Dear Friend,
I commend highly your desire to find the "right time to pray." During a retreat, a priest shared that each person has a built-in clock. We have expressions to confirm his statement. People say, "I'm not an early morning person" or "I do my best work at night when everyone else is asleep." So, your question is a good one.

The important thing is that you want to pray. You yearn to spend some time with God in prayer. Each person has to find the "islands of prayer" in the sea of our frenzied activity so apparent in our culture. I know a person who works in downtown Los Angeles and parks his car several blocks away from where he works so that he can walk and pray both going to and from his job.

I know another person who has made it a habitual practice to consciously drive by his parish church on the way home from work and spend fifteen minutes in the adoration chapel before driving home. I know a mom who locks the bathroom door and prays.

St. Teresa says, "We need no wings to go in search of God, but only to find a place where we can be alone and communicate with Him, who dwells within us." Continue reading

Sources

• The Integrated Catholic Life
• Image: What Christians Want to Know

I do not want this to be the case. Yet, when I think about all the images of consumptive 14-year-old girls that adorned the holy cards of my youth or all the silly stories about saintly young women who would rather die than disobey their parents, I fear it must be so.

I'm sure, of course, that Christ and the holy women those artists gravely misrepresented have forgiven them their sins. But those sins did damage and that damage must be atoned for. Thanks to them, countless Catholics (and non-Catholics too) are running around this world thinking sainthood a boring business and female sainthood more boring still.

For a long time, I was one of those Catholics. Somewhere along the way, between bad religious art and even worse religious storytelling, I picked up the idea that lady saints were like so many of the statues that represented them: cold, untouchable, and decidedly not real. How could they be real? They seemed to have so little life in them, so little blood—never speaking a cross word or giving a cross look, never getting angry, never even thinking a bad thought.

Those plaster women were not like any woman I'd ever met. And they were most definitely not like me, with my red hair and temper and excessively strong opinions. Maybe they were real, I concluded at one point. But they were also the rarest of birds, and neither myself nor anyone I knew could so much as hope to join their ranks.

Then, I met St. Teresa of Avila, who was a giddy flirt, even as a nun, until a mystical encounter with Christ brought her to her knees. When she got back up, she launched a reform of the Carmelite order. Her superiors tried to stop her, but she didn't give up in defeat. Instead, she launched a letter-writing campaign to King Phillip, begging him to intervene. Which he eventually did, bringing the inquisition against her to an end.

Around the same time, I met St. Catherine of Siena, who in 1376, marched off to Avignon and told Pope Gregory to get himself back to Rome post-haste and stay there. He obeyed.

Next I met St. Perpetua, who faced the lions of Carthage more calmly than I can manage to face the field mice in my kitchen. A lot more calmly.

Then, there was St. Joan of Arc, who commanded a motley crew of surrender-happy French soldiers and began her letters to the English army with the salutation, "Dear Heretics." Continue reading

Sources

• Emily Stimpson in Catholic Vote
• Image: Female Saints
  

Emily Stimpson is a freelance writer, based in Steubenville, Ohio.