Shia LaBeouf (age 38) is an American actor and filmmaker. He was raised with Jewish as well as Christian influences but acknowledged in 2007 that “religion never made any sense to me.” His struggle with alcohol addiction and a series of public scandals brought him to the verge of despair. “I was on my way out,” he admitted later of this dark period in his life. He was asked to play the lead role in a movie about a remarkable Capuchin friar named Padre Pio. To learn the role, Shia spent considerable time at a monastery in California. One friar, Brother Jude, advised him, “If you are going to play Padre Pio, you need to read the gospels.” As Shia read Matthew’s gospel, his big takeaway was “Let go.” The movie was filmed on location in the monastery where Padre Pio lived in Italy. Shia said of that time, “I walked in [the movie process] a wounded man in full-blown suffering. Through the course of the movie, I came out of my little shame cave and walked back into the world, found purpose again, and redemption again. I was saved. I was lost, and I was saved through Jesus Christ.” He has since become active in the Catholic church.
Padre Pio (1887-1968) decided to dedicate his life to God at age five. He announced to his parents a few years later, “I want to be a friar…with a beard.” At fifteen, he joined the Capuchin Brotherhood (a Catholic order that traces its roots to Francis of Assisi) with its customary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. I’m not quite sure what to do with reports that Padre Pio wrestled with the devil and bore in his body the wounds of Jesus (called stigmata), but his witness to the risen Christ in Shia’s life is wonderfully redemptive. His well-known “Stay with me” prayer leads us to pray: