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Morning Meditation
October 29, 2025
Collect for the feast of St Simon and St Jude
O God, we thank you for the glorious company of the apostles, and especially on this day for Simon and Jude; and we pray that, as they were faithful and zealous in their mission, so we may with ardent devotion make known the love and mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Reading: Deuteronomy 32:1-4
Moses recited the words of this song:
Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak;
let the earth hear the words of my mouth.
May my teaching drop like the rain,
my speech condense like the dew;
like gentle rain on grass,
like showers on new growth.
For I will proclaim the name of the Lord;
ascribe greatness to our God!
The Rock, his work is perfect,
and all his ways are just.
A faithful God, without deceit,
just and upright is he.
Meditation by Glenn Beamer
October 28th was the Feast of St Simon and St Jude. In children’s chapel and church school we are learning about saints in the Episcopal tradition and how those saints inform our faith today. St. Simon is the patron saint of sawyers, tanners, and woodworkers. The underlying motivation for this connection being that the apostle Simon was martyred by being brutally bisected with a saw. Thus, the Redeemer kids will learn more about St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.
In teaching our children about our saints, one objective is to help not just young people but all of us to recognize the saints in our midst today, why they improve our faith and lives, and how we can learn from them and strive to approximate them. St. Jude offers a relatively contemporary and on-going example.
In the late 1930s, Danny Thomas was a struggling comedian and actor. On the night his daughter Marlo was born in 1937, Danny Thomas had $7 in his wallet (about $150 today). He prayed to St Jude to discern whether to persevere in his livelihood.
By the early 1950s and with the advent of television, Danny Thomas’ fortunes improved, and he became one of the most in-demand actors in the era. In gratitude, Thomas sought guidance from Samuel Cardinal Stritch, then the Catholic prelate of the Archdiocese of Chicago. Cardinal Stritch recommended Thomas go to Memphis, Stritch’s hometown, and muster a coalition of benefactors to found a children’s hospital. Thomas and Stritch shared a devotion that “no child should perish in the dawn of life.”
As the group raised funds, they discerned a calling beyond a general hospital serving the community. They focused on creating a hospital dedicated to researching and fighting children’s cancers. At the time, the overall survival rate for pediatric cancer was just 20 percent and for acute lymphoblastic leukemia the survival rate was 4 percent.
St Judes Children’s Research Hospital opened in 1962 with a commitment that no child or family would ever be turned away from its care because of a lack of financial resources – a commitment St Jude’s maintains today. Until his death in 1991, Danny Thomas remained an indefatigable advocate for St Jude’s Children’s Hospital. St Jude’s is widely known for having created TV infomercials before they were widely used and for prodigious fundraising. In truth, alongside St Jude’s, Danny Thomas created the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities, which has been a primary conduit for the hospital’s support. Although not without its flaws, St Judes has gone beyond its initial goals for treatment and access to care. By 2020, overall child cancer survival rates quadrupled to 80 percent. Survival rates for acute lymphoblastic leukemia are now 94 percent.
Danny Thomas provides an example of saints who work in our midst. His devotion in the 1930s led to a vision of service in the 1950s which led to bringing that vision to life in the 1960s and going beyond that vision and devotion by the time of his death in 1991.
In addition to his example of benevolence in the spirit of St Jude, there is a second lesson for us. Danny Thomas’ work took place over a half-century and is a model of perseverance for us.
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