(LifeSiteNews) — Prayer is a powerful thing, more powerful than we realize. That this is the case is a biblical truth, as Our Lord says, “Seek and you shall find.”
On this episode of The John-Henry Westen Show, I discuss the power of prayer with Christine Kengott, whose life story is a witness to the reality of prayer and is marked by rather interesting encounters with multiple celebrities, including Jeff Bezos, Stephen Hawking, and Pope St. John Paul II.
Recounting her attitude towards Catholicism growing up, Kengott tells me that she had “very lame catechism,” and that she was not very devout. Even so, she sold ads and won trips from a Catholic youth camp, including two trips to Rome, where she attended an audience with Pope St. Paul VI and eventually got a kiss on the forehead from Pope St. John Paul II in 1980.
Later in the decade, she decided to take a trip by herself around the world, a trip during which she met danger on multiple occasions. “There were a lot of precarious situations where I thought I was going to die,” she tells me. “And I prayed pretty intensely and a lot of things transpired.”
“I’m not afraid to talk to anybody, anywhere, any time,” she continues. “And the trip kind of lent itself to that.”
Recounting one such story, Kengott tells me about one occasion where she and her daughter met Jeff Bezos at a sushi restaurant in Malibu. “We’re sitting there and I look over and I see Jeff Bezos standing with a group of friends,” Kengott recalls. “They had already eaten and they were saying their goodbyes.” Kengott, thinking that an introduction would help her daughter’s business prospects, introduced herself and her daughter to Bezos. When they got back to their table, Kengott thought of giving Bezos a rosary.
“So I walked over and I just called him by his first name since we had already met,” Kengott recounts, saying that Bezos was happy to receive the rosary and hear that Kengott prayed for him every day, ending the brief conversation by embracing her.
Kengott also recounts a time in which she and her family prayed the Rosary together for the first time, on a gondola at a ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.
“We were on a gondola that was all made of glass, and I very sheepishly said to my family, ‘It’s my birthday. Could we pray a Rosary?’” she says, adding that her family did so. “I had been praying the Rosary [for] maybe five years or so at this point, but never brought my family into it.” While praying the Rosary, Kengott tells me, the gondola stopped suddenly and the cable rose above the gondola, eventually the gondola moving up like a slingshot while the cable came down. Even so, Kengott and her family said that they felt at peace and felt nothing physically.
When she spoke to a ski patrol officer about the incident, the officer said that she was lucky that the gondola did not crash. According to Kengott, “He said that we’re lucky that the gondola didn’t come off of that cable the way it shot up like a slingshot.”
“So that was the first time I remember being so devoted to the Rosary with my family,” she continues. “Now we pray a family Rosary every day, and they’re receptive to it.”
Kengott adds that since her family likes to travel, they have found themselves in a good deal of dangerous situations, and resort to prayer often. “We had an incident down in the Amazon, we had an incident in Japan,” Kengott explains. “Very scary, life-threatening kinds of things. And we pray. And miracles … just happen all around us all the time.”
Kengott also explains that she asks the Holy Ghost to act through her. Demonstrating the point, she tells me a story of when she was asked to run a woman’s retreat at her parish and invited Our Lord and Our Lady, saying to them, “You’re much more competent than me.”
During the retreat, she caught a photo of what looked like the image of the Divine Mercy. When showing it to someone, Kengott was told that it was her fingernail. “Somehow I got my own fingernail,” she recounts. “I said, ‘Well, at least I have my nails painted red that day!’ … God has a sense of humor, too. But that has worked well, because then I can just, in passing, talk to atheists or agnostics [about Divine Mercy].”
For much more from Christine Kengott, listen to this fascinating episode of The John-Henry Westen Show.
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