During a recent Sunday my family’s pastor retold the story of St. Rita of Cascia: how she prayed that her sons should die rather than commit sin, and how God in fact granted her prayer rather than let the boys avenge the murder of their father.

How many of us have faith like that? How many of us have the courage to pray the related prayer of St. Dominic Savio, asking “death rather than sin” for ourselves? Not being a parent I cannot imagine what it would cost to make the first prayer; I know for myself that I shrink from making the latter.

While most of this shrinking is due purely to my own cowardice, I must also confess a curiosity about the effects of such prayers. The Church has a long catalogue of repentant saints, starting with Matthew and Mary Magdalene and the good thief Dismas, and continuing on through the centuries with Paul, Augustine of Hippo, Peregrine Laziosi, Margaret of Cortona, and Ignatius of Loyola—to name just a few. There is the rather spectacular story of St. Theophilus the Penitent, who supposedly made a pact with the devil but later repented by calling on Our Lady; his story gave rise to the Faust legend. My personal favorite is St. Genesius, a third century Roman actor who did spoofs on this funky thing called Christianity. During a command performance before the emperor Diocletian, Genesius experienced an outpouring of grace, realized the truth of Christianity, and begged to be baptized—really!—at once. The emperor was not amused. St. Genesius was beheaded, and today is patron saint of actors. (Yes, that’s right, the patron saint of actors was a comic.)

As I meditated—daydreamed, if you prefer—on the examples (??) of these saints, I found myself wondering: what if their mothers had prayed that they die before committing a mortal sin? Certainly St. Genesius would not have mocked the true Faith before thousands of people; but then neither would his martyrdom have been anywhere near as spectacular as it was. What about St. Augustine? If St. Monica had prayed for his death before ever the pear tree incident occurred, instead of praying for his conversion after it—we would never have had the Confessions, The City of God, the Anti-Pelagian writings, etc. Without St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis Xavier we would never have had the Jesuits. Well . . . maybe that example . . . Nonetheless, the point seems clear: God is able to bring good out of evil in ways that we cannot imagine. After all, it was the Fall that brought about the Incarnation. Why should the cosmic order of things be any different when scaled down to our own lives?

For many years we had a garden in back of our house. Weeding it was one of those dreaded tasks of childhood, and the worst aspect of weeding was the flat, tough-rooted “prickly plants” that seemed to crop up everywhere by some invisible and devilish influence. There were no garden gloves thick enough to keep their thorns from stinging; one either had to carefully reach down under the leaves to where the smooth stem lay or, in desperate cases, to attack the thing with a hoe.

After a few years of battling with these plants that I happened to be walking with my father in the lower field. The grass there was cut only rarely, and there were weeds of every kind intermixed with it like cockle among the wheat. I remember being stuck by one particularly towering weed (it was taller than I and even, I think, even taller than my father). It looked like a prickly plant, but it was far too large.

“A prickly plant?” my father said in response to my query. “Yeah, I guess that’s the same as what you pull up in the garden. But they’re really called thistles.”

I knew exactly what a thistle was; I was a great fan of George MacDonald, after all, and very proud of my Scotch-Irish ancestry to boot. I stood there, staring at the enormous “prickly plant” for some seconds. Then: “It has the most beautiful flowers.” 

Indeed! There were a great many of them at the end of every stem, purple clusters of soft, hair-like petals that belied their spiny origin.

“Yes,” my father agreed, “they’re beautiful flowers. But you have to let the thistles get awfully big before you see any.”