Lost Keys and Found Souls: What Saint Anthony Really Teaches About Life

There is something magnificently absurd about the fact that one of Christianity's most beloved saints is universally known for finding lost objects, when the most significant thing Anthony of Padua ever lost was himself. It is rather like remembering Shakespeare primarily for his penmanship, or celebrating Einstein for his ability to tie shoelaces. Not that there is anything wrong with finding lost keys or helping distracted housewives locate their missing spectacles—indeed, these are kindnesses of no small merit. But to reduce Anthony to a sort of celestial lost-and-found department is to miss entirely the staggering drama of a man who discovered that the only way to find anything of real value is to lose everything you thought you wanted in the first place.

The modern mind, with its touching faith in career planning and strategic life choices, would find Anthony's biography thoroughly bewildering. Here was a young man who seemed to have everything sorted out with admirable efficiency. Born Fernando Martins in Lisbon around 1195, he belonged to a wealthy family, received an excellent education, and joined the Augustinian order at the respectable age of fifteen. He was, by all accounts, exactly the sort of earnest, studious young man that medieval parents bragged about to their neighbors. One can imagine his family's satisfaction: their son was settled in a prestigious religious order, pursuing advanced theological studies, and destined for a comfortable career in the Church hierarchy. It was all very sensible, very proper, and very nearly disastrous to his soul.

For young Fernando had made the common mistake of confusing his own plans with God's plans, rather like a passenger who boards what he thinks is a pleasant river cruise and discovers he has actually enlisted in the navy. He spent nearly a decade contentedly studying theology and philosophy in the libraries of Coimbra, accumulating knowledge as other young men accumulate coins, never suspecting that he was being prepared for an adventure that would make his scholarly pursuits seem as quaint as collecting butterflies.

The first crack in his comfortable edifice came in 1220, when the bodies of five Franciscan martyrs were brought through Coimbra on their way to burial. These men had been killed in Morocco while attempting to convert the Sultan—a mission that contemporary risk-assessment consultants would have rated somewhere between inadvisable and suicidal. Most sensible people, observing these tragic remains, would have thanked God for their own safe, scholarly vocations and returned promptly to their books. But Anthony was apparently not sensible people.

Instead, something in those silent witnesses to radical discipleship pierced through his comfortable arrangements like a sword through silk. He began to experience what we might delicately call "vocational restlessness"—that divine discontent that comes when God decides to rearrange a life according to His specifications rather than ours. It was rather like a man who has spent years carefully constructing a model railroad, only to discover that God has different plans for the landscape.

The result was a decision that must have left his Augustinian superiors speechless with bewilderment. Anthony requested permission to leave their order and join the Franciscans, those ragged enthusiasts who had been founded barely twenty years earlier by a merchant's son with the disconcerting habit of taking the Gospel literally. It was rather like a tenured professor announcing his intention to join the circus, or a successful banker deciding to become a street musician. His family was appalled, his colleagues were mystified, and Anthony himself was probably more than a little terrified. Which are, of course, excellent indicators that he was finally moving in the right direction.

Upon joining the Franciscans, Fernando took the name Anthony—though not after the famous desert father Anthony, as one might expect, but after Anthony the Abbot, to whom the chapel where he made his profession was dedicated. It was a small detail, but significant, for it suggests a man beginning to understand that even his choices were being made by Someone else. He was learning what every saint must learn: that the spiritual life consists not in imposing our will upon God, but in discovering God's will already mysteriously at work within our own deepest desires.

Anthony's initial plan as a Franciscan was charmingly straightforward: he would go to Morocco, preach to the Muslims, and almost certainly be martyred for his troubles. It was the sort of simple, direct approach that appeals to young men of heroic temperament, rather like deciding to climb Mount Everest because it's there. He set sail for Morocco with all the confidence of a man who has finally figured out what God wants him to do. God, as usual, had other ideas.

No sooner had Anthony arrived in Morocco than he fell seriously ill—so ill that he could barely stand, much less engage in the vigorous work of evangelization that had brought him there. For months he languished, weak and frustrated, watching his grand missionary dreams crumble like day-old bread. It was the sort of experience that either destroys a man's faith or transforms it entirely. Anthony chose transformation, though he probably didn't realize it at the time.

When it became clear that Morocco was not going to work out as planned, Anthony arranged passage back to Portugal. But the ship, apparently as contrary as everything else in his life at that point, was blown off course by storms and ended up in Sicily instead. From there, Anthony made his way north to Assisi, arriving at the general chapter of the Franciscan order in 1221, where he encountered Francis himself—that strange little man who had started all this trouble by talking to birds and kissing lepers.

What followed was a period that biographers often gloss over, but which was perhaps the most crucial in Anthony's development. He was assigned to a small hermitage near Forli, where his primary duties consisted of washing dishes, sweeping floors, and saying Mass occasionally for the local farmers. For a man who had been educated at some of Europe's finest schools and had dreamed of glorious martyrdom, this must have felt like being cast as a spear-carrier in the very drama where he had expected to play the lead.

But it was precisely in this apparent exile that Anthony began to discover his true vocation. Away from the spotlight, forgotten by his superiors, seemingly wasted in his talents, he was being slowly prepared for something far greater than anything he could have planned for himself. It is one of those divine ironies that God specializes in: the preparation for public ministry that takes place in complete privacy, the education for leadership that happens in absolute obscurity.

The world discovered Anthony's extraordinary gifts quite by accident, as the world usually discovers such things. At an ordination ceremony in Forli, the designated preacher failed to appear, and Anthony was hastily pressed into service. The assembled clergy expected the sort of stumbling, apologetic sermon that one gets from hermits dragged unwillingly from their caves. What they got instead was a display of theological learning, scriptural insight, and oratorical power that left them literally speechless.

Word of this remarkable preacher spread with the speed that extraordinary things tend to spread, and soon Anthony was in demand throughout Italy and southern France. But here we encounter one of the most instructive aspects of his story: how he handled sudden fame. The modern world offers countless examples of talented individuals who are destroyed by success, who mistake their gifts for their identity and lose their souls in the process of finding their careers. Anthony avoided this trap, not through superior moral fiber, but through the hard-won understanding that his gifts belonged not to him but through him.

His preaching was legendary not merely for its eloquence, but for its effect. Entire cities would empty when Anthony came to preach, and the churches could not contain the crowds. People stood in fields and marketplaces, hanging on his words as if their lives depended on it—which, in many cases, they did. Usurers returned stolen money, enemies reconciled, and the spiritually dead found themselves mysteriously alive again. It was as if Anthony carried with him some of that original Pentecostal fire, the power to speak so that every heart heard truth in its own language.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Anthony's preaching was its simplicity. Here was a man who could quote the Church Fathers in their original languages, who knew Scripture so thoroughly that he earned the title "Ark of the Covenant," and who could engage in theological disputation with the finest minds of his age. Yet when he preached to common people, his words were as clear as spring water and as warm as bread from the oven. He had learned the difficult art of being profound without being obscure, learned without being pedantic.

This was no accident, but the fruit of those seemingly wasted years in the hermitage, when Anthony had been forced to discover what he actually believed underneath all his education. Stripped of his books, his reputation, and his plans, he had encountered truth not as information to be possessed but as reality to be experienced. When he spoke to crowds, therefore, he was not reciting lessons but sharing discoveries, not displaying knowledge but offering bread to the hungry.

The legends that accumulated around Anthony during his lifetime tell us something important about how his contemporaries understood his gifts. They spoke of fish gathering to hear him preach when human audiences were unavailable, of heretics struck dumb by his words, of miracles that seemed to flow from his presence like light from a lamp. Whether these stories are literally true is less important than what they reveal: that people recognized in Anthony someone through whom the boundaries between heaven and earth had become mysteriously permeable.

Yet for all his extraordinary gifts, Anthony remained fundamentally a Franciscan, committed to the radical poverty and simplicity that Francis had made the hallmark of his followers. He owned nothing, lived on whatever people chose to give him, and treated his fame as he might treat borrowed clothes—useful for the moment, but not his to keep. It was this combination of extraordinary ability and extraordinary humility that made him so effective, and so beloved.

Anthony's death, when it came in 1231 at the age of only thirty-six, was mourned throughout Europe. But even his death was characteristic of the man: he died not in some dramatic blaze of martyrdom, but quietly, in a simple cell, worn out by the labors of love. It was the sort of ending that would disappoint a Hollywood screenwriter but perfectly suited a man who had learned that the greatest adventures are often the most hidden ones.

The speed of Anthony's canonization—he was declared a saint less than a year after his death—was unprecedented and has never been equaled. But this was not merely ecclesiastical enthusiasm; it was recognition of something that his contemporaries had witnessed: a life so completely aligned with divine will that it became transparent to divine love. When people looked at Anthony, they saw not just a gifted preacher or a learned theologian, but someone through whom they could glimpse the face of God.

So what are we to learn from this Portuguese friar who found his way into every Catholic kitchen and countless Protestant hearts? First, perhaps, that God's plans for our lives are usually far more interesting than our own plans, and infinitely more suited to our actual needs than our perceived desires. Anthony thought he wanted to be a martyr; God made him a preacher. He planned to die young in Morocco; instead he lived to transform thousands of lives in Italy. His disappointments became his appointments with destiny.

Second, Anthony teaches us the profound truth that preparation for public ministry often takes place in private obscurity. Those years in the hermitage, washing dishes and saying Mass for farmers, were not a waste of his education but the completion of it. He learned there what no university could teach: that knowledge without humility is noise, that gifts without character are dangerous, and that the greatest sermons are often preached by how we live when no one is watching.

Third, Anthony demonstrates the possibility of being simultaneously learned and simple, sophisticated and accessible. In our age of specialization, we often assume that depth must come at the expense of clarity, that intelligence necessarily leads to incomprehensibility. Anthony proved otherwise, showing that the deepest truths are often the most simple, and that real wisdom makes the complex clear rather than making the clear complex.

Perhaps most importantly, Anthony's life illustrates the fundamental Christian paradox that we find ourselves by losing ourselves, that we gain our lives by giving them away. He lost his comfortable career plans and found his true vocation. He lost his scholarly ambitions and found wisdom. He lost his desire for martyrdom and found something better: a life poured out in service that was itself a kind of daily martyrdom, a constant dying to self that enabled others to live.

In our contemporary context, where personal branding and career optimization have become secular sacraments, Anthony's example is both challenging and liberating. He reminds us that our deepest fulfillment comes not from getting what we want but from wanting what God wants for us. He shows us that the most successful life is not necessarily the most planned life, but the most surrendered one.

For those who invoke Anthony to find their lost keys, there is perhaps a deeper prayer hidden within the request: Help me find not just my possessions, but my true self. Help me discover not just what I've misplaced, but what I've been missing. Help me lose my false securities so that I might find the only security that lasts.

In the end, Anthony of Padua stands as a permanent reminder that the most important things in life are often found precisely where we least expect them—in the disappointments that become revelations, in the failures that become foundations, in the losses that become the greatest discoveries of all. He found the whole world by losing his grip on it, and in his finding, showed countless others the way to their own true home.

-The Seeker's Quill