Patron Saints as a Practice

A patron saint is received with one's name at baptism, or chosen with a priest by those who come to the Church as adults. The relationship is real, not decorative: it rests on the communion of saints, the conviction that death does not cut the saints off from us but binds them closer, so that they can and do pray for those still on the way. To have a patron is to have someone in that great company who is especially yours — one you ask to pray for you, and one you try to imitate.

This is honor, not worship, and the Church has always guarded the line. In the earliest surviving account of a martyr's death, the Christians of Smyrna wrote of St. Polycarp: "For Him indeed, as being the Son of God, we adore; but the martyrs, as disciples and followers of the Lord, we worthily love on account of their extraordinary affection towards their own King and Master." A patron is loved and honored precisely as a disciple who points past himself to Christ. (On the underlying distinction, see veneration versus worship.)

In practice, keeping a patron looks like a handful of steady habits. The saint's icon is given a place among the family's home icons, often in the icon corner, where one can greet it in daily prayer. The saint's feast is kept as one's name day. One reads the saint's life — not once but again over the years, letting it work on the imagination. Many pray the short troparion of the saint daily and, on the feast or in times of need, an akathist, the long hymn of praise addressed to a saint.

Above all, one turns to the patron in prayer, asking their intercession in ordinary things and in trouble — often in the very matters the saint is known for. This is the same confidence Scripture places in the prayers of the holy: "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much" (James 5:16). The saints are simply the righteous whose prayer has not ceased.

The whole practice is ordered toward Christ, never away from Him. A patron is not a smaller god handling a department of life; the saint is a fellow human being who shared our nature and our struggles and, by grace, became holy — living proof that the same is possible for us. To keep company with such a person is to be encouraged and instructed, "compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1), and to be drawn toward the one goal the saint reached: union with God. As St. Paul could say, the Christian follows the saints only as far as the saints follow Christ — "Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ" (1 Corinthians 11:1).