Catholic Hermit: St. Servulus, Inspiring, Suffering, Victim Soul

I've found some information on St. Servulus, and this saint seems a much-needed friend and mentor currently.  I'm praying to have this man's strength of praising God and singing hymns of glory to God in my mind and heart of love.  The suffering of increased pain at increased levels is yet difficult for me to manage even with meds, so I look to St. Servulus to be here with me, inviting him to guide and inspire.  

While I know it takes time to adapt to increasing suffering, my desire as a hermit is to be of the law of God--the law of His Love--and simply, sincerely genuine.  This is definitely a phase in my spiritual life and as a consecrated Catholic hermit, as a friend, parent of adult children, and as a soul honed by years of pain yet still with plenty of sins and imperfections to be sanded and prayerfully, hopefully in God, polished smooth with the glow of my soul's finished product, all of God's grace and doing.

I know I have a way to go, that is for certain.  Yet each step, each day, each phase reflects the actualities of melding the challenges of personal temporal and spiritual life within the vehicle of my hermit vocation until that moment in which the Lord calls me from the temporal to be fully with Him in heaven. Servulus has a challenge in me, should he accept my invitation to dwell in whatever essence God allows, in Solus Deus Hermitage and in my heart.  Plenty of room for the angels and saints--and that includes my saintly ancestors and friends now on the other side!  Welcome here!

 Servulus was a beggar, and had been so afflicted with palsy from his infancy that he was never able to stand, sit upright, lift his hand to his mouth, or turn himself from one side to another. His mother and brother carried him into the porch of St. Clement's Church at Rome, where he lived on the alms of those that passed by.

        He used to entreat devout persons to read the Holy Scriptures to him, which he heard with such attention as to learn them by heart. His time he consecrated by assiduously singing hymns of praise and thanksgiving to God.

        

After several years thus spent, his distemper having seized his vitals, he felt his end was drawing nigh. In his last moments he desired the poor and pilgrims, who had often shared in his charity, to sing sacred hymns and psalms for him. While he joined his voice with theirs, he on a sudden cried out: "Silence! do you not hear the sweet melody and praise which resound in the heavens?" Soon after he spoke these words he expired, and his soul was carried by angels into everlasting bliss, about the year 590.

And this I found, also:

Saint Servulus of Rome

Invalid and Beggar
(† 670)

Saint Servulus of Rome

Saint Servulus was a perfect model of submission to the divine Will; it would be difficult to offer a more consoling example to persons afflicted by poverty, illnesses and the other miseries of life. It is Saint Gregory the Great who narrates for us his edifying story:

We have seen under the portico of the Church of Saint Clement, a poor man named Servulus, who is known to all the people of Rome as to Us. He was deprived of all the goods of this world; a long illness had reduced him to a pitiful state. From his youth he was paralyzed in all his members. Not only could he not stand up, but he was unable to rise from his bed; he could neither sit down nor turn himself from one side to the other, nor bring his hand to his mouth. Nothing in him was sound except his eyes, ears, tongue, stomach and entrails.

This unfortunate man, who had learned the mysteries of religion, meditated unceasingly on the sufferings of the Saviour, and never did he complain. He was surrounded by the loving care of his mother and brother. Neither the mother nor the children had ever studied, yet the paralytic had pious books bought for himself, in particular the Psalms and the Holy Gospels, and he would ask the religious who came to visit him on his cot to read from them to him. In this way he learned these books by heart; he spent days and part of the nights in singing or reciting them, and meditating them, and he constantly thanked the Lord for having taken him to be a victim associated with the pains and sufferings of Jesus Christ.

Many alms came to the little house of the paralytic, to such an extent that he became rich in his poverty. After having taken from these what was necessary for his subsistence and that of his mother, he gave the rest to the indigent, who often assembled around him to be edified by his words and his virtues. His bed of pain was a pulpit of preaching, from which he converted souls.

When the time came which was decreed by God to reward his patience and put an end to his painful life, Servulus felt the paralysis spreading to the vital parts of his body, and he prepared for death. At the final moment, he asked those in attendance to recite Psalms with him. Suddenly he cried out: Ah! Don't you hear that melody resounding in heaven?' At that moment his soul escaped from his body, which until his burial gave forth a marvelous fragrance.

Vie des Saints pour tous les jours de l'année, by Abbé L. Jaud (Mame: Tours, 1950).

Shared from this site:  https://sanctoral.com/en/saints/saint_servulus_of_rome.html

God bless His Real Presence in us, this Christmas Eve, 2019!