One of the best decisions I made at the start of each of the last two years was to align myself with a particular saint. In 2011, I chose two: St. Therese of Lisieux and Bl. Pier-Giorgio Frassati. Both died when they were just 24, the same age I was at the time. And both had a very down-to-earth spirituality. Throughout the year I read several books on them, regularly asked for their intercession, and developed deep spiritual friendships that I still call upon today.
For 2012, I chose my favorite writer, C.S. Lewis. He’s not canonized, since he never formally became Catholic, but he’s a saint in my book. He lived with remarkable charity and devotion, and he served the Lord with all his mind and will. A year later, I’m still reading through his letters, diary entries, and corpus, so I plan to stick with him again this year.
If you’d like to choose your own saint for 2013, Jen Fulwiler developed the Saint’s Name Generator just for you. Now’s the perfect time to run the program and find your own companion. Here are the details:
I used some of my holiday free time to create a little program that will choose a saint’s name at random. (Yes, writing code is how I relax. Yes, I am a hopeless nerd.)
Why would you want to choose a saint’s name at random?
I got the idea from the “saint for the year” devotion, where people have a patron saint for the new year chosen for them at random (usually by a priest or religious, who prays over each choice). I’ve had saints chosen for me this way before, and it’s always been a great experience. In 2007 St. Maximilian Kolbe was picked as my patron for the year. I wasn’t familiar with him before that, but his life ended up inspiring me tremendously all throughout the year, and I still ask him for prayers for all sorts of matters. He’s become one of my favorite saints.
I thought this might be a fun little tool for anyone else looking to select a saint at random to be a patron for a particular cause or time period. If nothing else, you might get to “meet” some new holy men and women. I had so much fun working on this, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
Start the Saint’s Name Generator.
PS. I’d love to hear which saint you get, so be sure to leave a comment and let me know!