We got some ink in the Southampton Press in New York!

"Almost Famous in Hampton Bays!" http://t.co/xJxT4QfhfW
— Rob Clemenz (@SaintforSinners) August 8, 2013

Our Idea about Saint Richard of Chichester as "Patron of NASCAR" is Picking Up Speed!

Long ago, we proposed that Saint Richard of Chichester would be a great Patron Saint of NASCAR. Saint Richard did "race" his cart to market at harvest time. Now, a young man has jumped on the bandwagon! Read here:


http://scoutsofsaintgeorge.ning.com/members/031n8yiaawlx7

Celebrating the Patroness of the Disabled, Saint Germaine Cousins

        

Celebrating Saint Germaine Cousins

          Today, June 15,  is the Memorial for Saint Germaine Cousin, from Pibrac, France, who was a peasant farm worker and shepherdess known for her kindness to children, devotion to her Faith, and as a performer of many miracles.

         Germaine was born with a disability, known as scrofula, which left her with a severely deformed left hand. She was often mistreated and blamed for anything unpleasant that might have occurred. One time, she was accused of stealing food from the pantry and trying to sneak it out of the house in her apron. It was demanded that she release the drawstrings of her clothes and when she did an array of beautiful flowers were all the appeared. Her Stepmother assigned her the role of looking out for the sheep and she was always happy to be with the welcoming animals, rather than her family who shunned her.

         According to one legend, when young Germaine would hear the Church Bells tolling while she was in the fields tending to the animals, she would always go to Church. Instead of leaving the animals alone, she entrusted her Guardian Angel to look after them and not one animal was lost during Germaine’s mini pilgrimages to attend Church.

         The children of Pibrac often befriended Germaine during her work on the farm. She was devoted to helping them in any way she could.

         Germaine is known as a Miracle Worker and even performed a Miracle for herself one day. The Courbert River separated Germaine from the Church she attended and one day the river was especially unruly and rapturous. Germaine just walked across the water in order to get to Mass! She was especially adept at curing the disabled from blindness, deafness, and the plagues that afflicted many of the people. She never cured her own hand, however, preferring to live with her disability and helping others despite her frailty.  Saint Germaine has many patronages, but is most revered as patroness of the disabled.

http://saintsforsinners.com/medals/index.php/saint-germaine

A Brief History of Dog Parks in the United States

A Brief History of Dog Parks in the United States

     My girlfriend Dusty, First Deputy at www.SaintsforSinners.com and I were talking about the local dog park in City Park and we began wondering how, when, and where the first dog parks originated. So, we channeled Saint Rocco,  patron saint of dogs and dog lovers who told us to surf the Internet to get the answer. We looked up some articles and a lady named Jessica Gross had a short piece that gave us all the information we sought.

     It didn't surprise us that dog parks basically began in Northern California, near Berkeley, according to Ms. Gross. We believe it since lots of trends seem to have begun in the west, like television, and the Gold Rush, to name two. Apparently, around 40 years ago, the city of Berkely, California was building a new transit system and tearing down lots of buildings that were in the way. That left a lot of  open land which has come to be known as "green space." Two other ladies, Doris Richards and Gail Green ( Gail GREEN, things that make you go Hmmmmmm. ) got things rolling along and pretty soon the first dog park had been established.

     The first park was a bit of a lark and basically just thrown together, thanks to the initiative of these two lovely women. But once it got organized, the dog park sort of became its own town and in the mid 1980's it was officially incorporated. And like "The Field of Dreams," once the park got built the dogs and humans came. Everything was pretty hunky dory at the park and then the inevitable happened.

      Word spread about how cool the park was and pretty soon like-minded individuals ( mostly women, Dusty surmises ) were calling and writing the people running the dog park and asking how they too could create a dog park. Their model has now been copied in numerous cities throughout the world. In our home town, a great dog park called "City Bark," was created in City Park on March 27, 2010. According to its president, Mary Ann Cardinale, the 10 people who envisioned creating the park were all, you guessed it, women!

        It should be noted that one of the ladies, Doris Richards, who helped create the dog park was honored by the City Parks Department. They erected a giant functioning fire hydrant in her honor.  Before she died Ms. Richards wrote that she felt the fire hydrant honor was "funny and fitting." We do too! 

        

      

The Artisan State-of-Mind

The Artisan State of Mind

      The New York Times writer Stephanie Strom has offered a story, today claiming that the “Millennials,” that is, those in the age group of 18 -30, have cast a bit of a pall over the fast-food industry. According to marketing gurus and number crunchers, the Millennials are avoiding visiting fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King, and instead opting for a more artisanal form of dining where they have clearer understandings of the food that they buy and eat. The younger folks seem to care about what ingredients they are eating and where the food came from in the first place.

         There has been some hullabaloo about the word “artisan,” with some in the Advertising Industry claiming artisan is the “hot” word of the day. “Use the word ‘artisan’ in your next advertising spread and poof, sales will escalate by great proportion. At www.SaintsforSinners.com we love that the word artisan is inching up in popularity and becoming more ameliorative. After all, we have been artisans and crafts-persons since the day our company became even a gleam in the eye.

         Art. Crafts. Uniqueness. Distinction. Quality.  These words have been our calling cards. Our story cards about the saints have always said something to effect that our imported Italian saint medallions are all painted by hand and one-of-a-kind. Sure, as we have grown and flourished we have had to alter our presentations about the uniqueness of our hand-painted saint medals, because, as we started to work with companies like www.fab.com and Group On and the like, we learned that when presenting photos of artistic renderings, the men, women, and children who buy our hand-painted saint medals tend to want the product they see, and straying too far and sending designs that are decidedly different than those that have caught a buyer’s eye, can cause disappointment. We have been painting and improving our designs for nearly 20 years.  It should not have been such a surprise to me that sometimes we serendipitously hit near perfection.  That may be because we have the artisanal saints guiding us on our venture.

         Saint Veronica, Papal patron of photographers and laundry workers, has recently joined our fold but since we paint with a broader brush than those at the Vatican, we broaden Veronica’s scope and offer her medal as a patron for artists and illustrators as well.

         Saint Luke is well-known as the Papal patron of painters and stained-glass workers, but we take him further, offering that saint Luke is surely the patron of artists too!

         Our Lady of Perpetual Help, also known as Our Lady of Perpetual Succor, is Papally inclined to everyone help not just when they need it, but at all times. That is indeed comforting, and our design of this Our Lady is nearly flawless in its beauty, but we had to add that Our Lady of Perpetual Help is a picture-perfect patron of artists and painters. Her wonderful story involved a magnificent painting believed to have been created in the 1200’s. It got lost and it got found and its rendering has been duplicated millions of times.

         And Our Lady of Guadalupe is all about a fantastically miraculous Tilma that was brought to the church by the peasant Juan Diego. The Tilma is such a magnificent and inspiring piece of art. How could we decline to present Our Lady as a patron of artisans and artists?

         Saint Elizabeth of Hungary is known as a patron of lace-makers and bakers. But doesn’t her reach extend to allow saint Elizabeth to be the patron of sewers and crafters and designers as well? We think so.

         We love the fact that the millennials seem to be bucking the trend of a “same ole, same ole” mindset.  They are embracing uniqueness. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary must be overjoyed that this new crew of people are rejecting cookie cutter sameness and embracing originality. At SaintsforSinners.com, we are doing the same thing and wonder, since we are over 18 years old but less than 30, are we not millennials too?

A nice essay from http://yaygod-sagas.blogspot.com/

I really liked this essay from Cyndi @ http://YayGod-Sagas.Blogspot.com

I'm sure http://SaintsforSinners.com "forgiveness patrons" Saint Dismas and Saint Maria Goretti would too. Thanks, Cyndi! "YayGod!"

"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, and what is soiled is made clean."  

Dag Hammarskjold

"By your capacity for forgiveness shall I recognize your God." 

 Meister Eckhart

     As the story goes, a frail elderly man went to live with his son, daughter-in-law, and four-year old grandson. The old man's hands trembled, his eyesight was blurred, making eating difficult. Peas rolled off his spoon, his milk spilled on the tablecloth, he broke a dish or two, and his place at the table was always a mess, irritating his son and wife. So they set a small table in the corner where Grandfather ate alone from a wooden bowl while the rest of the family enjoyed dinner. 

     The four-year-old watched it all in silence. One evening before supper, the father noticed his son playing with wood scraps on the floor.  He asked the child sweetly, "What are you making?"  Just as sweetly, the boy responded, "Oh I am making a little bowl for you and Mama to eat your food from when I grow up."

     Whether we know it or not, we are forever modeling to the children, grandchildren and the more impressionable hearts of each other how to enhance or diminish the Light in the world, by our actions and attitudes, regardless of the words we speak.  Earlier in the summer, Michael pressure-washed our patio, walkway and driveway,  oblivious to the fact that he was thereby destroying and drowning the garden and plants I had laboriously spent two days putting in just after we arrived. We were both snarky with each other, feeling under-appreciated, neither of us able or willing in the moment to acknowledge the role of ego in our stand-off.  Eknath Easwaran tells an amusing story about two people arguing, pretending to listen, when all they really needed were signs to hold up as the other spoke: "I'm right. You're wrong." The blessing of getting older is that these moments pass quickly, with grace and humor and, hopefully, lessons learned. (Note to self: do not plant garden until after the pressure-washing; also, plants are more easily replaced than husbands.)

     One blessing of getting older is that we find if we wait 24 hours or so before reacting and then tell a story about what happened, the feelings are usually universally shared, and more humorous than aggravating, one story begetting another as our life dramas unfold. My niece's mother, Donna, was caring for her mother with Alzheimer's. Donna went into the garage, and her mother locked her out of the house. The mother then kept telling Donna, who was banging on the door to get back in, that she had to go find Donna to unlock the door.  After a few days, the story could be told with laughter instead of frustration, fear and irritation.

     A friend, unaware that the answer machine on her neighbor's phone had not disconnected after she left her message, proceeded to complain to her husband in rather disparaging terms about the neighbor - until she heard the heart-stopping 'beep,' indicating the machine had recorded it all. When the friend called me in horror for advise, I was not much help because I couldn't stop laughing, even as we both recoiled at the thought of her innocent neighbor's eventual pain. They have since reconciled though not without difficult lessons.

    The thought occurs to me now that we are sending and receiving constantly in life; with every thought and every word, we leave messages of our choosing:  joy or despair, lightness or gloom, hope or cynisicm, acceptance or rejection.  How many of these would we want to be overheard or recorded? How much forgiveness and reconciliation are we open to in the relationships offered to us as gifts in our growing?

     "Engrave this upon my heart," Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, writes: "There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story."  I have a friend who, a few years ago, told me sometimes she just throws her hands up in exasperation and says, "This is for EVERYONE who has EVER asked me to pray for ANYTHING."  We could say the same prayer for forgiveness, in following Rumi's advise to be like the night in concealing the faults of others. For everyone who has ever harmed us, we offer forgiveness; for anyone who has suffered from our thoughts, words or actions, we ask forgiveness. We forgive ourselves and each other, because the tender grace that comes from being in such a place brings peace and well-being, until finally we remember who we are, and our place in the world.

     That act of forgiving those who trespass against us doesn't come out of fear of a higher power out there, but because we are connected to that deeper place within that tells us we are not so different from those who hurt us, reminds us that we have hurt others, and accepts the Love that masks itself behind the forgiving heart.

     We return in prayers of blessing and forgiveness, not once and for all, as the saying goes, but time and again. The Sufis say that reconciliation is simply remembering how far we've strayed from our original goodness, our feelings of remorse already a return to the Divine. I like to think that the grandfather in our story waited silently, knowing that his son would realize the goodness of his own heart and return his father to a proper place of respect, not out of guilt, but out of remembrance, in answer to the call to Love.

YAY GOD 

Saint Mark Announces Cure for Mosquito Bites!

Saint Mark, who works with http://www.SaintsforSinners.com and is often invoked and asked for help when flies and mosquitos are biting, has announced that he is helping to develop a pill that humans can take to ward off those pesky bites.

This will probably be very good news for athletes playing sports in the summer, like the "Geaux Cups," an accomplished team of softball players in New Orleans, Louisiana and pictured above. There are still a "few kinks in the line, however," Saint Mark said, adding "I'm trying to get the pill approved and used in Africa, because mosquito bites are sometimes lethal over there."

The medicine is called "ivermectin," or Mectizan, depending on who is talking about it. According to New York Times reporter Donald McNeil, Jr., scientists are "turning people into human time bombs for mosquitos." He writes that "when mosquitos bite people who have recently swallowed the drug, ... they die."   

Unfortunately, though, some people are dubious as to whether the medicine can really work effectively. A worm guy ( also known as a "parasitologist" ) is somewhat dubious: Dr. Frank O. Richards, from the Carter Center in Georgia, commented that "it's very difficult to say 'Let's treat a million people' - and then have to test each one." Apparently, for the medicine to be effective, all the people in the mosquito-ridden area have to take the pill at the same time." Saint Mark acknowledged that fact is troublesome, but he has asked Saint Matthew, the patron Saint of Accountants, to figure out a way to get millions of people to do something all at the same time and in the same area. Saint Matthew acknowledged the difficulty presented, but said he may be able to work the numbers, adding, "I've got a stellar abacus!"

Saint Catherine of Siena Promotes Palliative Medical Trend

There's a new trend taking place in America's Medical Schools and it aims to discourage superlatively high-achieving book smart students from getting into Medical School based solely on their excellent grades. Saint Catherine of Siena who was a highly communicative and expressive person, is working with Saints Luke and Cosmos and Damien, the 3 patron saints of Doctors, to make sure that future Medical School students learn the art of empathetic listening, before being allowed the privilege of entering Medical School.

Saint Catherine, the author of the classic, "The Dialog," has created the "Multiple Mini Interview,"  ("MMI") to be used in screening Medical School applicants. By using her Heavenly Powers, Catherine has been able to persuade 8 Medical Schools to have applicants go through several interviews before being accepted. Medical School applicants hoping to attend UCLA, Stanford, and Virginia Tech Carilon, along with other Medical Schools, will go through a procedure where they read a story about a fictional patient for 2 minutes. Then the applicant will walk through a door and be greeted by a team of people to discuss how to "treat" the patient. The interview lasts 8 minutes, and then is repeated approximately 10 times in a row.

The goal of the MMI, according to Saint Catherine and human beings, such as Dr. Stephen Workman, a Dean of Admissions at Virginia Tech, is to help usher in a new era of Health Care in America. The prospective Medical School students are not necessarily graded on whether they answer the questions correctly, which seems fair since these people have not even gone to Medical School yet! Instead, the interviews help weed out the arrogantly opinionated who, like most "know-it-alls," often fail to listen and also jump to conclusions, clinging to their notion of what is "right" and what is "wrong."  Gardiner Harris, a writer at The New York Times recently noted there are a lot of Doctors who are "insufferable know-it-alls who bully nurses and do not listen."

If Saint Catherine of Siena is successful with implementing the Multiple Mini Interview at more Medical Schools, it is estimated that the number of needless deaths and injuries in Hospitals will decline considerably. And it will be because channels of communication will be widened, not narrowed.  

SaintsforSinners Blog Gets a Facelift!

Hi everyone! Here's a short note to let you know we just updated and revised the SaintsforSinners Blog and eliminated all the SPAM posts. Here are our two commercials. Please share them with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, StumbedUpon, Diggit, and any other social network. We hope to be making posts regularly and soon we will be going to Europe to find more saint medals. We also added new retail stores in the Carolinas and Santa Barbara, California! Let us know about great retail shops in your area (or let them know about us!) and if you are looking for a particular saint medal we will try our best to find it during our medal hunting trip. Cheers! rob clemenz@ SaintsforSinners

P.S. Special thanks to Dimitrina, who helped make the Blog look much nicer! Soon we will be adding more saint stories and updating the http://SaintsforSinners.com web site too! :o)

Hand-Painted www.SaintsforSinners.com Imported Italian Saint Medallions of Saint Joan of Arc will be Given Away during the 3rd Annual Krewe of Saint Joan of Arc Birthday Celebration on January 6th, 2011 in the French Quarter of New Orleans. There will also be swords, medallions, magnets, and other surprises. According to Sir Richard Duplantier, Jr., "the Saint Joan of Arc Parade is the highlight of Twelfth Night and the most fitting event to attend for ushering in Carnival Season & Mardi Gras."

Joanie on the Pony Rides Again - Krewe of Joan of Arc Takes Over French Quarter January 6th, 2011

Get Ready for the 3rd Annual Krewe of Joan of Arc Parade, set to roll on "Twelfth Night," January 6, 2011, in the French Quarter. Help us celebrate Saint Joan of Arc's Birthday by celebrating her extraordinary life and spirit!

Our New "WISH" Ad

Our New Ad in WISH (The New Orleans Times-Picayune)

Please Repost!

Happy Easter!

www.multipraying.blogspot.com

Joanie on the Pony - Joan of Arc Twelfth Night Parade, French Quarter, New Orleans

January 6, 2010, Joan of Arc parades with the Krewe of Jeanne d'Arc, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, to celebrate Twelfth Night, or "King's Day," the preamble to the Mardi Gras Carnival Season!

Hmmmm.... Wonder where she got that hand-painted Joan of Arc medal she is happily wearing?

More photos by Victoria Pisarello to follow....

http://saintsforsinners.com/saint-stephen-medal-story.html

Happy Saint Stephen's Day!

December 26, 2009 is Saint Stephen's Day, and celebrates the life of Saint Stephen the Martyr, who was stoned to death because he refused to disavow his own personal convictions.

His story can be found at www.SaintsforSinners.com, which is linked above.

The sterling silver toggle clasp bracelet, featured left, can also be purchased from SaintsforSinners, but for the time being, orders are best completed over the phone, because we are trying to coordinate and individually customize the bracelet and medals to suit your specific, individual requests.

Click on the image to enlarge the photo.

The bracelet pictured here is one of our "There's Something About Marys" designs, featuring, yes, you guessed it, a series of Blessed Virgin Mary imported Italian Saint Medallions, all hand-painted in New Orleans, Louisiana.

From left to right, the Virgins listed are: 1. Our Lady of Fatima, 2. The Immaculate Heart of Mary, 3. Our Lady of Guadalupe, 4. Our Lady of Perpetual Help and 5. The Miraculous Medal.

Contact us if you would like to help us create your very own specially made "There's Something About Marys" Sterling Silver Toggle Clasp Charm Bracelet, including all of your favorite imported Italian Saint Medallions, hand-painted in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Our sister web site www.TheresSomethingAboutMarys.com is "coming soon," to a computer near you, 1n 2010!