Not so recently I was turned on to the long novenas of St. Bridget.

There's a one-year one consisting of 15 Paternosters, 15 Aves, and 15 particular prayers every day for a year.  There's another that consists of 7 and 7 and 7 that runs daily for twelve years.  Both concern the wounds Christ suffered during His Passion, and various promises of graces that convey holiness in this life, happiness in the next, and a commendable Christian death in between are attached to each.  The prayers for the former (there is a warning about the verbiage but proceed with prudence) are here.  A description of the latter can be found here.

Such undertakings daunt me.  Or, at least, they did.  I recently started saying the rosary on a daily basis, after some promptings I could not ignore, and when I realized I just needed to accept the time commitment it became easy (in the past I had tried to muscle my way through the fifteen minutes of sitting still and reciting Hail Marys, but now it can take 30 minutes and I hardly notice).  And I have been saying a decade of the St. Gertrude prayer daily since grad school, which was about 15 years ago, so if I had started the Bridgetine prayers at the same time I'd be done by now.

One thinks sometimes it would have been nice to be back in Biblical times to experience things firsthand (not the dysentery so much as the miracles).  I have at times been jealous of the grace given to people who were there to be recipients of it; I'm not cut out to be a bishop, but if I'd been in Palestine a couple thousand years ago maybe I could have been chosen as an Apostle, you know?

Yeah, that's not how it works and that's the wrong attitude, but jealousy isn't rational.

But recently a thought occurred to me:  whatever advantages people back then had, they didn't get all the same ones that are available to us now.  Look at some of the promises associated with other devotions that arose in the Middle Ages or later:

• The Rosary:  destroy vice, decrease sin, defeat heresies
• The Divine Mercy: even hardened sinners who say it will die a happy death
• Brown Scapular: None who die wearing it (non-superstitiously!) will suffer eternal fire
• First Fridays: all graces necessary to one's state in life and great blessings to all one's undertakings
• First Saturdays: Mary herself promises to assist by bringing the graces needed for salvation

Maybe this day and age is lean on living saints we can go to beg for prayers or miracles face to face, but these devotions can sure make up the difference.

The First Fridays devotion, also known as the Sacred Heart, is of particular relevance here.  It was presaged in the 13th century during a mystical encounter between St. John and St. Gertrude, whom the evangelist invited to recline on Jesus' chest as he himself did at the Last Supper.  When she asked why he did not elaborate about the experience in his Gospel, St. John explained that such was reserved for a time in history when the Church's love for God would have grown cold.  Four centuries to the day later, Jesus revealed His Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary.

What devotions, what graces, will be made available to our distant descendants, who will be struggling to see Biblical history over the haufenmist of Modernism that looms in between, over our very heads today?