St. Anthony of Padua by El Greco

Bigfoot’s wallet was found!

But only after I said prayers to St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things. St. Anthony is supposed to help you find what is lost, whether it is lost car keys, a lost job, or a lost love. He has helped me before with trivial things you might think would be beneath a saint’s consideration, like a lost earring.

A lost earring?

It was a a friend’s lost earring at a party many years ago, and she was quite upset about it. So we paused for a moment in our revelries to offer our silent, joking prayers to St. A., and voila–it turned up.

This time, St. Anthony led me to Bigfoot’s wallet under the bed, which surfaced while I was vacuuming.

That’s right, it was under the bed, not at the photo site at all. It must have fallen there when he changed clothes after coming home.

Of course it turned up when you were vacuuming, you say.

It would have turned up anyway, you say.

Well, read  some of these stories before dismissing the idea entirely.

Still don’t believe it? You don’t have to. St. Anthony helps skeptics and drunken party revelers as well as believers.

Bigfoot is the very definition of a skeptic. I am sometimes a believer in divine power, and other times a practitioner of silly superstitions, and I can’t always distinguish between the two.

So I choose “le pari de Pascal”, because I’m inclined that way anyway.

Of course I appear ridiculous in a society that worships logic above all, even though it’s really just a tool, even though we ourselves are moved much more by emotions and belief.

And that, Bigfoot would say, is the problem.

It doesn’t seem we’ll ever agree. But that’s OK.

Because St. Anthony also happens to be the patron of marital reconciliation.