Thanks for that. I do sincerely appreciate it. You are not my enemy, either.
I don't think I'm "twisting" anything. These Scriptures do clearly show the citizens of heaven interceding for us. How do
you interpret them?
You seem, like many Protestants, to make much of the fact of "praying to" the saints, as if it were somehow the same as praying to God. But as a fallen-away Catholic, I am sure you understand that the
content of "prayers to" the saints is nothing more than a request for intercession: pray for us. The fact that we even speak of "praying to" the saints at all is an accident of language: "pray," in its most literal sense, means to
ask, request, beseech. There is nothing the saints can do for us
but pray for us. They are not gods or divine or even any different than us, apart from their being with the Lord.
And are they "dead"? Is God not "the god of the living and not the dead" (Mark 12:27, etc.)? Are the "
firstborn who are enrolled in heaven" "dead," or are "the spirits of just men made perfect" (Hebrews 12:23)? If we believe in the Resurrection at all, then these people are not "dead," but more alive than they ever have been. And why would they, who are united with the same Christ as we, be separated from us? And why would they, who were faithful to intercede in their lives on earth, cease to do so in the next?
I have never understood the Protestant opposition to the communion of saints. Even as a Protestant, I celebrated my loved ones who went on to their reward, and delighted in their care for me after going to the Lord. Your vehement rejection, to me, comes across as a rejection of faith in eternal life.
"Let [the sick widow] then make use of others to pray for her to the physician. For the sick, unless the physician be called to them by the prayers of others, cannot pray for themselves. The flesh is weak, the soul is sick and hindered by the chains of sins, and cannot direct its feeble steps to the throne of that physician. The angels must be entreated for us, who have been to us as guards; the martyrs must be entreated, whose patronage we seem to claim for ourselves by the pledge as it were of their bodily remains [relics]. They can entreat for our sins, who, if they had any sins, washed them in their own blood; for they are the martyrs of God, our leaders, the beholders of our life and of our actions. Let us not be ashamed to take them as intercessors for our weakness, for they themselves knew the weaknesses of the body, even when they overcame." (Ambrose of Milan [fourth century A.D.], On Widows 9.55)
The grace and peace of the Lord be with you.