Sant'Uberto di Liège, ora pro nobis
Great St. Hubert, you were passionate about the hunt, but when touched by Divine Grace, you laid down your bow and took up the collar of priesthood. Known for your miracles and the conversion of many, you led countless souls to worship and glorify Our Lord. Moved by your example, I implore your help: obtain for me the Grace to follow in your footsteps and become a passionate disciple of Christ. Amen.
A few hours away was all it took to remember how quiet the world can be when left to itself. Upstate, beyond the reach of sirens and the din of digital devices, the woods were already clothed in autumn—scarlet, gold, and rust whispering beneath a pale sun. The air was sharp and honest, filled with the scent of damp earth and fallen leaves, and the silence was not emptiness but presence.
Here, without the noise and the endless commentary of modern life, the soul begins to breathe again. One can think—not in the shallow, distracted way of the city, but in that older sense of recollection, of turning inward. The rhythm of the woods restores a proper order, where all things, seen aright, lead back to God. Watching the leaves fall, I was reminded that every created thing speaks of its Maker, and that rest, rightly understood, is not escape but return—to simplicity, to gratitude, to truth.
Each year, the Feast of Sant’Uberto di Liège—the hunter turned saint—arrives with the first days of November, the month of the Holy Souls. I think then of my father, who was an avid hunter. It is a time when the world itself seems to mourn, and we are called to remember those who have gone before us.
Once a nobleman chasing stags through the Ardennes, Hubert was struck by a vision of the Crucifix between a deer’s antlers, and from that encounter his life was changed. The hunt became a prayer.
I’ve long adopted him—along with Sant'Eustachio—as patron for my father, who spent his happiest hours in the woods. For him, hunting was never mere sport, but communion: with creation, with silence, with the God who speaks through both.
The forest becomes a chapel, the stillness a litany. Every rustle in the underbrush recalls the sacred order of things—man as steward, not master, of creation. In that quiet, my father, and by extension all my ancestors, feel near again. And as I pray for their repose, Sant’Uberto’s lesson resounds: that all pursuits, rightly ordered, lead us back to the Cross—and through it, to the peace of eternity. Evviva Sant'Uberto!
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, November 4th, Feast of San Carlo Borromeo
