven. We can look to the saints as our “big brothers and sisters”, looking to them for guidance and prayers as we journey through our lives. In this talk, Danielle Bean shares the stories of several saints that can specifically help on your journey to healing and practical ways you can grow in friendship with the saints.

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Reflective Study Guide Questions

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“Upon my death I will let fall a shower of roses; I wish to spend my heaven in doing good upon the earth.”

St. Therese of Lisieux

1. What is your perspective on the saints? Do you find them human and approachable, or do you struggle to connect with them? Why?

2. Have you had any personal encounters with a specific saint? How have you seen the prayers of the saints help you in your own life?

3. Of the saints that Danielle shared in this talk, which saint did you feel the most connection to? Why?

4. How can you begin to get to know this saint better in your life? What practical steps do you plan to take next to strengthen your relationship with your “big brothers and sisters” in heaven?

Text: Growing in Friendship with the Saints: Saints for Healing

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Hello, I’m Danielle Bean. Welcome to this session where we’re going to be talking about growing in friendship with the Saints, saints for healing specifically. But before we get started, let’s open with a prayer. 

Opening Prayer

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord, thank you for this opportunity to come together. I ask that you pour down your grace and your blessing, and your mercy and your love on each person that’s participating in this retreat here today. Give them the grace they need for the healing that you want them to have in their lives. Fix them where they’re broken, Lord, heal them where they’re wounded. Make them whole, help all of us to grow in friendship with the saints and with one another. And remind us always that we are not alone on our path toward heaven. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. 

Building New Friendship With the Saints

All right. Today we’re going to be talking about growing in friendship with some of the saints, specifically some saints for healing because this retreat is focused on the topic of healing. And really what I love about, so I’m a cradle Catholic, and what I’ve always loved about my Catholic faith is that we have this beautiful gift in the communion of saints. We are not alone on our path toward heaven. God gives us one another, this beautiful community, beautiful friendships that we can have with others here on earth, but not limited to that we have these beautiful friendships that we can grow and we can learn and we can have the beautiful example of the saints people who’ve gone before us. 

And I sometimes like to think of the saints as kind of our big brothers and sisters. They, they guide us on our path toward heaven. They’ve gone before us. They fought the good fight. And there’s a saint for pretty much every situation you might find yourself in in life. There’s a saint for that because there’s such a beautiful diversity of their lives and their experiences during their time here on earth. And there are patron saints for pretty much every occupation, every kind of healing that you might need, every kind of sickness you might have, very specific. And so if you’re suffering with something in your life and you want healing and you want to find a saint that you can particularly pray to for that, do some Googling, do a little bit of research. And I bet you can find a new friend that way. But you know, sometimes the saints find us, sometimes they choose us. 

Building a Relationship With St. Therese

Have you ever had this experience where you learn about a new saint, maybe that’s new to you, and then they just keep popping up here and there and everywhere that saint is kind of stalking you, hoping to develop a connection with you. I’ve certainly had that happen one, one time recently it happened, not with a lesser known saint, but with a very well known saint, Saint Therese, the little flower, who’s a very well known saint. Right? And she’s for sure someone that we can pray to for healing. And in this experience, this was funny because I had, you know, I, on and off, I mean, I love Saint Therese, and, I love reading her writings and I love how very real she is and how childlike she is in her faith and how simple her little way is. So I find a lot of inspiration in her life and in, you know what I can read about her, but I hadn’t been praying to her for a while. You know, you can kind of go through phases. 

You might pray more novenas to particular saints, maybe through Pray More Novena or maybe on your own, or maybe you’re focused on a particular saint because you’re reading a story about their life or something like that, or you’re celebrating their feast day. And there’s so many though that maybe you move on in some ways. And, this was the case with me, with Saint Therese, I hadn’t been praying to her in quite some time, and I was struggling with something, it was a work situation that I wanted resolved and it was causing me a lot of stress and anxiety, and I didn’t know exactly what to do about it. And I just decided, I don’t know, she kind of popped up everywhere and a certain week of my life, I saw her here and there and I thought, why don’t I just, why don’t I just say Novena to St. Therese, and some of you might be familiar with Saint Therese the little flower, and she promised to spend her heaven just raining down flowers, meaning graces, answers to prayers down here on Earth, sending roses. And so it’s sort of a Catholic tradition that when you pray a novena to St. Therese to kind of get a sign that your prayer is being answered, you look to receive a rose, maybe an unexpected rose, or you see a rose somewhere. There are lots of different stories. 

Maybe you have some of your own to share on that topic. And it’s not something that you, you know, are required to believe as a Catholic. But these, this is kind of like the traditions that surround the lives of the saints and the ways that we celebrate them and connect with them are really a fun part of being Catholic and growing in our faith together.

A Rose From Saint Therese

So anyway, I was praying this novena for this particular intention about a sticky work situation that I really just wanted resolved. And I was praying to Saint Therese, I was in the middle of this novena and I was kind of keeping in mind, okay, I’m going to keep an eye out for a rose. Right? I hadn’t had any dramatic stories with that before And praying, novenas to Saint Therese before, and I was probably on about day seven of this novena when we were over at my father in Law’s house. He’s, moved recently and we were helping him out by cleaning out his space in his house. 

You know, he, at that stage in life, you really just need to declutter a lot of things. And there was stuff that hadn’t been touched in years. And, , my husband and kids and I were over there kind of going through things and clearing out, deciding what to keep and what to get rid of. And I opened up this China cabinet, which hadn’t been opened in many years, and it was dusty in there. And I, saw this pretty little teacup and I picked up the teacup and I could see there was, there was something in it. And I kind of just tipped it to, see if it would come out. And it did come out and it fell at my feet. And it was like this weird kind of dusty, small gray object. And at first I was scared because I was like, I thought it was a mouse or something like that. So I was like taking this step back. And then I just stooped down to look at it. And it was a rose, it was a dried up, dusty, decrepit rose. So it took me an instant before I realized that I was getting this, this message from Saint Therese And I thought really like, this is my rose, this gross thing. Like what, what does this mean? And I kind of had a notion that maybe Saint Therese was telling me you’re going to get an answer to your prayer, but you’re not going to like it. It’s not going to be what you hope for. And lo and behold, just a few weeks later, I was let go from that job, not the answer I wanted. It did however, answer my prayer in that the situation was resolved. 

So that’s just a funny story. But this is how we can grow in friendship with the saints. They’re real people who lived real lives of faith and they understand the ins and the outs and the ups and the downs and the joys and the sorrows and the challenges of everything that you’re going through. So what a beautiful gift we have in the communion of saints in that we can turn to these people and pray to them and ask them to pray for us.

Now, it’s important to be clear about that because sometimes our Christian brothers and sisters and others misunderstand what we’re doing when we’re praying to the saints. We are not worshiping the saints. We worship God only, but they are our friends. Just like you might ask a friend who goes to mass with you or a friend who lives down the street to pray for you for a particular intention. We can ask the saints to pray for us and they are in heaven, and so they have God’s ear. What a beautiful gift that we have access to these holy men and women and that they care about what’s going on in our lives and we can be connected with them in that way. 

So I want to talk about a few different saints and just share a few different saints that you might consider on your path toward healing. Maybe some saints that you want to grow in connection with, maybe some that you’ve heard of before, maybe some that you haven’t heard of before. It’s a beautiful thing that we cannot exhaust the communion of saints. We can really get, get a big book of the, the lives of the saints and or just follow the liturgical year going one saint a day. And you’ll be introduced to all kinds of new heavenly friends. But a few that I want to mention here today. 

Saint Raphael

So the first that I want to mention is Saint Raphael Now he’s an archangel and his very name “Raphael” means God heals. Now I have a special connection with Saint Raphael I have a son who’s named Raphiel And this is a saint that I’ve prayed to many times through the years. And Saint Raphael is known as a, a patron saint of healing. And other saints have referred to him that way. And sometimes I think in the community of saints, we forget that we also can pray to the angels. These are god’s heavenly messengers and our heavenly friends, they’re hugely powerful and we forget to pray to them, including our own guardian angel. Do you know that you have this powerful being that God has given to you specifically to help you to get to heaven while your healing is very much going to be a part of that. 

So, St. Raphael is a great saint to pray to for healing, but also your own guardian angel. If you’re struggling with something, do you remember to pray to your guardian angel? Because it’s your guardian angel’s number one task to help you get to heaven and your healing is going to be a part of that. So don’t forget that we have access to these powerful friends in heaven, the angels and the archangels and the communion of saints. 

Saint Jude

Alright, the next saint I want to mention, and I love this saint because he’s considered the patron saint of hopeless causes. And this is St. Jude, he was one of the original apostles. I love that he has that title, the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes because we all feel like a hopeless cause sometimes. Do you ever have a situation in your life and you think this is hopeless? There’s  no way that this can be resolved. Well, there’s no way that this can turn out for my good. 

Well then you need to turn to St. Jude and he specializes in hopeless causes. Have you ever felt like you are a hopeless cause or somebody that you’re praying for or a relationship that maybe you’re praying for, you just feel like there’s no hope there. God gives us hope through friendship and through your friendship with St. Jude, who’s the patron saint of hopeless causes and you know, I love that the St. Jude Cancer Center is, is named for St. Jude and there are other charitable organizations that are, because he’s a perpetual reminder to us that God can do all things and that no person is a hopeless cause. No situation is a hopeless cause. We always have hope in God. So remember that when you’re feeling like a hopeless cause, don’t hesitate to turn to the patron, saint of hopeless causes. He specializes in that, so turn to Saint Jude. 

Saint Rita

All right, the next one I want to mention is St. Rita. Now this is an Italian saint and she was, I think it was about the century that she lived. And she lived a very difficult life, a very difficult life. So if you are needing healing from any kind of woundedness in your life, St. Rita might have experienced that same kind of woundedness. She experienced a marriage. She was married at years old to a much older man who was abusive. And she lived in that abusive situation for many years, praying for her husband. And that’s a great deal of suffering, emotional, spiritual, and physical suffering that she went through. And ultimately her husband was murdered, and so she went through that kind of pain. If you’re suffering pain from loss in your life, if you are grieving the loss of someone close to you, you can turn to St. Rita. And she’s has had an experience like that. 

Also, her sons died of dysentery. If you’re experiencing illness in your life or illness of people that you love and that you’re worried about, St. Rita can help to answer your prayers. And this is part of what I find so encouraging about learning more about the communion of saints, is the fact that these are real people that we need to remember real people that lived real lives. And many of their experiences can be similar to our own. You can do a little research and you can find a saint for anything that is going on in your life, but especially with healing, because so many of them suffered in so many very specific ways that maybe can help us to relate to them a little bit. 

Saints Are Closer To Us Than We Think

And this is part of the challenge when we’re talking about the community of saints is, you know, you might have a beautiful statue of a saint. You know, I’ve got Mary here behind me and you know, we might have beautiful statues of saints in your church, at your parish. And it can be easy sometimes to begin to think about the saints like that, like their statues, like their, you know, these characters in a storybook from a long time ago. And we kind of put them on a pedestal and they’re far away. They’re distant from us, not fully human. We need to remind ourselves that the saints are fully human. They lived fully human lives, they were weak and they were flawed and they messed things up and they stayed faithful and they grew in their relationship with God throughout their lifetimes. 

So there’s so much we can learn there, but important to remember that they’re human and they suffered in these human ways like St. Rita did. And St. Rita had as a form of stigmata a wound on her forehead. What more sign of suffering do you need? Right? So many of the saints had different kinds of ways that they were either suffering physically, many of them suffered illness, it’s part of the human experience. But the difference is in how they embrace these things. So if you’re suffering in any way in your life right now, if you are seeking healing from any kind of woundedness, Saint Rita is a saint that you can turn to who will understand what it means to suffer. Think of that wound that she had, which was actually considered a gift from God to have this sign, and yet she endured that. And how many of us in our suffering, we want to reject it. We don’t want to embrace it, and the saints give us, that almost feels like super human example of embracing suffering as a gift from God. So Saint Rita is another saint, A friend that we can have in heaven that we can turn to in our search for healing. Alright, the next saint that I want to mention with healing is Saint Monica. 

Saint Monica

This is a pretty well known saint, especially to mothers because, or parents who are suffering in any way because of your parenthood. Because parenthood is something that can cause a lot of struggling, a lot of suffering, a lot of grief in your life. It costs us a lot to love and care for the children that God gives us in this life. And our children can cause us to suffer. I think about all the time, I think about Eve in the garden when God told her, “You’ll bring forth children in great pain.” And I used to think that that just meant the kind of suffering that comes from, you know, pregnancy and childbirth. But it truly is referring to a more expansive idea of the way that we love other people, the way that we give ourselves in a way that costs us. It’s a very feminine way of loving it’s mothering, right? 

And God calls us to this and it can cause us to suffer. And Saint Monica is a beautiful example of this because she is the mother of now Saint Augustine, but he wasn’t always a saint. He left his faith. He was a, a brilliant young man. He was a passionate young man. He was living a worldly life of sin as a young man. And St. Monica prayed steadfastly for him. She never gave up hope. She prayed for him every day, and it caused her so much suffering to see her son choosing to throw away his gift of faith in this way. And she prayed diligently. And ultimately her prayer was answered. A prayer was answered, first of all, with the conversion of her husband who was a pagan, and she was persistently faithful in her prayer for him. And then ultimately Saint Augustine, we got Saint Augustine. Not only did he come back to his faith, but he came back with a fervor and a passion that has now gone on to be a gift to the Church. He’s now a doctor of the Church. This one of the great minds of our Catholic faith who’s written beautiful prayers. And there, there’s just so much in the theology that we have from Saint Augustine now that is such a gift to the Church. 

And I love to think about Saint Monica and her faithfulness in her prayers and her not giving up hope for her son. And the fact that those prayers, because she was persistent, because she trusted in the Lord, trusted that God would heal her broken mother’s heart, that we now reap the benefits of it because Saint Augustine has gone on to bless the Church and bless the world in countless ways. So if you are suffering as a result of your motherhood or your fatherhood, if you are suffering in a relationship with your child in any way, shape, or form, or just suffering some of the everyday pains and disillusionment that can come in everyday living out of faithful family life, Saint Monica is a saint that you can turn to and she will help you. She will pray for you and she will help you to find the healing that you need. 

Saint Anne

Okay, the next saint that I want to mention is Saint Anne. This is a pretty well-known saint and she is near and dear to my heart. My middle name is Anne. And I’ve always felt this special connection to Saint Anne, who is the mother of Mary. So that makes her the grandmother of Jesus. And you know, we can read that, we can know that, and we can think, oh, what a, you know, what a blessing what, what a special privilege. She had to be the grandmother of Jesus. And yet there’s a whole lifetime of suffering that happened before that blessing in Saint Anne’s life. So Saint Anne was unable to have children. And so many times in the Bible we read about fertility issues with women. We read about women who weren’t able to have children. We read about women who are competitive with one another in having children. And this is because children are seen in a very real way and in a very accurate way as a blessing from God. 

And yet Saint Anne suffered a lack of that blessing in her married life. And she was faithful, just like I was telling you about Saint Monica, who was faithful in her prayer life. Saint Anne was persistent in praying, in trusting the Lord. And it was much later in life when she was well passed, when she might have thought that she would get the answer to this prayer, that God decided to answer her prayer. And boy did He answer her prayer. She was privileged to become the mother of the Blessed Mother, the immaculate conception. That’s an amazing thing. And so I think Saint Anne’s story is such a beautiful reminder to us if we’re suffering in any way, if we are praying for healing in our lives and wondering where’s the answer to this thing? You know, I’ve been praying about this. I don’t feel like I see an answer to this. 

Saint Anne is a saint who can understand that because she lived, that she lived out this faithful life of prayer, asking for God’s blessing and not hearing an answer, not hearing the answer that she wanted until much later in life, maybe when she was tempted to give it up and walk away and think it’s impossible to happen now. But she’s also a reminder of not only the goodness of God, but the fact that God can do all things nothing is impossible for God. And that He answered her prayer with abundance. He didn’t just give her any baby, He gave her the mother of God, He made her the grandmother of God. What a beautiful gift, what an honor, and what, what a privilege. And so Saint Anne can be a model for us in that persistence of prayer when we’re in need of healing in our lives. And she can pray for you too. This is part of the beauty of praying to the saints, is that, like I said, we can think of them as kind of our big brothers and sisters in heaven. They’ve gone before us, they’ve set the example, but they didn’t just move on. They’re turning around, they’re turning back to us. They want to help us. They want to be our friends in a very real way. You might have friendships that are a real consolation to you in your life here on earth, but God wants you to have heavenly friendships that you’re going to experience in the same way with these people who share your faith, who want to connect with you, who love God, who want you to get to heaven. So pray to Saint Anne, ask her. 

Saint Faustina

Alright, the final saint that I want to mention that we can pray to in our seeking healing is Saint Faustina. So Saint Faustina is the saint who had revelations from Jesus and brought us and shares with us the Divine Mercy devotion. So Jesus was sharing with Saint Faustina in these revelations throughout her lifetime. She was a little nun in Poland, and he’s sharing with her in these very personal ways. If you read The Diary of St. Faustina, it’s really just beautiful. I mean, it’s a little hard to get through. I suggest going through just a few pages at a time and just reading about the, the ways that Jesus spoke to her, the kinds of connections that they had, but that he cared very much about the details of her life and that she modeled for us this beautiful trust in God, even when things are hard. 

St Faustina suffered physical and emotional and spiritual wounds in her lifetime, and she suffered them in this great patience, trusting in the goodness of God. And as you’re reading her diary, and I very recently read it and was re inspired along these lines that she is trusting in God because the people in her life always disappoint and discourage her. Even those that she, you know, that love her, that want what’s good for her, don’t always understand her. They don’t understand the unique kind of suffering she’s going through. And so she expresses in her diary this real longing for just connection with the Lord because He’s the only one, He’s the only one who can see her suffering. And she, she trusts in Him with her whole being. Such a beautiful example of that trust.

A really fun thing that I realized recently was when I recently read through the Diary of St. Faustina, I was kind of growing in friendship with her and beginning to pray to her more often, thinking of her more often, thinking of different parts of my life where I could turn to her and ask her to pray for me because I knew she had experienced some similar sorrow or suffering or need for healing in her own life. And as I was going about this, I really began to just kind of in my prayers to her in a very loving way. It referred to her as my big sister. And I really just felt that she was this, this big sister to me. And I have a real life big sister who I love and I treasure. And my real life big sister’s name is Hélène which is French for Helene. And I came to find out just when I was sharing about this with my real life, big sister Hélène, she said, did you know St. Faustina’s name before she entered religious life was Helena? And I said, no, I did not know that. What a beautiful thing, what a beautiful gift that God gave me and gives you big sisters, big brothers to kind of lead us on this path in life. And I loved that my two big sisters that are so dear to me shared this name in common. And you know, as you grow in friendship with the saints, you might find that you have that experience too, that you can connect with the saints in these very personal ways. They want to grow in friendship with you. And now it’s not going to be the same as sitting down with a friend over a cup of coffee, but it can even be more deep and more real than that. 

A Spiritual Connection With Our Brothers and Sisters in Christ

In many ways, it’s a spiritual connection that we have with our brothers and sisters in Christ who’ve gone before us and are now in heaven and are able to intercede for us what a beautiful gift that intercession is. So if you are looking to grow in friendship with the saints on your path toward healing, some practical things you might consider doing are reading the lives of the Saints. Maybe get a, a great big volume of the lives of the saints and work your way through it. Or just do a little Googling, do a little searching, researching online for different saints who are patron saints of different causes. Like I said, they can be very surprising and very specific. 

So there might be one that is particularly conducive to your state in life and the kind of healing that you need in your life right now. You might visit a shrine for a particular saint as a way of kind of making a, a devotional practice and asking for that saint’s intercession. And of course, you can pray in novena. This is the Pray More Novenas retreat. So you know about this, you can pray a novena to a saint. Now if you do a little research, you might find one that’s, you know, ready made to that saint. But you can always kind of make up your own novena by praying in a specific way for nine days, asking for a particular Saint’s intercession to help you in a real way in your life. Ultimately, my prayer for you is that you’re going to continue to grow in friendship with the saints, whatever kind of healing you need in your life right now, the saints are part of the way that God is answering your prayer, asking for His healing and His love. And the most beautiful reminder we get in the communion of Saints is that whatever it is we’re going through, whatever you’re struggling with in your life, in the world, in the church right now, none of us is alone in it. Thanks be to God for that.

About Danielle Bean 

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