When It Hurts, Remember You Are an Eternal, Living House

C.S. Lewis has a special way of explaining things….

 

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."

 

Take a Pilgrimage...Into Your Past

In the last blog post, I wrote about the friendship between Catherine Doherty and Dorothy Day.  They prayed for one another and visited on occasion, but the “maintenance” of their friendship took place in the letters they exchanged throughout the years.

Below is an excerpt of a letter from Catherine to Dorothy.  In it Catherine describes a beautiful way of praying.  Catherine was known for bringing Russian Orthodox traditions to the west and “translating” them for Catholics in North America, who she felt were spiritually hungry but lacking in the deep spiritual practices she had experienced growing up in Russia.  In the passage below, Catherine writes about taking “pilgrimages” into her past and visiting the “shrines” she found there:  the graces, gifts, sorrows and joys that she had experienced throughout her life.  In her book Poustinia, Catherine wrote that Russians were serious about pilgrimage – they traipsed all over the huge country – pilgrimage was a way of life.  But even the most seasoned religious traveler discovered that in the end, to be a pilgrim means to journey within.

I invite you to reflect on Catherine’s words and consider praying this way, too.  Which shrines of your past should be revisited – what joys and sorrows?  Can you look back and recognize God’s presence in your life in the people, places and events that shaped you? 

“It has been now over a month that a great desire to write to you has come to my heart.  I have been making, as you know, ‘pilgrimages’ into my distant and not so distant yesterdays, stopping now here, now there, to render thanks to the Lord of Life, for this special grace or that, for this wonderful gift or sorrow and for that infinite moment of joy.  Short as my life is, as any human life is, there are, strange to say, many a shrine in it before which, as is the custom of my people, I can bow low from the waist, touching the earth with my hands, and singing alleluias in my heart for each….  Amongst the memories of my yesterdays is a shrine that I reached into today, at which, in a manner of speaking, I still worship.  Long ago and far away I arose in search of the Lord….  [O]ut of nowhere, you came, and hand in hand, we walked together.”

You can read the full text of Catherine’s letter to Dorothy in an article about the friendship between Catherine and Dorothy, written by Fr. Bob Wild, the postulator for Catherine’s cause for canonization. 

Fr. Wild has also written a book assembling the letters of Catherine and Dorothy entitled “Comrades Stumbling Along:  The Friendship of Catherine de Hueck Doherty and Dorothy Day as Revealed Through Their Letters.”

Catherine Doherty & Dorothy Day: Friends, Servants of God

Some friendships were just meant to be.  Such was the friendship between Catherine Doherty and the better-known social activist Dorothy Day (click here for previous posts about Catherine).  Fr. Bob Wild, the postulator for Catherine’s cause for canonization, wrote of Catherine and Dorothy:  “They were almost mirror images of each other:  their apostolates covered roughly the same historical period, from 1930-1980, totally loyal Catholics, serving the poor, conditioned by the Great Depression, women of prayer, dedicated to the Church, founders of movements that continue to this day.” 

 

Although Catherine and Dorothy never had as much time together as they would have liked, they maintained a deep friendship through correspondence and an occasional visit.  They supported one another through thick and thin, experiencing many of the same challenges in their common work of serving the poor and marginalized.  At times they were discouraged by their work – Catherine writes of times they would meet together at Child’s in New York (“where you could get three coffee refills”) – and how they would sit together holding hands and crying into their coffee cups (“I mean honest, big tears….  We had had it!”).  But they prodded one another along the narrow path – and both are now honored by the Church with the title “Servant of God” as their causes for canonization are underway.  Both women had their share of bumps along the road, and there will certainly be bumps along the road to canonization, too.  And for them, of course, the title “saint” means nothing.  They ran the good race and fought the good fight; they served until the end and poured themselves out as libations for the little ones, the ones in need, the ones who are Christ in this world.  But for us, to call them “saint” would be a privilege.  It would allow us to speak the recognition, each time we say their names, that they did the single thing we are all supposed to do – the thing we want to do but don’t have the courage:  they followed the two great commandments until it hurt.

 

This is how Catherine described their last meeting in 1978:

 

“Well, this was quite a red letter day as far as I was concerned. It was the fact that I met Dorothy Day. She had her 81st birthday. She looks so thin, so thin. Life is sort of ebbing out of her. Only her eyes are still sparkly. For me this was a red letter day. To me there was really nobody there, only Dorothy. I looked at her, and I sort of took her in with my whole heart, my mind, my eyes, my body, my everything. And I said to myself, ‘Catherine, you are meeting a saint. Don’t you ever forget it, the saint of New York.”

 

The relationship between Catherine and Dorothy is a testament to friendship.  In this life, we either make the way smoother for each other, or we place obstacles in each other’s paths.  The mutual love between these women, grounded in the love of God, made the road ahead of both of them a bit less dark and dangerous.  It gave them both more courage to love. 

 

As Fr. Wild wrote:  “[It] will be a glorious and historically significant sight when Catherine’s and Dorothy’s huge beautiful portraits shine together in the brilliant Roman sunlight on the façade of St. Peter’s.”

 

Click here to read Fr. Bob’s article about Catherine Doherty and Dorothy Day.

 

Love One Another...Even at Church

It is an uncomfortable truth that those closest to us are sometimes hardest to love.  Mother Teresa hit the nail painfully on the head when she said it is easier to feed a hungry person a bowl of rice than to love the hurting person in your own home.  This truth applies to our life in the Church, especially within the parish.  Sometimes we look wistfully beyond her doors because those inside seem hardest to love.  Inside the doors of our own parishes, we find thousands of petty ways to judge and harm; we sift one another like wheat!  Whether there are great divisions in our communities, or just incessant pecking at one another, we do great harm to the Body of Christ; we fail the One we claim to love most. 

St. Augustine had a graphic way of putting it – when we claim to love Christ without loving his people, we decapitate his Head from his Body:  “What has the Church done to thee, that thou shouldst wish to decapitate her? Thou wouldst take away her Head, and believe in the Head alone, despising the body. Vain is thy service, and false thy devotion to the Head. For to sever it from the body is an injury to both Head and body.”

If we refuse to love those Christ died for, we empty the Cross of its power.  We work against Christ.  We become the enemy, the sickness in the Body.  Love in the Church is what keeps the arteries open and allows the blood to flow freely through the Body, keeping each member healthy and able to function.  When love fails, the blood of the Church slows and thickens; like body parts deprived of oxygen, members become lifeless and a slow decay sets in.

It is easy to find fault, to excuse ourselves from loving certain individuals who don’t measure up to our own standards – who don’t believe the right things, or say the right things, or make the right decisions.  But when this happens and we find ourselves without love, let us very intentionally stop, look on that person with the loving glance of Christ (Lk. 22:61) and cast on them the mantle of love, for “love hides a multitude of sins” (1 Pt. 4:8).  That is not a platitude from Scripture; it is a demanding truth.  We have the power to cover sin, to neutralize its damaging effects, simply by offering a calm, peaceful, forgiving love, and by leaving behind our judgment and irritation, which only exacerbate the faults of others and rob us of our peace.

When we find it hard to love someone – especially when it is one of our brothers or sisters in Christ, one of the fellow members of his Body – we must turn to Christ and beg for his help – because it is very important to him and to the survival of his Body.  We must go so far as to make him a promise:  “I will not decapitate you, Lord.  I will not work against the power of your Cross, which does not divide but reconciles.”  When we keep this promise, when we love those hardest to love, we become like him, and we discover not only the power but the joy of the Cross.  We release ourselves from our own demands and satisfy only the single command of the Master:  to love.  Following this command, we maintain the health of the Body and bolster the power of the Cross.  And slowly we discover that we have joined in a miraculous plan.  Our love heals and transforms:  those we deemed the “less honorable” parts of the Body (1 Cor. 12:23) become the beating heart of the Church.