Energize Your Prayer Life With a Personal Novena

National Catholic Register, 20 July 2020

A daily dose of the saints is good for the health of a disciple of Christ, to know that he is not alone along the way.

Lives of the saints have a venerable place in Catholic devotion. Every Catholic library needs a version of the Roman Martyrology, a list of all canonized and beatified saints, arranged according to their feast days. Each day has at least a few; some days a great many. Of the making of books about saints there is no end, as there is no end to the making of saints.

The standard English Butler’s Lives of the Saints is necessary but unwieldly. In multiple volumes, the biographies, while short, are still too long for inclusion in daily prayers. Over the decades, many more user-friendly adaptations and imitations have been published. Enter a new option, marvellously done: Saints: Becoming an Image of Christ Every Day of the Year (Ignatius). The author is Dawn Marie Butler, which is a good surname to have if you are in the saint-writing business.

This new one-volume Saints is explicitly devotional, meant to accompany one’s morning prayers. Each day has several saints listed with a few paragraphs of history and a short invocation for that saint’s intercession. Some of the saints are those listed in the universal Roman calendar, which are those saints that are commemorated throughout the Church at Mass. But the vast majority are not universally celebrated, given the limits of the calendar year.

The saints, in all their variety, are an incarnational way to learn about Catholic history, theology and spirituality. A daily dose of the saints is good for the health of a disciple of Christ, to know that he is not alone along the way.

I might suggest to readers a saintly devotion that I have developed over the years — the personal novena.

It’s simple. First choose a date of some significance to you — birthday, anniversary or some such. Then work back nine days and for each of those days look up which saint falls on that day (or close to it). All the better if some of the saints are not on the universal calendar; it makes the novena more personal and educational.

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