She Ain’t Heavy, She’s My Sister

Feast of St. Agnes of Assisi – Born 1197 – Died 1253

Some people have such a fire in them, such determination, that they cannot be stopped. Like a rock of faith in the midst of a stormy sea, they stand firm and cannot be moved. Sometimes…. literally.

St. Agnes was the biological sister of the famous foundress of the Poor Clares, St. Clare. Agnes was Clare’s “first” follower. But like anything as bold as discipleship, it met with some resistance. Some felt that Agnes, like her sister Clare, was wasting her life in this devotion to prayer and poverty. When she left home just two weeks after Clare’s exodus into the desert of contemplation, the family tried to fetch her back. They had tophysically drag her out of the monastery, but suddenly she became so heavy that several big armed knights could not budge her. The will of the soul made steel of her body, it would seem. When her charming uncle Monaldo tried to strike her, he was temporarily paralyzed. They left Agnes and Clare in peace. Smart move.

The Moral? Don’t mess with the desires of the heart; don’t try to force a soul so uniquely called to fit into your little paradigm of what happiness is. And know this: we need contemplatives like Agnes and Clare in the world. They rest in the eye of the storm in perfect stillness. They draw down graces innumerable by their constant gaze into the Heart of God. We need them, and should never hinder their call into the white hot furnace of silence.

“One solitary God-centered, God-intoxicated person can do more to keep God’s love alive and His presence felt in the world than a thousand half-hearted, talkative busy people living frightened, fragmented “lives of quiet desperation.”
– Fr. McNamara

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Better Not Bitter – St. Martin de Porres

There’s a patron saint for everything and everyone, you know… African-Americans, Barbers, Hairdressers, Race relations, Social justice. In fact, for all of these, it’s the same saint – Martin of Porres.

“Father unknown” is the cold legal phrase sometimes used on baptismal records. “Half-breed” or “war souvenir” is the cruel name inflicted by those of “pure” blood. Like many others, Martin might have grown to be a bitter man, but he did not. It was said that even as a child he gave his heart and his goods to the poor and despised.”
(www.americancatholic.org)

Martin was the son of a Panamanian woman, probably black but possibly Native American, and a Spanish man of Lima, Peru. Having inherited his mother’s dark complexion, Martin was not acknowledged by his father until his eighth year. Talk about a “father wound!” After his sister was born, the father abandoned them, and the family grew up locked in deep poverty. But rather than become bitter about his circumstances, Martin became better. He gave his heart to his fellow poor, served as a Dominican helper and later a brother, pouring himself out tirelessly for people’s welfare, both temporal and eternal.

What a shame that Martin’s father, consumed with his own image, missed the image of God stamped in the beautiful body and soul of his son Martin. Where is that father now? What choices he must regret and what opportunities are now lost! Or perhaps the prayers of the son turned the heart of the father? May we imitate Martin’s humility, for the humble shall be exalted. And may we not miss in the ordinary, small, and obscure things in life, the mark and the mystery of the Divine.

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Wanna Be

Do you wanna be happy, whole, integrated, joyful, successful, at peace, part of something amazing, purposeful, powerful, confident, loved, loving, redeemed, relaxed, realized, real? Then you wanna become a saint.

Do you wanna be a person in touch, in truth, inspired, desired, magnetic, magnanimous, moved, and moving? Then you wanna become a saint.

There is only one tragedy in the end – not to have been a saint.
– Leon Bloy

So save yourself all the yogi guru self-help hullabaloo. Wholeness is simpler than that – it’s found in holiness! Let’s cut through all the plaster cast, plastic past, Campbell’s Soup Kid lookin’ holy card pictures of saints for a moment. What does it really mean to become a saint?

It means to become vulnerable. To be open. To receive all things from the Hand of God in trust and in love. A saint is synonymous with what’s sane. A saint is the ultimate realist, for there is nothing more real than the Cross and the Broken Body stretched upon it. And there’s no place for vanity. The hollow of the heart is open to the Mystery, the metal of the mind is sharpened by this Truth…. We are small, we are creatures, but we are made for the Infinite, and nothing in this finite world can satisfy us. And our deepest dignity lies in this longing…

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

The Apostles…. The Big Dawgs of the Catholic Faith

The Twelve – they so often adorn facades and rest atop pillars, gilded, massive, epic figures, each Atlases on whose shoulders the Church rests…. or so we grow up imagining. But what do we know, really, about these figures when the dust of millennia settles and we glance back at Sacred Scripture?

We know their names. We know they were mostly an “uneducated” lot (though schooled strong in the Book of Nature). We know they didn’t always have a clue what their Master was saying. We know all but one abandoned Him at the moment when He would have needed them most. A pretty shaky foundation for a Church, you might be thinking. But we also know that they came back to Him, and preached His Name from the rooftops, and in every conceivable way they poured themselves out for Him. That’s about it. But isn’t that what it’s all about?

The good news is that this shaky foundation has Christ Jesus as the capstone, and through Him the whole structure is held together. The good news is that Simon and Jude and all of the Apostles were madly in love with the God Who had become flesh for us. They cared little about themselves anymore. It was always Jesus.

The bad news is… this cornerstone has been rejected. So were all but one of the Apostles (John died in exile in his old age). Jude, whom we celebrate today, was eventually murdered with an ax, and Simon, also celebrated today, was beaten and cut to pieces. Destroyed, just like their Beloved Master.

They died for Jesus. What else do we need to know? They were open to God. That’s the key. They were martyred by the world, that’s the lock. They were open to the possibility that God had come in Jesus… They were closed off and shut up by a world that did not want to hear it. A world afraid of the possibility that the Door they opened might lead to Sacrifice, to Suffering, to Real Love, and to Mercy Immeasurable. Too much work for many of us.

Simon and Jude lost their lives but found themselves. And they now point us to that Cross-Shaped Door that leads to our true selves, for in Heaven we shall know as we are known. Let us pray that we too can stretch out our arms, clutching nothing, for a chance at winning everything.

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Tough Love – Isaac Jogues and Company

This morning in chapel, I got zapped by one of the prayers we heard. Jesus “put himself into our hands.” Incredible… Talk about becoming vulnerable, dependent, helpless. Didn’t he know the risks involved? Unrequited love, betrayal, indifference, even a scalding hatred that would end in tearing his very flesh from him and hanging him on a cross? Yes, he knew the risks, but he did it anyway. Jesus “put himself into our hands.”

Isaac Jogues, John de Brébeuf and Companions
Today, we celebrate a group of men – missionaries – who also knew the risks. They came from across the sea with the burning conviction that God had broken into our world, took on a body like us and offered it freely to ransom us from hatred and violence and indifference. But some of the Huron and Iroquois men, men who felt their power and position, their very paradigm of life, challenged by the missionaries, grew violent themselves. They cut off Isaac’s fingers so he couldn’t offer the Mass, they would cut out a man’s tongue so he couldn’t speak a word of the gospel, burned and scalped and brutally beaten… But Isaac and his companions kept preaching with their very bodies, as they moved about the villages…. They said with their very bodies: Peace… Mercy… Love… Forgiveness, in a violent and bloodthirsty region.

After much torture and an escape from his captors, St. Isaac actually returned to France, and was hailed as a hero. And then, guess what he did? He “put himself into their hands” again. He returned to North America, to that place of torture, to speak of his love of the God Who was tortured for us.

Two summers ago, I took my nephew Sean on a whirlwind tour of New England, a real vision quest, as a gift for his confirmation. Our first stop… the North American Martyrs Shrine in New York state. There we learned of one of St. Isaac’s little practices of evangelization…. carving the Holy Name of Jesus into trees around the little Mohawk village he ministered to. Today the shrine simply tacks on the wooden letters, and they’re everywhere! St. Isaac, like a lover, carving his Beloved’s name into an old oak.

At the southern tip of the Adirondak Mountains, Isaac was brutally killed by the Iroquois League, witnessing to Christ. We stood on that holy ground where these men made their sacrifice. Later, their love bore fruit in the birth of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks… on that very spot.

Was it worth the risk? Well, my nephew was moved, and he knows now that faith can make a man out of you. The root of virtue is vir…. Meaning manly, masculine. Sean knows a truth worth dying for, and that Christianity is not a religion for “wimps.” We are made for a tough love, one that is willing to lay down our life for our beloved. May we pray for and receive such courage and trust from the martyrs of North America. Their blood cries out from our own soil… Believe, Trust, Love… and Forgive.

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Will the Real Francis Please Kneel Down.

(My friend Brian who runs the “Defending My Beanfield” blog posted this powerful reflection on St. Francis, though he’s not sure of the author. Does anyone recognize it? It’s a real wake up call for some of us who unknowingly, or knowingly, “sanitize” the saints.

“Save us from the birdbath Francis!”

THE REAL FRANCIS

There you stand, O prophet of God
Placid in the sun-drenched garden
And never in the cold dank cave
Or bleeding amidst the thorns.

There you stand, poised and sanitized
Air-brushed with the birds
Who once opened their beaks to praise their Maker
And then stood silent to hear His Holy Word.

Why do you too stay silent
Exiled to sacred niche and abandoned
Upon some plaster pillar?
You who glowed naked ashen upon the barren earth
Now need vigil light and fresh white linen?

What is the weak reason everyone loves you?
And who are you, you little wounded man
That everyone crowns your weary wet head with gold?
Are you not a lion now made mascot or lapdog?

Your bitter life has been made palatable
And burlap garb soft to the touch.
Marketed for the masses
You stand sweet and surreal upon the tattered page.

How do you feel being everyone’s plastic saint?
Pulled this way and that
Like puddy shaped
and shoved into the mold of many little minds.

Everyone: old-timers and new-agers,
Left wing liberals and right wing Republicans,
Industrious Amish and lazy agnostics,
Catholic school kids and Protestant preachers;

Yes, the whole lot of us who make up life;
Communists, ecologists, vegetarian, veterinarians, silver-haired hippies and bow tied bankers,

Everyone owns you as no one knows you.

Yet God knows you, you broken tiny man.
And you know Him, do you not?
Resting in crib or burning on a cross,
Hidden behind wafer and wine and Holy Word.

So, as you now stand, pale and listless
so too my poor soul,
far from the sharp thorns and the bright snow
Where you found your Christ.

Yes, you who stumbled along Assisi’s stone streets,
And wept while staggering like a drunken man,
Speak to me, a sinner, who feasts on rich fare.
Speak to me of the poor God – of GOD!

Will the real Saint Francis please kneel down?

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Flower Power

“I prefer the monotony of obscure sacrifice to all ecstasies. To pick up a pin for love can convert a soul.”

Thérèse Martin was not a sissy saint. It wasn’t all roses and buttercups for this young women of 19th century France, though the language of early writers, and her own words at times, can seem like sweet saccharine.

She was a rock of faith, broken and remade by the reality of suffering. All of her life… from the death of her mother at the tender age of 4, through the fits of delirium, fever, prolonged fainting spells, the ravages of tuberculosis, and in the end a total deprivation of the consolation of the Presence of God, she was faithful.

She entered the convent at the age of 15, boldly asking permission from the Pope himself to do so, and spent 9 years in a cloister, working long and hard at domestic chores, to the humdrum daily tick of the clock. Nothing extraordinary, seemingly from the outside. But on the inside she was a powerhouse of prayer and an icon of burning union with God. She taught us how to make the ordinary extraordinary.

So take your crazy 4th period class, or that business meeting, or the price of gas, or that cranky baby, or that back pain, or those pesky telemarket’ers today, and smile, and give them up to God. Suffering need not be wasted or in vain, pain can become priceless when offered up for another.

Thérèse died in 1897 at the age of 24. She felt the vacuum of atheism in her soul in the closing days of her battle with tuberculosis, but still she held on to her faith and trust in God. Like Mother Teresa in her final days, they each took on the post-modern aftertaste of nihilism, and offered its seemingly meaningless despair up as a sacrifice for souls. That’s flower power, that’s the power of this Rose of Jesus.

St. Thérèse, Little Flower of Carmel, pray for us!

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

When Passion Meets Prayer

Did a Magdalene, a Paul, a Constantine, an Augustine become mountains of ice after their conversion? Quite the contrary. We should never have had these prodigies of conversion and marvelous holiness if they had not changed the flames of human passion into volcanoes of immense love of God.

– St. Frances Cabrini

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Mission Moment

I chose this week’s Mission Moment from a perhaps little known saint whose bio alone is food for a major motion picture. Here’s the quote:

Christ said, “I am the Truth”; he did not say “I am the custom.”

…and here’s the man: St. Toribio Alfonso Mogrovejo
________________________

St. Toribio Alfonso Mogrovejo
Archbishop of Lima; b. at Mayorga, León, Spain, 1538; d. near Lima Peru, 23 March 1606. Of noble family and highly educated, he was professor of laws at the University of Salamanca, where his learning and virtue led to his appointment as Grand Inquisitor of Spain by Philip II and, though not of ecclesiastical rank, to his subsequent selection for the Archbishopric of Peru. He received Holy Orders in 1578 and two years later was consecrated bishop. He arrived at Payta, Peru, 600 miles from Lima, on 24 May, 1581. He began his mission work by travelling to Lima on foot, baptizing and teaching the natives. His favourite topic being: “Time is not our own, and we must give a strict account of it.” Three times he traversed the eighteen thousand miles of his diocese, generally on foot, defenceless and often alone; exposed to tempests, torrents, deserts, wild beasts, tropical heat, fevers, and savage tribes; baptizing and confirming nearly one half million souls, among them St. Rose of Lima, St. Francis Solano, Blessed Martin of Porres, and Blessed Masias. He built roads, school houses, and chapels innumerable, and many hospitals and convents, and founded the first American seminary at Lima in 1591. He assembled thirteen diocesan synods and three provincial councils. Years before he died, he predicted the day and hour of his death. At Pacasmayo he contracted fever, but continued labouring to the last, arriving at Sana in a dying condition. Dragging himself to the sanctuary he received the Viaticum, expiring shortly after. He was beatified by Innocent XI in 1697 and canonized by Benedict XIII in 1726. His feast is celebrated on 27 April.

– from New Advent.org

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org