Even Little Saints See the Face of God: St. Servulus, Tiny Tim, and the Nativity

 ". . . but Jesus said, "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven." And he laid his hands on them and went away." (Matthew 19:14-15)

Antique St. Servulus Prayer Card

One understandable drawback to the great liturgical rfeasts, such as the magnificent celebration of the Nativity of Our Lord at Christmas, is that lesser observances can be overlooked in all the excitement. For instance, today (December 23rd) is the memorial of St. Servulus: he is worth remembering for his own sake, but his life also gives us some very fruitful matter for meditation on the penultimate day of Advent, as we prepare for Christmas itself. Let’s take a look at the story of St. Servulus, from the 1866 edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints (an account based on a homily by St. Gregory the Great): . . .

[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]

The Crisis of Fatherhood and the Litany of St. Joseph

      How odd St. Joseph, the human father of Jesus, must look to so many of us today.  We live in an age that distrusts the traditional features of fatherhood, and even denigrates them as "toxic masculinity."  Small wonder that fatherhood itself is in steep decline.  According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, "19.7 million children in America—more than one in four—live without their biological dad in the home." ("The Father Absence Crisis in America")  That unprecedented figure is growing all the time, in spite of the fact that the decline of fatherhood has such devastating and clearly documented consequences: a four times greater likelihood of living in poverty; a greater likelihood of emotional and behavioral problems, infant mortality, crime and imprisonment, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, obesity, dropping out of school, and all the other problems that flow from those circumstances (see the article linked above for citations).

"The Flight into Egypt" by Jacopo Bassano (1544)

      As horrific as those consequences are, Christians know that there's something even worse. The Church has always taught us that human fatherhood is merely a reflection: as Jesus himself puts it, "call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven." (Matthew 23:9) Human fathers are merely stewards, and our authority is not our own, nor do we exercise if for our own sake . . .

[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]

St. Patrick, Julius Caesar, and Slavery to Sin

 “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this today” (Deuteronomy 15:14-15)

 

"St. Patrick Baptizes the King of Munster". *

     St. Patrick is, of course, the Patron Saint of Ireland, but he wasn’t originally Irish.   He was Romano-British, probably born in what is now southern Scotland, or possibly Wales.  His first introduction to the Emerald Isle was as a slave, after he had been kidnapped as a youth by Irish raiders.  In his difficulties he came increasingly to rely on God, and he believed that God was calling him out of captivity.  He escaped and found his way home.  His faith life deepened, and after a time he concluded that he was being called back to save those who had enslaved him.  After ordination as a priest he returned to Ireland, where he successfully evangelized his former captors, and eventually became known as the Apostle of Ireland.

   There is something profoundly Christian about St. Patrick’s story.  Consider just how different is the story about Julius Caesar, as told by the Roman historian Suetonius.  When he was a young man, Caesar was kidnapped by pirates . . . 

[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]

*Stained glass window from St. Patrick's Church, Columbus, OH; photo Wikipedia Commons

Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day – Fruit of the Same Tree

The pink Valentine clutter has not yet completely abandoned the shelves of retailers, as we’re just three days past the feast of the most well-known of unknown saints, and yet today we put on ashes and the purple of Lent. Whether by chance or design St. Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday often find themselves in close proximity. A few years ago when the two apparently contrary feasts occupied the same day, I saw a post on a certain social media network (which I refuse to name, as I have since renounced it and all its works and empty promises) that caused me to stop and think about the connection between the two . . . [Click HERE to read the entire post at Spes in Domino]

St. Valentine, Patron of Agape

 A Cloud of Witnesses

      The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that we live out our life of faith here on earth in view of a “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), which is to say our holy predecessors. They watch over us from before the Throne of God, where they cheer us on and intercede on our behalf.  At the time the letter was written, all these witnesses were holy men and women from Old Testament times, but that cloud has been expanding constantly over the centuries since to include countless Christian Saints. They are truly our witnesses before God, and also our examples, heroes who show us the path to follow.

     Speaking for myself, one of the unintended rewards of dabbling in bloggery over the past few years is that, in researching and writing blog posts on many of these saints, I’ve come to know them so much better. I’ve come to a deeper appreciation of famous heroes of the faith whom I thought I already knew, such as St. Joseph and St. Therese of Lisieux. I’ve also come to know many more obscure saints, some of whom I had never heard of before: St. Peregrinus and St. Mellitus are just two examples. Today, however, we have the curious case of a saint who somehow manages to fall into both of these categories. He is universally “known”, at least insofar as his name is a household word, even among non-Catholics, and in fact among non-Christians.  At the same time, a great many people don’t even know they’re speaking the name of a Christian saint, and those who do know it know almost nothing about the man himself, or even whether he was one man, or two . . . 

[Click HERE to continue reading on Spes in Domino]

The Power of Christ: Saints Paul, Timothy, & Titus

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

    The boxer Robert Fitzsimmons, who was slated to fight the much larger James J. Jeffries in a heavyweight title match in 1902, supposedly quipped: “The bigger they come, the harder they fall.”  While Fitzsimmons failed to demonstrate the truth of his remark on that occasion (he lost the bout to Jeffries in the 8th round), it has become something of a proverb.  How many times have we seen that the more formidable the opponent, the more dramatic the impact when he comes crashing down?

    The nascent Church faced just such an opponent in the days after the ascension of Jesus, an opponent much more formidable than James Jeffries and Robert Fitzsimmons put together.  This man “was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” (Acts 8:3).  Not satisfied with terrorizing the followers of Christ in Jerusalem, “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, [he] went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:1-2). And yet this man, Saul of Tarsus, reached Damascus a very different man, because on the way he met the Risen Christ:

Now as he journeyed he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" And he said, "Who are you, Lord?" And he said, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do." The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. (Acts 9:3-8)

“Oh what a fall was there!”, as Shakespeare’s Mark Antony says of the death of Caesar.  And when Saul fell to the ground it was indeed a great fall, one which the Church commemorated yesterday, as it does every January 25th, as the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul.  Saul, of course, later calls himself Paul, and goes on to become Saint Paul. While both might have been great falls, each in its own way, Saul's was a very different fall than Caesar's.  Caesar pursued greatness to satisfy his own ambitions, and any lasting good that came of it was simply a happy consequence God’s working everything for good (see the quote from the same St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans at the top of this post).  This working for good  took a very different form in the case of St. Paul himself. When Paul arrives in Damascus the Lord tells a man named Ananias to “come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight” (Acts 9:12).  Ananias has heard about Paul, and is afraid of him, but the Lord assures him that “he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel” (Acts 9:15).  Unlike Caesar, who lived only for his own glory, Paul now lives for the Glory of God or, as he himself puts it: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). While Caesar's fall was the end of his life ("Now die, Caesar!"), Saul's was the beginning of new, more glorious life.

The laying on of hands: Joseph Ratzinger (later
Pope Benedict XVI) is made a cardinal

    Likewise, any power that St. Paul and the other Apostles wielded was very different from the sort of power that Caesar fought for.  Caesar’s power died with him under the jealous daggers of conspiratorial senators, and it would take almost two decades of ongoing civil war before another man, his great-nephew Octavian, seized supreme command in the Roman Empire and had himself proclaimed Augustus, the first emperor.  It generally happened that emperors after Augustus generally gained power through violence and bloodshed, and lost it in the same way.
St. Paul, on the other hand, was simply a conduit for the power of Christ, who tells him "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:9).  It is a power that comes from outside of him, which was before him, and which continues after him.  We can see this in the fact that yesterday’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul is followed by today’s memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, just as Timothy and Titus themselves followed Paul.  St. Paul made both men bishops by the laying on of hands, just as Ananias had laid hands on him, and wrote letters addressed to both that are now included in the canon of Sacred Scripture. Timothy and Titus likewise passed the power of Christ on to other bishops.  This power is still working through our bishops today, centuries after the bodies and the power of the Roman Emperors have crumbled into nothing.

    The bigger they come, the harder they fall.  We all fall at some point in our lives.  Let us pray that we fall not like Caesar, in a futile pursuit of worldly ambitions, but like St. Paul, born to a new life in Christ.

St. Antiochus of Lyons & the Will of God

Today the Church commemorates a truly great saint, St. Theresa of Avila.  A Doctor of the Church, she was at the same time one of the great mystical writers of all time and a hard-nosed pragmatist who, along with St. John of the Cross, led a much-need reform of the Carmelite order.  Her reform efforts were not welcome to everyone: she met strong, sometimes violent, resistance from her fellow Carmelites. We can all grow in Christ through her example of total surrender to our Lord, and it comes as no surprise that there are any number of beautifully written and insightful meditations on this amazing saint today.

    One disadvantage of the large shadow casts by giants of sanctity like St. Theresa, however, is that lesser-known saints who share the same day on the liturgical calendar can go unnoticed.  I’d like to look at one of these holy men and women, St. Antiochus of Lyons, whose feast we also celebrate on October 15th.
The sources I’ve been able to locate on St. Antiochus are brief, but tell an intriguing story.  He was a 5th century priest of Lyons, in what was then still called Gaul (the modern country of France).  The bishop of Lyons, St. Justus, abdicated his office and left for Egypt to become a hermit in the desert.  The people of Lyons sent Antiochus on the long journey to Egypt to persuade their holy shepherd to return to his flock.  Justus, apparently, was unwilling or unable to comply, and Antiochus returned home, an apparent failure.  The people of the diocese, however, recognizing that “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away” (Job 1:21) saw in the failure of Antiochus’ mission a gift as well: a new bishop.  They promptly chose Antiochus to replace the departed Justus as their spiritual father.  We are told that he went about his new office “with zeal and firmness” until he was called to his final reward.

Egyptian hermitage

    St. Antiochus, very much like St. Bridget of Sweden, is one of those saints who seems to have failed in his primary mission, only to discover that his failure there really served to prepare him for a success greater than he had dared to imagine. We learn from the lives of saints like Antiochus is that the path to sanctity lies not so much in our own efforts as it does in accepting the will of God.  Even more, the failure of these holy men and women here on earth reminds us that whatever we do accomplish, or fail to do, here only matters for a little while; our true mission is not only loving and serving God in this world, as the Baltimore Catechism puts it, but enjoying eternal happiness with him in the next.
Let us all prayer for the Grace to join St. Antiochus, St. Theresa of Avila, and all their fellow saints before the Throne of God.

 

St. Joseph the Worker - The Laborer Is More Than His Work

     They say that necessity is the mother of invention but, as today's feast of St. Joseph the Worker shows us, sometimes measures taken for practical purposes can point to deeper truths.

Holy Family Father and Son, by Corbert Gauthier

     St. Joseph the Worker is a very recent addition to the liturgical calendar. Pope Pius XII, who wanted to present a Catholic alternative to the Communist celebration of May Day, instituted it in 1955.  Who better to counter the self-proclaimed "vanguard of the workers" than a great Saint who was also a laborer, a man known for his patience and perseverance, but also his piety?  As such, St. Joseph is also the ideal embodiment of the Dignity of Work.  He shows us that work is not simply something we do to survive, or that connects us to a certain economic class, but is an essential part of our humanity, a way in which we act, at least in a small way, as co-creators with God (see St. John Paul II's Laborem Exercens).
     At the same time, we can see that while a worker may be honored for his work, he is not defined by it.  Here the Catholic view stands in sharp contrast to the outlook of Marxism, where a working person's primary identification is with his class, and he finds meaning by working toward the "workers' paradise" of a fully communist society; since the realization of the workers' aspirations is the Greatest Good in this worldview, those who are seen as obstacles (such as members of the Capitalist Class) deserve to be extirpated.  Western market-driven societies have their own false anthropology in the phenomenon of the workaholic, whose whole life centers on his career, and who sees no meaning beyond it.  
     Christians, however, see our primary identification as adopted sons an daughters of God: equal in dignity (regardless of externals such as class, sex, race, etc.), called to love, and all of us part of the One Body of Christ.
     Now look at St. Joseph.  There have probably been carpenters more skillful than Joseph, or more productive, but none of them have feast days. We honor him today in his role of worker, but that's not why he is a Saint.  He's a Saint, and a great Saint, because he cooperated in God's great work of salvation.  Today's feast reminds us that we can all aspire to sanctity, even humble laborers, and that whoever we are, and whatever we do in this world, what we do for the Kingdom of God and who we are in the eyes of the Father is what matters in the end. 

(See also: "Fighting Dragons, Inside And Out" on Nisi Dominus)

Saints - All That Matters In The End

St. Francis De Sales

Christ established his Church almost two thousand years ago.  The last two millennia have been filled with countless holy people, many of whom we honor with a feast day on the Liturgical Calendar.  Today, for example, is the feast day of well-known and well-loved saint, St. Francis De Sales, Bishop and Doctor of the Church.  St. Francis, who died almost four centuries ago, was ahead of his time in his concern for the devotional life of laypeople. I'll have more to say about this wonderful Saint in the future.

    Today we also honor some less well known saints. For instance, we find the following in Butler’s Lives of the Saints:

St. Macedonius: Hermit of Syria, called Kritophagus, the barley-eater. He lived forty years on barley moistened in water, till finding his health impaired, he ate bread, reflecting that it was not lawful for him to shorten his life to shun labours and conflicts, as he told the mother of Theodoret; persuading her, when in a bad state of health, to use proper food, which he said was physic to her. Theodoret relates many miraculous cures of sick persons, and of his own mother among them, by water on which he had made the sign of the cross, and that his own birth was the effect of his prayers, after his mother had lived childless in marriage thirteen years. The saint died, ninety years old, and is named in the Greek menologies.

St. Macedonius may not be as well known as St. Francis de Sales, especially not in the western Church, but important details of his life have been preserved.  We can see that his story shows us a model of holiness, but also provides a salutary lesson about the importance of respecting the physical bodies God gave us, and also about the efficacy of prayer.

    In some cases, however, we know little beyond the names of some of the holy men and women who appear on the liturgical calendar.  Today, for instance, we also honor:

St. Mardonius: Martyr of Asia Minor with Eugene, Metellus, and Musonius, burned at the stake at an unknown location. (from www.catholic.org/saints)

That's pretty scanty compared to what we know about St. Francis de Sales, or even St. Macedonius, but it is more than we know about Saints Thyrsus and Projectus.  Their biography at Catholic Online [here] is rather brief; it reads, in full:

Martyrs of an unknown year and location. Their Acts [i.e., histories] are no longer extant.

That’s it.  We don’t know when they lived, where they lived, or what they did. All we know is that they are Saints . . . which is really all that matters in the end.  St. Paul says:

. . . Run so as to win.  Every athlete exercises discipline in every way.  They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one. (1 Corinthians 9:24-25)

That crown is the crown of sanctity. We are all called to be Saints with God in Heaven, but we can’t all be a St. Francis De Sales, of even a Saint Projectus or Thyrsus.  Most of us, even if we persevere to the end, will be just like the vast majority of saintly Christians through the centuries, forgotten a few generations after our passing from this world.  All the things that seem so important to us today will likewise have disappeared.  And that’s fine, because there’s only one thing that ultimately matters, that eternally matters: that, by the Grace of God, we be Saints.

   

   

St. Vitalis, Love & Human Traffficking

When a man dies, his life is revealed.

Call no man happy before his death,

for by how he ends a man is known.  (Sirach 11:27-28)

Back when I was new to the world of bloggery I published a post on St. Julia of Corsica which I called "St. Julia of Corsica - A Saint For Our Times." And, of course, she was a timely Saint. Interestingly, every time I write about another Saint, I find myself wanting to title the post the same way: "St. [Fill In The Blank], A Saint For Our Time", or " . . . A Saint For Today". It stands to reason, because sanctity, a reflection of the Eternal God, has a universal quality about it; every Saint has something that every one of us hoping to rest their heart in the Lord wants to find. At the same time, every Saint is a distinct individual, and sometimes by identifying with some of the unique aspects of a particular Saint's life, their sanctity seems a little less remote, and therefore a little more attainable, for ourselves. For just that reason we have Patron Saints and devotions to particular Saints.
It is also true that the unique stories of particular Saints illuminate specific problems or issues that are still with us today (which is another reason why we have Patron Saints). For instance, earlier this week (January 11th; the scripture quote above is from the same day's Office of Readings) we commemorated St. Vitalis of Gaza, who is venerated both in the Orthodox Churches and in the Catholic Church as the Patron Saint of both day laborers and "ladies of the night" (that is, handy-men and prostitutes: the reasons for both will be made clear below).  His hagiography [Here and Here] tells us that, around 625 A.D.,  when he was already advanced in years, he came to Alexandria in order to minister to the prostitutes.  His method, as described in the brief biography on Catholic.org, was as follows:

[A]fter obtaining the name and address of every prostitute in the city, he hired himself out as a day laborer, and took his wage to one of these women at the end of the day. He then would teach her about her dignity and value as a woman and that she did not deserve to be used by men as an object of their lust.

He followed the same routine every day, and he succeeded in rescuing a large number of women in this way.  Many fellow Christians misunderstood his motives, however, as he insisted that the women he helped not tell anybody about his role in their conversion, or the real reason for his nocturnal visits (presumably because these women - and their handlers - only let him in because they believed the he was a paying “customer": if they knew what he really wanted, they would have barred the door . . . or worse).  One righteously indignant young Christian, assuming the worst about Vitalis, struck him a blow to the head that resulted in his death.  Only then, freed from their promises of silence, were the women he had helped to save able to clear his name by their testimony.  

   There are a number of compelling angles to the story of St. Vitalis.  One is that yet again we have confirmation that “there is nothing new under the Sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).  The scourge of prostitution is still very much with us and, as St. Vitalis understood fourteen centuries ago, it is a vicious form of exploitation that not only enslaves the body but sickens the soul.  Despite the push in some quarters today to whitewash prostitution with terms like “sex workers”, it is becoming more commonly recognized for the evil it is, and included under the broader heading of “human trafficking” (slavery, in other words).  Nonetheless, not only is prostitution still with us, but it is in fact worse, and more pervasive, than most of us realize.  I recently had the opportunity to hear a talk by Darlene Pawlik, now a pro-life and anti-trafficking activist, but formerly an exploited teen who was first “trafficked” on her 14th birthday and who remained under the control of various traffickers for the next several years . . . all right here in United States.  She was eventually saved by turning to Christ, and with the help of Christians who, like St. Vitalis, made it their mission to reach out to the victims of the “sex trade”.  There are in fact many groups today that similarly follow in the footsteps of St. Vitalis, both among Catholics and other Christians as well.

From  http://awakenreno.org/myths-and-facts-about-nevada-legal-prostitution/

    Another point that stands out in the mission of St. Vitalis is his desire to save one soul at a time, like the shepherd in Jesus’ parable (see Luke 15:4) who leaves behind the 99 sheep to recover the one who is lost.  St. Vitalis treated each woman as an individual, and talked to her about her life, and the salvation of her own soul.  He treated each prostitute as a thinking, feeling child of God instead of an object to be used, and he was therefore able to offer real Love, as opposed to the tawdry simulacrum of love they were used to dealing in.  I can't help but think, in a way, of St. Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who also insisted on treating each human being like, well, a human being. Secular leftists such as the late Christopher Hitchens have criticized her for being an ineffectual sentimentalist: she should have been addressing "The Real Causes" of poverty (capitalism, inequality, etc.) instead of “merely” comforting the poorest of the poor in their distress.  There is certainly a place governmental and political action, but as Mother Theresa understood, laws can't save souls, and Christ didn’t suffer and die to save us from abstractions, or to establish a perfect political or economic system: he came to save us from sin, through the great outpouring of  His Divine Love on The Cross.

    His Love is still the only thing that can save us from sin.  That’s why so many of us have come to conversion through the example of others, or because of the loving attention of a Christian who, like Christ Himself, showed an interest in us, not as a means to an end, but simply for our own good.  Not all of us are called to start seeking out prostitutes, of course; as the death of St. Vitalis shows, that was and remains a risky undertaking, for a number of reasons.  We can, however, offer material assistance to those who are willing and able to take the risks (perhaps some of the groups linked above), and offer our prayers for their safety and success, and also for the salvation of the exploited women (and men) they seek to help.  We should certainly support appropriate laws to thwart traffickers and to help their victims. Finally, we can work and pray for our own continued conversion, that we recognize the seriousness of sexual sin, and how permissiveness in this area can help create an environment in which a soul-killing evil like the “sex trade” can flourish.*

St. Vitalis of Gaza, pray for us, and for all victims of human trafficking.


* I intend to address this last point in more detail in another post in the near future.

The Christmas Conversion of St.Thérèse

(An earlier version of this Thursday Throwback was first published 16 December 2014)

The future St.Thérèse (r) and her sister Pauline

 In the lives of the Saints we can find some amazing stories of conversion: the Risen Lord literally knocking his persecutor Saul to ground and blinding him, in order to raise him up as St. Paul; the rich and spoiled son of an Italian cloth merchant who needed a year in a dungeon as a POW followed by a near fatal illness before he cast off self-indulgence to become St. Francis of Assissi; the vain and vainglorious Spanish nobleman who had his leg nearly shot off with a cannonball, and then went through months of excruciating recovery, before he could begin to see God in All Things as St. Ignatius of Loyola.  How startlingly different, and yet how strikingly the same is the conversion of the little French girl Thérèse Martin, now St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, as she tells it her autobiographical Story of A Soul: 

     I had a constant and ardent desire to advance in virtue, but often my actions were spoilt by imperfections. My extreme sensitiveness made me almost unbearable. All arguments were useless. I simply could not correct myself of this miserable fault. . .  A miracle on a small scale was needed to give me strength of character all at once, and God worked this long-desired miracle on Christmas Day, 1886. . . 

     Now I will tell you, dear Mother, how I received this inestimable grace of complete conversion. I knew that when we reached home after Midnight Mass I should find my shoes in the chimney-corner, filled with presents, just as when I was a little child, which proves that my sisters still treated me as a baby. Papa, too, liked to watch my enjoyment and hear my cries of delight at each fresh surprise that came from the magic shoes, and his pleasure added to mine. But the time had come when Our Lord wished to free me from childhood's failings, and even withdraw me from its innocent pleasures. On this occasion, instead of indulging me as he generally did, Papa seemed vexed, and on my way upstairs I heard him say: "Really all this is too babyish for a big girl like Thérèse, and I hope it is the last year it will happen." His words cut me to the quick. Céline, knowing how sensitive I was, whispered: "Don't go downstairs just yet—wait a little, you would cry too much if you looked at your presents before Papa." But Thérèse was no longer the same—Jesus had changed her heart.

     Choking back my tears, I ran down to the dining-room, and, though my heart beat fast, I picked up my shoes, and gaily pulled out all the things, looking as happy as a queen. Papa laughed, and did not show any trace of displeasure, and Céline thought she must be dreaming. But happily it was a reality; little Thérèse had regained, once for all, the strength of mind which she had lost at the age of four and a half.

     On this night of grace, the third period of my life began—the most beautiful of all, the one most filled with heavenly favours. In an instant Our Lord, satisfied with my good will, accomplished the work I had not been able to do during all these years. Like the Apostle I could say: "Master, we have laboured all night, and have taken nothing."

     More merciful to me even than to His beloved disciples, Our Lord Himself took the net, cast it, and drew it out full of fishes. He made me a fisher of men. Love and a spirit of self-forgetfulness took possession of me, and from that time I was perfectly happy.

The Lord didn’t need to knock Thérèse down, beat her up, or have her shot in order to get her full attention; all he needed was to allow her to overhear a couple of stray comments from the father she loved so dearly.  That wounded her deeply enough to reveal to her the reality of her own selfishness, and to open her up completely to Christ’s Grace.  The meaning of conversion, after all, is to “turn around”, away from a way of life dictated by our own desires to one truly centered on God.
     Now, most of us need a wake-up more like the one which was granted to St. Paul or St. Francis; perhaps not quite as dramatic, but most of us, I suspect, are much more wrapped up in our sin than was little Thérèse Martin.  But that is precisely why the Little Flower’s conversion stands out: even someone who seems to be doing just about everything right is still in need of conversion, and not just in one instant, but continuously over a lifetime (and of course she did experience much greater suffering later in her short life). Sin will always be trying to turn us back. 
     St. Thérèse’s conversion story reminds us of something else.  There will always be opportunities for conversion.  We don’t need to go out looking for trouble, because we will all have ample opportunity to experience The Fall in our lives.  The more enmeshed we are in sin, however, and the higher the walls between ourselves and God, the harder our fall must be.  Wouldn’t it be better to come to Christ like Thérèse did, without too much collateral damage to ourselves and to others?
     Finally, St. Thérèse learned to turn her hurt and disappointment into generosity of spirit, her selfishness to selflessness.  When I think back on her Christmas of 1886 I am reminded that I need to ask my Lord for the Grace to do the same. O come, O come Emmanuel!


(See Also: A song that captures the spirit of Advent: “Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming” http://goo.gl/XYvbh8 )

     

Never Underestimate The Power Of Prayer

The Dalai Lama, anti-prayer warrior

I was powerfully reminded recently of the old saying, “Never underestimate the power of prayer”. I had just been reading about the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, who has been urging people not to pray for France or for the victims of the recent Islamic terror attacks in Paris (a theme that has been taken up, much less gracefully, by more secular sources after the terror attack in San Bernadino California).

            Bemused by the apparent incongruity of a renowned religious leader discouraging prayer, I tracked down this news article, which quotes the Dalai Lama as saying:

We cannot solve this problem only through prayers. I am a Buddhist and I believe in praying. But humans have created this problem, and now we are asking God to solve it. It    is illogical. God would say, solve it yourself because you created it in the first place . . . We need a systematic approach to foster humanistic values, of oneness and harmony. If we start doing it now, there is hope that this century will be different from the previous one. It is in everybody’s interest. So let us work for peace within our families and society, and not expect help from God, Buddha or the governments.

            To be fair, the concept of an omnipotent Creator God who really hears our prayers appears to be foreign to the tradition in which the Dalai Lama was formed; we should not expect him to embrace a Christian concept of prayer. At the same time, St. Peter tells us to “to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15), and therefore it is proper to point out several false assumptions implicit in the Buddhist leader’s remarks, which are amplified in their cruder expression on the front page of the New York Daily News (picture below).

            First of all, the detractors of prayer seem to be suggesting that praying will somehow keep us from taking whatever concrete actions might be appropriate in a given situation, as if “Pray for Paris” means “Pray, and don’t do anything else.” Perhaps they’ve never heard the expression “Pray like everything depends on God, but work like everything depends on you.” In any case, nobody I know is proposing prayer as a substitute for action, so this is a (not very sophisticated) straw man argument. In the case of the people at the Daily News, it seems mostly an excuse to slam politicians they don’t like for not supporting gun control laws the newspaper promotes (one might point out that these policies were already in place in both France and California, and did nothing to hinder either attack).

            There also seems to be a misunderstanding, whether genuine or disingenuous, as to what such prayers are intended to do. Nobody is suggesting that God will restore the earthly lives of the innocent people murdered in Paris or San Bernadino in response to our prayers, or is expecting a deus ex machine whereby God simply steps in and solves our problems for us, as the Dalai Lama suggests. That is not to say that we discount the possibility of miraculous intervention (see below), but our prayers in response to human tragedies, for the most part, address things that are beyond the reach of any laws or “systematic approaches” we can enact in this world: prayers for the souls of the dead, and prayers that God bring healing and peace to the hearts of those among the living who are suffering from the tragedy (and in the case of suffering caused by evil-minded people, we pray for the conversion of the perpetrators hearts). Beyond that, we ask for the gift of God’s Grace, his divine assistance to give us the wisdom to know what we ourselves should do . . . and the strength and courage to do it. If the conclusion of that prayerful deliberation is that, for example, the application of armed force is advisable, we are happy to pray for the salvation in the next world of those on whom we are waging war in this one (we Christians are a Both/And People).

            Not that any of those things are likely to deter those pushing the “For God’s Sake, Don’t Pray!” meme, because their real (but generally unspoken) argument is that prayer is futile, that it can accomplish nothing, except maybe to give the people offering the prayers the excuse that they have done their part and can leave the real work to others. This assumption most of all we should not allow to go unchallenged; we should not underestimate the efficacy of personal witness to the power of prayer, particularly when we have seen for ourselves that prayer can have powerful, and, yes,  on occasion even miraculous results.
      Here’s a true story, for instance, something that happened to me recently. When I first came across the Dalai Lama’s anti-prayer pronouncement, and was considering how I might respond, I ran into a colleague in the hallway who wanted to talk about another person on the staff who was being treated for cancer.   That led to a discussion about a close family member of his who had been suffering from late stage cancer, and had been given less than two weeks to live. He described how he prayed for his relative, and with her, and over her as she slept. His suffering relative was still alive after two weeks; shortly after that she was cancer-free, and she is still alive and healthy today more than a dozen years after the the doctors told her she had barely enough time to get her will notarized and say good-bye. Interesting that this man, who had no idea what I had just read, and with whom I had never before discussed prayer or religion at all, should choose to share with me this personal testimony to the miraculous power of prayer just as I was formulating a response to a public attack on the practice (Coincidence? Maybe . . . but who can say for sure?). 

      Another example from my personal experience is Benedicta McCarthy, a young woman with whom, and with whose family, I was acquainted some years ago. 

Benedicta McCarthy at St. Theresa Benedicta's canonization mass

Benedicta swallowed an entire bottle of Tylenol when she was a toddler, destroying her liver. Her father, a Byzantine Rite Catholic Priest, organized a prayer campaign for her as she lay in the hospital, where the doctors who had observed a hopelessly damaged liver in the morning found a perfectly sound and healthy organ that same evening. The Vatican’s Congregation for Saints attributed Benedicta’s inexplicable (to non-believers) recovery as a miracle attributable to St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross (formerly Edith Stein), for whose intercession Fr. McCarthy and his family and friends had been praying; this miracle was cited at the Saint’s canonization in 1999.

            If we want an example more relevant to the threat of jihadists, we can look to the unlikely victories of Christian armies fortified by prayer over powerful Muslim aggressors at Lepanto in 1571 or Vienna in 1683. Let the Dalai Lama and the Daily News take note: Don Juan of Austria and Jan Sobieski did not stay home, secure in the expectation that God would smite the foe in their absence. Rather, they went forth to battle knowing that the Lord would answer their prayers only if they did their own part as well.

            Prayer works: we have seen it happen. Really, aren’t the people putting their faith in fantasies those who are relying on purely human “systematic approaches” and laws to do what such things have never done and perfect human nature? So by all means, let’s pray. Let’s pray for Paris, pray for San Bernadino, pray for healing for the people suffering from the ugly crimes committed there and for the conversion of those who seek to commit such crimes. Finally, let us pray for all of us, and all humanity, that we may be willing to turn to our Lord and let our actions be informed by his grace and guided by his will.