Thank You St. Joseph for Selling Our House

Growing up a Protestant in the Philadelphia suburbs deprived me of any understanding or experience with the Roman Catholic practice of the Invocation of the Saints. My wife Gale, however, grew up in a large Irish Catholic family in Pittsburgh along with having twelve years of Catholic education. I learned from Gale that St Jude was the patron of lost causes and St Anthony the patron of lost things. St Blaise was the Saint to pray to when suffering from a sore throat and each year on December 9 all the school children prayed to St Lucy for something that has to do with their eyes. And when selling your house always bury a statue of St Joseph upside down in the front yard facing the house.

Our house in Kittanning had been on the market for over two years and hadn't sold. We were trying to sell the house in the softest housing market in decades in a very depressed job market in Armstrong County. Not a very promising prospect. But it has been said "desperate times call for desperate measures" . So I bought a statue of St Joseph from Autom, a religious supply house that sells such things (see picture of the actual statue from the Autom catalogue).

In mid August I was doing some maintenance on the house and I took the claw end of my trusty hammer and dug a hole in the garden bed in the front of the house. I put my new statue of old St Joe in the hole facing him toward the house but alas and alack the hole was a tad too shallow. Oops! So I grabbed the aforementioned hammer and pounded him in and covered him up!

Then some of my Catholic or former Catholic friends chimed in. I told my friend Melanie about the saga. Two mistakes -- She said I probably gave him a massive headache and he won't sell the house out of spite -- Besides he is supposed to be facing AWAY from the house so to draw people in. Then my friend Kathi told me, he needs to be buried in the BACK yard not the front! Yikes! Then my friend Rege said you have to do bury the statue during a FULL MOON not during the day. Obviously I had failed miserably.

Well, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, guess what! The house sold in mid September and whether or not St Joseph had anything to do with it I do not know. But I wasn't taking any chances -- I was covering all my bases. As I was writing this Gale reminded me this is all bunk -- all superstition. Then she went to bed early with a headache and sore throat. So I gave her a kiss good night and said a short silent prayer to St Blaise.