St. Josephine Bakhita

Today, February 8, is the feast day of St. Josephine Bakhita, who is one of my two favorites saints, the other being St. Martin de Porres. I don't have much time to write, so I was going to link to a review that I wrote of her biography, Bakhita: From Slave to Saint, by Robert Italo Zanini, which I read a couple of months ago; however, I find that I did not ever write the review, so I will just say a few words. 

Bakhita was born in Darfur in 1869. When she was about 8--she didn't really know how old she was--she was kidnapped by slave traders. Not only do we not know her exact age, we don't know her real name either. Bakhita, Lucky, was the name that was given to her by the slave traders.

After having belonged to several masters, some who treated her kindly and some who tortured her mercilessly, she found herself in a Canossian convent in Italy where she was accompanying the daughter of her current master, and where she heard the gospel for the first time. She was baptized and because slavery was illegal in Italy, she was allowed to stay and join the order. She was given the name Josephine in religious life.

She never seems to have worked any miracles except for being unfailingly kind to all who wanted her help in any way. She just lived a simple, holy life in gratitude for all that the Lord had done for her. She became quite well-known in her lifetime because of her dramatic history and travelled widely in Italy telling her story, which she did very simply and briefly. She died in 1947 when she about 80 years old and was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 1, 2000.

One story about St. Josephine Bakhita that I love is that when she was fairly old, she heard that there was another black sister in another order. They were able to meet and they determined that the other sister was her older sister who had been kidnapped a short time before Bakhita. I can't imagine the joy they must have felt meeting again after having been separated from their family for so many years.

Zanini's book is based for the most part on the testimony given during the investigation that led to her canonization. It's very factual and he includes some information about the political situation of the time to help the reader understand her story better. I'd recommended it if you have any interest in Bakhita because there is so much more than I can write here.

Several years ago, shortly after her canonization I think, a retreat master told us Bakhita's story briefly and gave us a holy card with a relic. I don't know why, but the minute I saw this woman's face, I fell in love with her. There doesn't seem to have been any reason for this. I just did. Since then, I have made a friend, a woman who escaped from persecution in the Sudan, who now lives in Memphis. I haven't seen her in about a year, but I always felt that she me helped to know Bakhita a bit better. And then, Bakhita was the doorkeeper of the convent, which, as I mentioned in a previous post, is basically my current job in the parish, where I hope to grow to be as kind and grateful as she was, but I have to admit it's an uphill climb.

AMDG

Hope

“Hope," says Emily Dickinson:

...is the thing with feathers - 
That perches in the soul - 
And sings the tune without the words - 
And never stops - at all - 

 And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - 
And sore must be the storm - 
That could abash the little Bird 
That kept so many warm - 

 I’ve heard it in the chillest land - 
And on the strangest Sea - 
Yet - never - in Extremity, 
It asked a crumb - of me.

And this is lovely, and in some ways, true, but it seems to me to a rather thin, insubstantial description of hope, and if this is all there is, then we are in trouble. In know that in some other ways, this is a false hope. I know it because there have been times in my life, mercifully fairly brief and long past, when if there was anything with feathers in my soul, it was stiff as a board and lying on its back with its feet in the air. If this had been my only hope, I'm not sure that I wouldn't have succumbed to complete despair.

Along with this poetic view of hope, there is an everyday usage that also falls short of the mark. The current understanding of the word is that it expresses a desire that something be true. We really, really want it to be true. Also, when people say, "I hope this or that will or will not happen," it's frequently clear that they really mean "I doubt this will happen," or "I'm afraid this will happen." But our faith gives us reason to expect more.

Having grown up Catholic, I have always been accustomed to seeing Hope represented by an anchor, but I was probably in my 30s before I thought much about why that was. I was reading Hebrews 6:17-19 when I finally figured it out.

So when God wanted to give the heirs of his promise an even clearer demonstration of the immutability of his purpose, he intervened with an oath, so that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge might be strongly encouraged to hold fast to the hope that lies before us. This we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm, which reaches into the interior behind the veil...

Our hope is anchored beyond the veil. It's already where we want to be. It's not insubstantial or fragile. It's as strong as iron. And we are tethered to that hope. There are days when we strain to pull ourselves toward that veil, and there are days when we know that other hands are doing the work for us, but even on those days when we go looking for that feathered thing singing in our soul and find instead a roaring lion prowling around with a few feathers hanging out of the side of his mouth, we can tie that rope around our waists and sit and wait and hope.

Further on in Hebrews, Paul tells us that, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen." I do not have the vaguest notion, in any intellectual way, of what that means, but I somehow connect it with a very difficult period of my life. I remember that in my bleakest time, I didn't feel any hope. In fact, I didn't really feel anything at all except for a kind of desperation at the thought of having to be alive. The only time that I had any peace at all was when I could sit on my front porch during the very brief part of the freezing days when that was possible, and pray the rosary. That was my tether to that anchor in a very miserable and foggy sea. There was no singing, and there were no feathers; there was just cold inside and out, and holding on. But I knew I was holding on to something and somehow that was enough.

I know that there are probably some of you who really love this poem, and I probably know who you are, and I hope (heh) that I haven't ruined it for you. I kind of like it myself. I've heard that little singer many times, in fact I've probably experienced that more than the cold and fog, and it's certainly more pleasant. I just haven't found it quite as reliable as I would like--or as I need.

I'll close with another poem from Gerard Manley Hopkins--not so pretty, but maybe more hopeful.

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
 Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
 In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
 Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

 AMDG

Is Everything Sad Going to Come Untrue?

With that Gandalf stood beside him, robed in white, his beard now gleaming like pure snow in the twinkling of the leafy sunlight. "Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?" he said. ... "Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?" 

"A great shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened, the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.

I don't know how many times I've read Lord of the Rings, but it's been many, many times, both to myself and out loud to my children, and I think that my youngest daughter may have read it to me. Still, when our retreat master read that eponymous phrase to us Sunday morning, I didn't remember that I'd ever heard it before. How evocative that question is. It is, I think, a yearning that resides in the deepest recesses of our hearts. 

Just so the apostles must have felt when they encountered the Risen Christ, like the Pevensies in Narnia--death itself working backwards. So will it? Will everything sad come untrue?

Well no, not in the way that the question seems to imply. Frodo, like Our Lord, (and like ourselves) bears his wounds, and life in Middle Earth, will never be the same. The evil ones have been routed, but they are still around and will certainly not surrender forever. Still, the shadow has departed. Likewise, our enemy is still prowling around seeking to devour whom he may, but his shadow--the threat of never-ending doom--has been dispelled for those who have eyes to see.

While we would like the sad things to have never been, Our Lord, of course, Whose ways are not our ways, has a better plan. He's the Great Recycler of the universe--never letting anything go to waste, and never content to just make something like new, He goes about making it better. Adam's sin becomes a happy fault. Jesus's pierced hands and feet become "rich wounds yet visible above;" and our wounds become the conduit through which we receive His grace and then pass it on to others.

"Is everything sad going to come untrue?" I wonder if perhaps in the end everything sad is going to have been untrue. Not that the sad things will not have happened, or that they will not have been horrible, but that they will somehow be seen as the cause of our joy. Sadness is, after all, a reaction to that which we deem to have been destructive: destructive of our bodies, destructive of our relationships, even destructive of our faith. But what if at last we see the wounded hands of Our Lord behind it all? 

To Save a Life Rather than Destroy It

Last night I was thinking that I wish we had been able to do something more in the parish where I work for this Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children, but I've been sick and missed a couple of days of work week before last, and then we had a day off, and then somebody died and we had to plan the funeral, and the children are having their first confessions this evening so we needed programs and certificates, and some of them needed Baptismal certificates. With one thing another, we just haven't had time. So, I was sitting, distracted, in Mass this morning hoping that the petitions would at least be appropriate (they were) and then came the Gospel, not something special for the day, just the Gospel for the Second Wednesday in Ordinary Time, Mark 3:1-6.

Jesus entered the synagogue. There was a man there who had a withered hand. They watched Jesus closely to see if he would cure him on the sabbath so that they might accuse him. He said to the man with the withered hand, “Come up here before us.” Then he said to the Pharisees, “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” But they remained silent. Looking around at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart, Jesus said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately took counsel with the Herodians against him to put him to death.

 Distracted though I was, this managed to get my attention. It seemed oddly appropriate for the day--Jesus in conflict with the law over the value of a life, and putting his own life in danger for the sake of another. I love it when this happens, and I've known it to happen so many times. You plan a retreat, or a Mass in honor of some event or another, and the reading of the day turns out to be just what you need. It doesn't seem like this should work, but somehow it does.

Later in the day, a man came to the door looking for something to eat. He was walking with one of those aluminum canes with 3 feet, and one of his arms was obviously very weak. I was wondering how he was ever going to carry the food back home on foot, but he told me to double-bag the food and it would be okay. While I was in the back getting some things together, he started talking to another man who was there about how he had had a stroke a short time ago and how he had been so afraid to die, but that while he was in the hospital he had learned that there really was a God. He was telling us how great the nurses were to him because when they found him on the floor in the bathroom they had helped him up and then put an alarm on the bed so they'd know if he got up again. (This is an incredibly humbling job.) Then I got to thinking that there Jesus was again, taking care of that man with the withered arm.

Before I leave work in the evenings, I try to get to the church to say the Angelus, and today when I walked into the little atrium that leads to both the church and the parish hall, there were 6 pairs of shoes of various sizes lined up in a row next to the wall like they were about to parade into the church. When I got inside, there was a family kneeling in a row and holding hands at the foot of the steps that lead up to the sanctuary. Besides the six shoe-less people, there were two babies. The mother didn't seem much older than the two teenage girls and the man with them could have been one of the children or the father. I just couldn't tell. The mother was praying that in spite of the big mess that they were, they were come there to pray to Jesus today. Then they talked for a while, and the kids were dancing around (I'm pretty sure they aren't Catholic.) And then the mother said they had never had a group hug, but they were going to have one, so they got in a huddle and said the Our Father, and left. About a minute later, one of the little girls who was about 8 or 9, and with whom I had had a certain amount of eye contact and exchanged a few smiles, came back into the church and said, "God bless you." 

All-in-all a pretty good day.

All around us everyday there are people whose lives are hovering between salvation and destruction. We talk about the Culture of Life, and the Culture of Death, and we think of them in terms of abortion or capital punishment, or euthanasia. Of course, these are all immensely important, but choosing life is so much more all-encompassing than that. Sometimes it's just a matter of listening or looking someone in the face and smiling.

AMDG

Full

Last night, lying awake in a room filled with the light of the full moon, I was remembering past moon-filled conversations and missing them, and then my Love said, "But I made the moon."

Yes. Yes, You did.

And this morning at Mass, He gave me the little moon of His Self so that I could swallow it and be filled with light.

AMDG

What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

Well, I didn't really have much of a vacation--just two days for Christmas and New Year's Day, but this is about what I did on New Year's Day.

Almost 38 years ago, my sister had a baby girl whom she put up for adoption. For all these years, I have missed my niece, and prayed for her, and felt like there was a big hole in our family, and I often hoped that I would meet her one day. And, that is what I did on New Year's Day.

So, here we have my mother, my sister, Lisa, with her arms around her granddaughter, Olivia, and my niece, Nikki.

It was a great visit. Everybody got along. Nikki and her daughter fit right in. All in all it was the best possible Christmas present.

And I really am going to write a blog post soon. I'm working on one now.

AMDG