Friday Reflection Part I: What Makes a Modern-Day Saint?
“In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place, and let it be free and unashamed.” from William Saroyan’s ‘The Time of your Life’
We are clearly in a time of our lives we would rather not be in and in these weekly reflections we have acknowledged the “place we are in” and how we might understand and respond to it. There is an irony here in that we at Saint Stephen’s have prayed and worked to come out of darkness and in the fourth year of our new life, we found ourselves seeking new Light, but like all of you we’re overwhelmed by the darkness of this time, a disabling and destructive world-wide pandemic. One way we are doing this is to replicate in writing what we did with the Furness Burial Cloister: to bring the past into the present—from darkness into Light—in order to inform and shape the future.
In these reflections we aim (1) to mine the Episcopal Church’s Lectionary of Holy People, now called A Great Cloud of Witnesses in order to (2) illuminate the story of Saint Stephen’s, now in its 198th year: we are using the past to understand the present and shape the future. Where we seem to have ended up at this point is captured in today’s question, “What Makes a Modern-Day Saint?”
Dorothy Day sees modern-day sainthood this way: We are all called to be saints, Saint Paul says, and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us. Maybe there is, in fact, “some of the saint in all of us.” As we try to connect the dots, maybe it’s as simple and profound as the truth of the old adage, that in a time of crisis, most especially an unprecedented one like this pandemic, what becomes more and more apparent is that the best is brought out in good people (“saints” maybe) and the worst is brought out in bad people.
One defining ingredient of sainthood throughout the ages comes from Scripture, compassion, one of God’s most generous and reassuring qualities as He engages with us. So the key seems to be how one acts, which we might explain this way: If a saint acts compassionately it is not because that person is a saint. Rather it is the compassionate acts which make that person a saint. Today, the coronavirus compels us to explore the elements of modern sainthood, and to examine how those people we hold up as models have lived their faith. And in this examination, we discern more about how we are living our own faith in how we do what we do in “this time of our lives.”
This Reflection, Part One, (from the Lectionary) will explore the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, a Doctor of the Church, who lived in the late 14th century (1347-1380) and who, among many things, was a nurse and community public health leader. There is much more to this story. Part Two is another story that Suzanne Glover Lindsay tells, the story of Saint Stephen’s 1919-20 neighborhood outreach program to the “little merchants of the street,” newsboys, bootblacks and peddlers. The compassion of the congregation and its leaders was extraordinary in that it created a club for these little merchants, many of whom were homeless, to live the group’s motto, “Somebody Does Care.”
Catherine of Siena
Part One: On Saint Catherine of Siena
I begin with two quotes to help ground us. The first is from Lamentations 3: 31-33, the Old Testament lesson for the commemoration of Saint Catherine of Siena; it provides a context for Catherine’s work and witness: For the Lord will not reject forever. Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone. The second quote is from Catherine herself: Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire. How did Catherine know that God “will have compassion,” and how did she know who God meant her to be? And who was she anyway? The facts are many: Catherine of Siena was a Dominican layperson; a mystic; a theologian; an author, (The Dialogue of Divine Providence) and extensive letter writer; a nurse and a patron saint of nurses; a political operative and diplomat who negotiated peace between Italian States and restored the papacy to Rome after 67 years in France (the Avignon papacy); the Patron Saint of Europe; an activist who protested the marriage that her parents tried to arrange for her by refusing to eat; and the first female Doctor of the Church. Catherine is said to have had visions of God as early as 5 years of age and to have dedicated her “whole life” to God when she was 6 or 7 years of age.
Catherine of Siena was a contemplative who actively lived and worked in the world, to which she believed she was called. And in this time of the Coronavirus, what resonates with us is Catherine’s commitment to the care and feeding of the poor and the sick. As a nurse she cared for patients with severe illnesses (e.g. leprosy) and is the later years of her life she cared for the sick and dying during the second pandemic of bubonic plague in Europe which began in 1347 and ended in 1750, a pandemic which killed millions. In her work, Catherine was said to have been wonderfully compassionate to the needs of the poor but “ever more sensitive” to the suffering of the sick. And in her care for the sick and dying, Catherine never feared for her own health. So it should not come as a surprise that Saint Catherine of Siena would die at the age of 33, paralyzed and spent.
Nor should it surprise us that Catherine of Siena was named a saint by the Church in 1461 and a Doctor of the Church in 1970. Quite apart from her Catholicism and her commitment to the “peace and unity of the Church,” the political aspects of canonization, the uniqueness of Catherine of Sienna as a powerful woman widely respected, and her deeply personal relationship with Christ, it is clear that in any number of ways Catherine of Siena was an exceptional human being who was ever faithful to her own exhortation: Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire. In who she was and what she did, Catherine of Siena surely “set the world on fire.” And the facts and qualities of Catherine’s sainthood open up an important path to thinking more about the facts and qualities of modern-day sainthood.
The qualities we see in Catherine’s sainthood, among them compassion, empathy, goodness, unconditional generosity, self-confidence, competence, steadfastness, witness, holiness, practical wisdom, imagination, and holiness are not so unusual for a declared saint and a wonderful one at that. As we reflect on the “heroes and heroines” and the terrible toll of the daily battle with the coronavirus and take in the numbers of dead, dying and dangerously ill, a battle fought by the thousands of medical first responders and front line personnel in the hospitals, and thousands serving the public good in other ways, we see immediately that the qualities of Catherine of Siena’s sainthood are precisely those of the heroes and heroines in this time of our lives, living and working with, and giving witness to, the pandemic. Perhaps we should begin to think of these people, those who bring out the best under the terrible conditions and terrible costs of this pandemic, as among the very “best” of modern-day saints.
Amen
—Father Peter Kountz
About Friday Reflections:
Every Friday, Father Peter and Suzanne Glover Lindsay share written reflections highlighting a particular theme. This week's Friday Reflection explores Profiles in Compassion.