Plum Harvest via Laura Cerbus (what does it mean to receive a gift we haven’t chosen?)
The Year of Madeleine via Haley Stewart (motherhood and writing as acts of co-creation)
The Unmaking of Our Biblical Womanhood via Michelle Van Loon (“what if we finally stood together, united by our belief in Jesus instead of divided by arguments over power and authority?”)
April 29 is the Feast Day of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), a mystic, reformer, and adviser to popes. This week, we’re praying one of her beautiful prayers.
***
O Holy Spirit, come into my heart; by your power draw it to yourself, God, and give me charity with fear.
Guard me, Christ, from every evil thought, and so warm and enflame me again with your most gentle love that every suffering may seem light to me.
My holy Father and my gentle Lord, help me in my every need. Christ love! Christ love!
Wednesday, April 29, is the Feast Day of St. Catherine of Siena, a Dominican laywoman, mystic, mentor of popes, and church reformer. Her prayers and spiritual writings continue to inspire us today.
For our prayers this week, I’m featuring two recent videos in my series, “The Prayers of St. Catherine of Siena.” Each is a burst of encouragement and hope that we need during this time.
In the following prayer, St. Catherine asks God for help in responding to our neighbors with love and generosity–perfect for this time of pandemic:
***
And in our second prayer, Catherine reflects on how God has given us his own nature, which is fire:
Given what has come upon us — the pandemic, social distancing, uncertainty, isolation — I wanted to put some encouragement into the world. I’ve begun a video series in which I read a prayer, or a portion of a prayer, by St. Catherine of Siena, the 14th-century mystic, lay Dominican, church reformer, and Doctor of the Church. The first two readings are posted below.
Catherine’s prayers are beautiful and passionate, and I hope they will encourage you during this difficult time. I’m especially moved that St. Catherine so often prays for mercy and salvation for the entire world.
In this first prayer, Catherine pleads for mercy for the world:
The following prayer is very short and is a personal plea for God to renew our spirit:
Have you noticed that journeys abound everywhere you look in the Christmas story? Mary and Joseph journey to Bethlehem. Then they take the infant Jesus to Jerusalem forty days after his birth. The wise men journey from afar. And the Holy Family flees to Egypt.
And what about us? Well, the Incarnation sets us on a journey, too.
Fresco of St. Catherine from the Basilica of San Domenico, Siena, ca. 1400
In ca. 1378, the Italian mystic Catherine of Siena wrote:
You see this gentle loving Word born in a stable while Mary was on a journey, to show you pilgrims how you should be constantly born anew in the stable of self-knowledge, where by grace you will find me born in your soul.
This passage is from St. Catherine’s Dialogue. In the passage, God is instructing the soul. Notice, first, that God calls us “pilgrims.” You pilgrims. Hey, you pilgrims! Mary is not the only one on a journey this year. We are, too. We’re on our way to the stable, and we’re going there, in Catherine’s words, to be born anew.
To be precise, we will be “born anew in the stable of self-knowledge.” This phrase sounds remarkably modern. But by self-knowledge, I don’t think Catherine means “finding ourselves.” She means knowing ourselves as we can only truly be known . . . and that is through our rebirth in Christ. Even on a daily basis, we can be renewed in our spirit and regenerated in our heart by traveling to the source. To the stable. Born into Christ, into his great love, we know who we are and we know whose we are. This is surely one of the great yearnings we experience during the season of Advent – to see Christ come into time, into a hurting world, and make us new and tell us who we are.
In The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner speaks of this journey of renewal. Riffing on The Wizard of Oz, he writes, “For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning…” What he describes here is like a rebirth – an acquiring or knitting together of all the parts we need to make us whole.
Both Catherine of Siena and Frederick Buechner really speak to me this year. I’ve been feeling so fragmented, so pulled apart by circumstances and people and the warring desires of my heart. For me, rebirth means to be knit together as a whole creation. When this happens, I will not become something or someone entirely new. I will be most fully myself. This is Catherine’s “stable of self-knowledge.”
I like the way Catherine rephrases her thoughts on birth at the end of the passage quoted above. God says, “you will find me born in your soul.” To be reborn in Christ is to have him be born in our soul. It is a double birth.
If Christ is born in us, we can then bring him forth into the world. We can bring the love of Jesus to our neighbors, our friends, our family, and to our hurting communities. In his commentary on Luke, St. Ambrose said, “Christ has only one mother in the flesh, but we all bring forth Christ in faith.” Our own rebirth helps birth Christ for a world in need.
So this year, I am making a pilgrimage to Bethlehem. I hope you’ll come with me. We will travel to the stable like Mary so that we can find God born in our soul. And we’ll travel as our own broken selves so that we can be born into new life. Jesus and us, born on Christmas day.
The Contemplative Writer 