Last spring a lovely group of ladies joined me in the Endow study “Setting the World Ablaze: St. Catherine of Siena.” (Never done one? Check them out!)
One of the things I find charming about Endow studies is how different aspects of the study — sometimes the words on the page, sometimes the discussions that they prompt — smack me upside the head at just the right time. Those messages stick with me and continue to challenge me long after the study is over.
And sometimes saints just stalk me. Ask me about St. Anthony of Padua. Or the kissing saints.
I’m convinced it’s a coordinated effort to save my soul. Seriously. Life’s full of distractions, and God knows I need reminders about the Important Things. So he sends in special agents — like friends, family, random strangers, or even sometimes a 14th-century doctor of the Church whose body is in Rome and whose head and thumb are in Siena — to bring me back around.
As I was flipping through a travel book from my honeymoon shortly after the Endow study was over, out fell these prayer cards from St. Catherine’s tomb at the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.
I’m not sure whether my husband and I picked them up on our honeymoon in 2009 or if he picked them up during a previous trip to Rome. All I can say is that, true to form, St. Catherine is one persistent woman. At minimum, six years had passed before I happened to flip open that travel book, and it just happened to coincide with the end of the Endow study.
Finding the prayer cards caused me to reflect again on a particularly memorable quote from the study. In the following message from The Dialogue, God responded to St. Catherine’s request for guidance on pursuing perfection in charity in a broken world:
So if you would attain the purity you ask of me, there are three principal things you must do:
You must be united with Me in loving affection, bearing in your memory the blessings you have received from Me;
With the eye of your understanding you must see my affectionate charity, how unspeakably much I love you;
And where the human heart is concerned, you must consider my will rather than people’s evil intentions, for I am their judge — not you;
If you do this, all perfection will be yours.
(pp. 191-192 of The Dialogue, translated by Suzanne Noffke, O.P.)
Need a New Year’s resolution, anyone?
Oh, and if there is one thing I learned from the Endow study, it’s that Grandma’s arm twisting has nothing on this woman. If you’re being stalked by St. Catherine, be prepared to hear from her, even when you’d rather be left alone in your errant or cowardly ways.
She was known to be especially persistent in reaching out to and encouraging her spiritual children who were struggling. Sometimes this took the form of calling a disciple away from worldly pursuits, with copious reminders of her maternal affection; other times this meant calling a pope to “be a man” instead of a cowardly boy in the face of political pressure.
I can’t say that I enjoy being stalked by saints. It’s really uncomfortable to have your soul pricked where it most hurts. I just hope that in the end I’ll be able (to paraphrase St. Catherine) to bear it in memory as a blessing from a loving Father.
Some honeymoon photos of St. Catherine’s hometown, Siena:
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