When Life’s Impossible, Talk to St. Rita

Sometimes you feel like you’re faced with a problem with no apparent solution.

You hear about someone with a terminal diagnosis.

You’re drowning in life—or are trying to support someone else who is.

You are trapped in a situation that gets more and more complex.

You’re struggling as a spouse or as a parent or as a child or as a sibling.

The challenges are almost too vast to put into words.

That’s when we can turn to St. Rita of Cascia. She is the friend you can reach out to anytime, even for an ordinary concern. But she’s is also the friend who is the patron saint of the impossible. And there’s not much you’re going to encounter that she didn’t in her life.

She had a difficult, painful marriage. Her husband was murdered. Her twin sons wanted to avenge their father’s murder, and she prayed that they wouldn’t be able to. Then they died before they could get revenge for their father. St. Rita found her way to religious life as an Augustinian, but her suffering didn’t end even as she answered the call. She received the stigmata one Good Friday while in prayer and bore that for the last 15 years of her life. Toward the end of her life, she was bedridden and could only consume the Eucharist.

But her life was also full of faith and full of miracles.

When she was an infant, a swarm of white bees landed on her lips and moved in and out of her mouth without stinging her.

While she was dying, a relative visited her, and St. Rita asked for a rose from their family garden—even though it was winter. When the relative arrived at home, a single rose was blooming in the snow.

Since St. Rita’s death in 1457, she has been credited with many miracles. And I find myself turning to her when life presents a particularly complex issue. Yes, I turn those problems over to God. Some people don’t understand asking saints to intercede. But you can turn a problem over to God and still feel great comfort and strength in asking a friend to join you in prayer.

St. Rita is that friend. She has an inner strength that carried her through a painful marriage, the loss of her twin sons to illness soon after her husband’s death, and the agony of the stigmata. Through all her physical and emotional suffering, St. Rita persevered in faith. She carried forward. She gave herself to God. She believed that anything and everything is possible—and, of course, for God it is.

What a marvelous faith. What a powerful witness. What a wonderful friend we have in St. Rita, who can join us in prayer from heaven.

As she is quoted as saying, “There is nothing impossible to God.”

Maybe today, as we mark St. Rita’s feast day, you can talk to St. Rita about whatever is feeling impossible in your life right now. Chances are she’s seen and heard something even more impossible. And what a gift to have a friend and advocate in heaven who’s walked difficult journeys with deep faith, abundant hope, and inspiring trust in God.

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