Saint Anne's Rosary

"As we walked back out to the parking lot, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense that something miraculous had just happened."

A number of years ago, when our kids were still young enough to have free time during the summer, we took a trip out east to New York and Vermont. I am still not a comfortable traveler, and until that time I had never been east of Ohio. I didn’t know what to expect except more traffic and more confusing tangles of highway. What were we going to do about money cutting across Ontario? As time for departure approached, I grew more apprehensive. This was supposed to be a vacation, and I was dreading it. Nevertheless, when the time came, we packed the Suburban to the gunnels and took off through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the scary heights of the Mackinac Bridge, through the Lower Peninsula, across Ontario and on to New York.

Not without mild adventure, of course. I waited in line for a half hour at a small bank in Michigan to get some Canadian money, not realizing there was a currency exchange just across the border. I felt really stupid having worried about that. We spent about ten dollars at a McDonald’s the entire way across Ontario before we got lost trying to find the bridge to Niagara Falls, New York. We drove around in circles several times wondering how we could miss a bridge. At a stop sign we were struck in the rear end by a Geo Tracker carrying two young New Yorkers as lost as we were. We barely felt the blow, and the kid was visibly relieved when I saw no damage to the Suburban. No one needed the complication of an accident in Canada. The next time around we found the entrance to the bridge, which was shrouded in construction scaffolding and canvas. Our return to American soil seemed like a blessed event.

As it turned out, our trip was blessed in more ways than one. Even though we merely skirted the Adirondacks, we found the beauty of outstate New York and Vermont to be breathtaking. A sense of history is everywhere in signs, markers and events. The people are proud of their heritage and friendlier to travelers than almost anywhere I’ve been. We enjoyed the rustic peacefulness of Cooperstown, which is worth the visit even if you don’t go to the Baseball Hall of Fame. We stopped at Fort William Henry, and although this wasn’t a religious pilgrimage of any kind, we also visited the shrines of The North American Martyrs and the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lilly of the Mohawks.”

We left home prepared to camp as much as we could but didn’t find convenient opportunities until we crossed into the quiet hills of Vermont, although time seemed to be running short and we’d left much unseen in New York. We pitched our tent for two nights a short distance north of Bennington and then for two nights at a state park on one of the northern islands of Lake Champlain. Before we’d left, I had thoughts we might go as far as Maine and then wind our way back through the Adirondacks. That was no longer going to be possible, insofar as we only had two days left before we had to make the long drive back to northern Wisconsin. To be sure, our leisurely pace had left me more relaxed than expected, if a little unfulfilled. We had also, somehow, escaped the expected crowds. I’d been wondering for days “where was everybody?” I was used to more tourist traffic many places within an hour of home. Were we not within a few hours driving of many more millions of people? Either easterners didn’t travel as much, or they took for granted the beauty in their own backyard.

Our first full day on the islands of northern Lake Champlain we went for a drive to see what we could see. Our wanderings of course took us to another shrine, Saint Anne’s Shrine on Isle La Motte, Vermont. There we found ourselves in a shady, pastoral setting on Lake Champlain that befitted the peacefulness of our trip. The grounds were groomed and immaculate. It was the weekend of July 26^th, the Feast of Saint Anne, so the place was full of people and things going on. Masses were being held in a beautiful outdoor pavilion. The shrine was one of the few places on the trip that had attracted a crowd. I found it comforting in a way.

Eventually we found ourselves in the gift shop where I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I picked up an inexpensive pair of sunglasses similar to a pair I’d worn for years. I lingered over the rosaries, in particular a beautiful rosary of olivewood beads. All my rosaries had long ago broken or disappeared. The olivewood rosary was far from the most expensive rosary there, but one could have not have bought the rosary without a matching olivewood box that sat next to it. The shop did not accept credit cards, and the rosary and box would have put a dent in my dwindling supply of cash. I must have stood there for ten minutes. To me it was the most beautiful rosary I had ever seen. With great regret, I paid for the sunglasses and left.

Lunch was being served in the main building, and so we made our way there through the shade of the trees and a cool lake breeze. We stood in line buffet style and filled our trays, while I stood there wondering how we had found our way to such a place. I thought of the rosary left behind. It was not yet too late to change my mind. But no, we had another day there on the lake and three hard days driving after that. I was not sophisticated in the ways of ATM’s and other ways to get cash. Still, the thought of the rosary would not desert me. Something told me I would deeply regret leaving Saint Anne’s Shrine without the olivewood rosary. The struggle continued through lunch and into the perfect July air outside. I could not leave that rosary behind, I simply couldn’t.

We returned to the gift shop where I took the rosary and matching box into my hands. The girl behind the register matter-of-factly reached for some change atop the register and offered it to me. “I overcharged you a little for those sunglasses,” she said, as if she’d been expecting me. She held no more than seventy cents in her hand. How strange, I thought at first, to have the change waiting there on top for me, a whole seventy cents; how strange to act as if my return for seventy cents had been such an absolute certainty. As I paid for the rosary and box and we again wandered out onto the peaceful grounds of Saint Anne’s Shrine, the strangeness had only begun to settle in.

I have never been a person to doubt the existence of miracles or the miraculous, but neither have I been a person who expects to see any evidence of the same in his lifetime. I am an ordinary sinner, and saints just don’t bother with people like me. But as we walked back out to the parking lot, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense that something miraculous had indeed just happened. As if Saint Anne herself had wanted me to have the rosary I now carried, as if she had called me to it. Tears welled into my eyes, which I wiped away as quickly as possible, lest my family see and think that I was losing it. I had to stop and catch my breath. How do you act normally at such a time? I don’t think I’ve ever known such true humility as in that moment. Is it only in the presence of God that we realize how truly insignificant we really are?

From that moment on, I have taken Saint Anne’s rosary whenever I travel. The segment of our trip home across Canada was even less eventful and more pleasant than the first. Saint Anne is the patron saint of Canada.

Have I ever thought that the clerk had simply set the money aside to balance her register? Have I ever thought her expectation of my return was simply a display of a fastidious personality? Have I ever thought that it was all just a curious happening devoid of any saintly intervention? Of course. The skeptic in me is still quite alive and well. Do I believe it? I suppose one would truly have to understand the effect the rosary had on me from the first to understand that, no, for once I do not believe in the natural explanations. Something overwhelming happened to me at Saint Anne’s Shrine on Isle La Motte. There I believe Saint Anne presented me with a rosary, and I believe she hears all our prayers.