SEEKING SAINT EXPEDITE: CONFESSIONS OF A PENITENT PROCRASTINATOR
I first encountered Saint Expedite six years ago while wandering through the streets of Buenos Aires; I turned a corner and stumbled upon a crowded sidewalk shrine packed with devotees praying and lighting candles. As you might intuit from his name, Saint Expedite is the saint you pray to when you really want your prayers to be answered yesterday already, and as an inveterate procrastinator for whom patience is something of a growth area, I was instantly smitten!
According to his biography, Expedite was a Roman soldier who was martyred for his Christian faith in the early fourth century. He had contemplated conversion to Christianity for a long time, but Satan (in the form of a crow) kept squawking in his ear, “Cras. Cras. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.” And each time, Expedite was persuaded that his religious conversion could surely wait until tomorrow. One day, however, he shouted back, “No, not tomorrow! I will do it today!” He therefore immediately and boldly proclaimed his Christian faith, which soon resulted in his martyrdom. In iconography he is depicted as trampling on Satan, while triumphantly holding a cross that says Hodie (today). In other words, he is surely a saint whose emulation and intercession are most direly needed by every good procrastinator!
There is just one tiny, slight, minor, inconvenient problem with all of this: Saint Expedite is almost certainly a pious fiction who probably never existed.
There are no indications of popular devotion to Expedite until the late 18th century, and there are several competing accounts for the sudden appearance of his cult. My personal favorite is the report that a box of relics was shipped to a convent, which was labeled “Expedite” in order to ensure its speedy delivery. Not knowing which saint these relics belonged to, the nuns simply began to pray to “Saint Expedite.” More prosaically, it has also been noted that expeditus is a Latin term for a foot soldier. “Expedite” may, therefore, have been an anonymous saint referred to only by his profession, with the story of his martyrdom springing up only after “expedite” had evolved something more like its modern meaning.
Then again, I secretly like the idea that maybe the patron saint of procrastination just had a 1500-year delayed start before he finally got around to getting his story out and developing a following.
In any event, once established, devotion to Saint Expedite spread rapidly in many parts of the Roman Catholic world, especially in France, New Orleans, and Latin America. He was (and is) particularly beloved among students, academics, and writers—perhaps a telling indictment of the prevalence of procrastination within our ranks?
Students in 19th-century New Orleans even developed a special “expedited” novena to Saint Expedite, compressing the usual nine days of prayer down to merely nine hours. Because honestly, if procrastination and impatience are the reason that you’re seeking his intercession in the first place, then you probably didn’t plan well enough to start praying a full nine days ahead of your crisis. If you don’t have nine days to work with, then a nine-hour desperate “all-nighter” of prayer will simply have to suffice, and generations of students swear to its efficacy.
I carry a stack of Saint Expedite prayer cards in my purse to hand out to friends and students who are stressed out from the pressure of too many projects and ominously looming deadlines. Many of my friends, especially those who are good Protestants, initially turn their noses up at my “Christian folk magic.” At least, that is, until the deadlines creep closer and real desperation starts to set in. Finally, they are likely to declare, “Argh! Fine! Give me the fake saint and I’ll give it a try!” and I quietly slide a prayer card under a door or across a table, peddling illicit and unsanctioned intercessions like the ecclesiastical equivalent of a drug dealer. An impressive number of theology dissertations and countless last-minute sermons have thus been successfully written under Saint Expedite’s watchful eye. Historicity or not, therefore, I am not inclined to fire him any time soon!
But what does it mean for a scholar of church history to secretly profess a sincere devotion to a saint who almost certainly lacked any historical existence (or who, in a best-case scenario, may have been a genuine martyr with a purely fictional biography)? For that matter, what does it mean for an Anglican to number herself among his devotees? After all, the very first item on our list of criteria for recognizing saints in the Episcopal Church (at least officially) is “historicity,” which is a requirement that was presumably intended to preclude precisely this kind of thing.
One of the perils of being a theologian is that you become increasingly able to justify pretty much anything that you might wish to think or to do, and I realize that I might (possibly) be getting dangerously close to that territory here. Nevertheless, I would still note that Pseudo-Dionysius argues in The Divine Names that since God is entirely beyond the categories of being and non-being, both being and non-being alike yearn for God, and God is rightly praised and glorified by things that do not exist as well as by things that do exist. For that matter, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:28 that God chose “things that are not” in order to reduce to nothing the things that are. It therefore seems not implausible to me that God could have chosen a saint who was not, who lacked any historical existence, in order to be more fully revealed as the God not only of everything that exists, but even of everything that does not. Can that which does not even exist somehow mysteriously intercede for us to God? Pseudo-Dionysius seems to suggest that perhaps it can.
Indeed, when you are praying specifically for something that does not exist to come into existence, whether that thing is a term paper or a coronavirus vaccine, it arguably helps to have a saintly intercessor who is on the other side of the great being/non-being divide. As you, by work and by prayer, try to drag what does not yet exist into existence, your helper can push from the side of non-existence while you pull from the side of existence. By such cooperation, perhaps together you can bring that which is still only imaginary into being.
And so, I will defend my illicit saintly devotion to the bitter end, with or without any stamp of ecclesiastical approval; but, dear Saint Expedite, you know all those prayers about this pandemic that so many people have been flooding heaven with in recent months? Please do expedite those. We’re all growing a bit weary of being patient.
Elizabeth (Liza) Anderson received her PhD from Yale University in 2016 and is an assistant professor of theology at the College of Saint Scholastica in Duluth, MN. From 2015-2018, she served on the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music as the chair of the calendar committee. However, she did not even try to add Saint Expedite because she ultimately respects the criteria established by General Convention, and poor Expedite did not meet a single one of them.
