Patron Saint of Parking Spaces

St. Martin de Porres, stained glass window, St. Mary's Cathedral.

You can find powers over parking attributed to various Catholic saints, including St. Thérèse of Lisieux and St. Francis of Assisi. But I beg to differ. My spiritual director insisted that when he was visiting the sick at a busy hospital with limited parking spaces, St. Martin de Porres was his go-to guy. He had a statue of St. Martin on the dashboard of his car and was always regaling me with new tales of St. Martin's triumphs.

I took this with a grain of salt bigger than Lot's wife (who was, you may recall, turned into a pillar of the stuff). But then one day when I was desperate to park and out of time and patience, I remembered St. Martin de Porres. And suddenly, even as a prayer was forming in my skeptical mind, a car pulled out just ahead and left me a space. I no longer recall the details, but they were something like "in the shade on a hot day, right in front of the building, with plenty of time prepaid on the meter."

Needless to say, I was willing to try this experiment again. It has been going on for quite a few years now, and I've learned that St. Martin has powers in other realms as well. He has shown himself willing to help with anything that needs coordinating, scheduling, calibration, or coming together at the right time. Parking, obviously, is a just a subset.

Here is my latest evidence.

I frequently wring my hands over my failure to finish my (semi-autobiographical) novel, and I have been praying to St. Martin de Porres about this, asking for help. My current authorial state is that I know what I need to write next, and I can't summon up certain details I need from memory, so I will have to go back to old handwritten journals. Digital searches not possible. And I could only pinpoint the time period to a couple of years, during which I wrote several hundred pages! Meanwhile, I was spending so little time writing that today, when my writing group met, I had nothing to share but a blip!

St. Martin, however, has been busy while I have been wallowing in nonproductivity. On a table near my file cabinet there is a year of old journals, two volumes, three inches thick. They've been there for months, and I can't remember why. When I glanced at their dates I thought I might as well start looking there, since they seemed to be waiting. Dejectedly I opened the top volume to somewhere in the middle and began to read. I couldn't believe my eyes. The description of the very meeting I wanted to write about was there on the page.

Was I amazed? Was I thrilled? Truth to tell, yes and no. There was a letter I'd written that led to that meeting, and I needed to see it also before writing the chapter I had in mind. Without much hope I opened the same volume, again at random, to a page half an inch previous, just hoping for a reasonable starting point for my search, and found myself staring at the very letter I'd been seeking. Then I remembered St. Martin de Porres. Gracias, San Martín. Looks like the ball's in my court now.

Why do I attribute this to St. Martin? First, these finds were preceded by prayers to him in my own handwriting. Second, it's not the first time such "coincidences" have occurred. Am I trying to persuade you? Not in the least. I remain an experimentalist at heart. Care to try an experiment?