CATHERINE AND HER INCOMPARABLE DIALOGUE

In the words of St. Paul VI, Saint Catherine of Siena was "a unique phenomenon… among the sweetest, most original and greatest [saints] history has ever recorded." I wish to present briefly the 14^th Century Dominican saint and focus on her The Dialogue.

Catherine Benincasa is born on March 25, 1347 in Siena, Italy. Jacobo and Lapa, her parents, had twenty-five children. Catherine, their twenty third, was a pious girl devoted to Jesus and to Mary. Early in her life, Catherine offered her life to Christ, her Spouse, and made for him an interior cell in her heart. When she was about seventeen years old, Catherine joined in Siena the “Mantellata,” a group of lay women of the Order of Penance of Saint Dominic, and began a three-year period of prayer and penance while leaving in seclusion at her home. At about twenty, Catherine leaves her home – but never leaving her interior cell - and dedicates herself to serve, with her many disciples, the neighbor, especially the needy neighbor, and the Church, and to promote peace

Catherine died on April 29, 1380, after much suffering. She was canonized by Pius II in 1461, proclaimed a co-patron of Europe by Pope Pius XII in 1939, and declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970. St. Catherine is also copatron of Italy and one of the patrons of the Diocese of Macau (China).

Catherine wrote a major work of spiritual and mystical life: the Dialogue, or the Book of Divine Providence, which is a conversation between God the Father and Catherine. As it has been said, more than a book it is Catherine’s fascinating life. She also wrote hundreds of moving letters and about forty-eight soliloquies and prayers uttered by her during periods of ecstasy or while praying aloud. In her works, extension of her attractive life, Catherine links marvelously contemplation and action, prayer and compassion. 

The Dialogue is not easy reading and often repetitive, but it is certainly worth reading – and must be read. It is a “classic” of Christian spirituality and therefore always timely and timeless. It is amazing to realize that an unlettered young woman, who learned to read late in life and did not know how to write well, was able to dictate the incredible conversations (her method of inspired teaching) between God the Father and herself.   

An inevitable question: Where did she learn that marvelous doctrine of Christian and mystical spirituality?  Catherine’s answer, according to her confessor Blessed Raymond of Capua: “From Jesus, my Lord and Teacher, who talked to me as I am talking to you now.” Catherine thanks God for it: “The doctrine of the truth that you have communicated to me is a special grace, besides the common that you give to the other creatures.” Evidently, Blessed Raymond of Capua, her other confessors, and Dominican preachers taught her sound doctrine. She loved very much the “glorious Thomas [Aquinas].”

The Dialogue is generally divided into 167 chapters, generally short. It starts with an introduction (Chas. 1-2), continues with her doctrine on perfection (3-12), on the dialogue (13-25), on the doctrine on the Bridge (26 - 87), tears (88 - 97), truth (98 – 109), the Mystical Body of the Church (110 – 134), divine providence (135 – 153), and finally, on obedience (154 – 165). She concludes her Dialogue with a summary and a song of grateful praise to God (166-167). (We have read and translated from the excellent Spanish edition and translation by Jose Salvador y Conde. Obras de Santa Catalina de Siena, El Diálogo - Madrid: BAC, 2018, 434 Pages).

God, Eternal Trinity, created us to have eternal life, through the blood of Christ Crucified. No one can go to the Father without the aid of Jesus, who is the Bridge. God the Father tells her: “The soul united to him by his divine love is ‘another I’.” She repeats: “You [God the Father] are the one who is and I am the one who is not.” The sweet union of the soul with God in holy communion: “the soul is in God and God in the soul like the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.”

Catherine’s doctrine on the Bridge is considered one of her most innovative teachings. The Bridge is the Only-Begotten Son of God, the sweet Jesus, God and man, Christ crucified and risen, mediator between God and humanity. Redemption and grace come from the Blood of Jesus. The Bridge has three states or steps represented by the feet, the side, and the mouth of Jesus crucified. In the first, the soul leaves vices; in the second, the soul lives of the love of virtues; and in the third – the mouth -, the soul finds great peace and stillness.

The Bridge is built up with the stones of true virtues. Charity is the queen of virtues and the one that gives life to all other virtues, and the only virtue that enters heaven. Humility, a very important virtue for the saint of Siena, is the wet nurse of Charity, and patience, its marrow. Most holy faith is rooted in obedience, another virtue highlighted by the saint of Siena. 

Christian life, guided by the Holy Spirit, is permeated constantly by “humble and holy prayer” – of gratitude, of praise, and especially of petition: “Ask, then, because I [God the Father] do mercy” and invites all to knock at the door of Truth, his Son. Catherine sighs: “Oh Love! I have overcome you with your very love.” 

In the Bridge there is a shop: the Garden of the Church, where the pilgrim receives the Bread of Life and the Blood of Christ. The Church is the vineyard of the mystical body, and Jesus is the grapevine in which we are grafted. Catharine laments: Those who are not thus grafted will soon become rebels who will be like members separated from the body and will soon rot.

The Saint of Siena speaks of another bridge: the bridge over the river where those with grave sins may sink and drown. For them also – for all -, the door of God’s mercy is always open. Catherine cautions us kindly: selfish love is the source of all evil. Selfish love is a rotten tree planted in the mountain of pride.  God the Father tells St. Catherine – and us: “To obtain eternal life, it is not enough that my Son is the bridge, but that you utilize it.”

Christ, our Bridge of salvation, invites us to live compassionate, fraternal, joyful and prayerful lives. Thus, we contribute to building bridges in our divided world: bridges of justice, solidarity and fraternity among nations, families, political parties, religions and cultures; bridges that replace existing walls of pride, hatred, violence and racism. FG

 

CALLED TO BE MYSTICS

All saints and mystics speak to us of God One and Triune and of God’s love, and of their experience of the existential presence of God in their lives. They talk to us of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is their spiritual master, mystic par excellence and lover, and of the Holy Spirit, who dwells -with the Father and the Son - in the depth of the soul and gives divine grace and his Gifts. They talk affectively and effectively in their teachings and, above all, with the moving testimony of their life of love, humility, prayer, detachment, the cross, joy, contemplation and compassion.

After carefully studying the classics of Christian spirituality, theologian Peter John Cameron concludes that he finds in them seven recurrent themes: belief in God’s love (1); God’s mercy, sin, and the mode of the soul (2); the instrumentality of the Church and the communion of saints (3); the importance of prayer and struggles with aridity (4); the dynamics of detachment and holy indifference (5); the redemptive role of suffering (6), and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (7).

Although mystical life has often been almost exclusively connected with extraordinary supernatural phenomena, in reality it is similar to spiritual/moral life, to a good Christian life, which begins with the presence of God’s grace (and the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity) in the soul and develops through the experiential realization of that loving presence in a virtuous life. Mystical life, writes H. C. Graef, “is nothing else but the life of grace lived at its highest level.” For Meister Eckhart the beginning of a mystical life consists in “living a Christian life in all seriousness and fulfilling the established moral duties.” For his part, his brother Dominican Henry de Suso adds: the mystical life is “the way to live everyday life in freedom and in serene interior abandonment, and to make of the daily conflicts and disappointments an opening to God.” “To reach perfection does not consist in obtaining mercies, neither in having the gift of tongues or the spirit of prophecy, but in conforming our own will to God’s will, in such a way that anything that He wants we want also, and accept it joyfully, whether it is tasteful or bitter” (St. Teresa of Avila).

 The mystics are often sidelined by Christians, as if they were to be admired but not imitated. They are considered as unreachable; but they are reachable. We just have to read their lives and their teachings to convince ourselves of their accessibility. Besides, they themselves consider their visions, levitations, ecstasies as accidental. An expert on the matter tells us: “If we were more familiar with the masters of Christian spirituality, then it would be less likely for young people to go after some oriental guru to slake or quench their thirst for the spiritual” (Jacques Philippe).

All believers in God are called to holiness, that is, to a mystical life, which is an ascending loving union with Christ. We read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “God calls us all to this intimate union with him, even if the special graces or extraordinary signs of the mystical life are granted only to some for the sake of manifesting the gratuitous gift given to all” (CCC, 2014).

Mystical life, then, simply means loving union with Christ, which is called mystical “because it participates in the mystery of Christ through the sacraments – ‘the holy mysteries’ – and, in Him, in the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. Thus, for the disciples of Jesus, holiness means loving and intimate union with God the Father, through Jesus Christ - God and man - and in the Holy Spirit

There is within each human person a clear or obscure - mysterious - search for God, a longing for divinization in all religions. In the three Abrahamic religions, there is a desire to be one-with-God, to experience God in daily life. For the followers of Christ, experiencing God in Christ implies necessarily experiencing the presence of the neighbor, our brother or sister. St. Thomas Aquinas, theologian and mystic says that love of neighbor may be higher than contemplation: “Therefore, to labor for the salvation of our neighbor even at the expense of contemplation, for the love of God and neighbor, appears to be a higher perfection of charity than if he would cling so dearly to the sweetness of contemplation as to be totally unwilling to sacrifice it even for the salvation of others.” Pope Francis quotes the Angelic Doctor: The noblest deeds are the works of mercy, “even more than our acts of worship”; “Mercy is the beating heart of the Gospel,” and loving the needy neighbor is the priority, the distinguishing characteristic of all the followers of Jesus, “the great criterion” of holiness also today.

Words to ponder, from Pope Francis: Holiness “is not swooning in mystic rapture,” but in practicing the preferential love for the poor. This special love of the needy neighbor is not – cannot be – opposed to love of God in prayer and worship. The Argentine Pope adds: “I don’t believe in holiness without prayer.” Truly, “the primacy belongs to our relationship with God, but we cannot forget that the ultimate criterion on which our lives will be judged is what we have done for others” (Gaudete et Exultate; cf. Mt 25:40, 45).

Spiritual/Mystical life leads us progressively towards a deeper experience of God in our lives, to experiencing God One and Triune in ourselves, in others, in the needy and poor of the earth, and also in God’s creation. Indeed, in our time the mystical dimension of creation is especially felt: nature is our common home, which is permeated by the power and beauty of God. It is said of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) that her first book was the Breviary “after the stars and the flowers” (Perez de Urbel). She experienced ecstasy contemplating a flower or the sunset.  A mystic of nature, Jakob Bohme (1575-1624) writes: “You will not find a better book that will help you to know in depth the divine wisdom than a walk through a green meadow: there you will smell and taste the marvelous energy of God.”

Let us close these pilgrim’s notes with the sublime verses of St. John of the Cross in his awesome Spiritual Canticle:

Pouring out a thousand graces, / He [Jesus] passed these groves in haste;

/ And having looked at them, / With his image alone, / clothed them in beauty.

(FGB)

 

ARE YOU HAPPY?

In his visits to the brothers, the Master of the Order of Preachers Timothy Radcliffe started the dialogue with a question: Are you happy?

We all want to be happy. The universal longing for happiness is natural – and not free: “To want to be happy is not an object of decision… Every free moral decision is a quest for happiness” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae). Unfortunately, many among us are not happy. As A. Camus said: “Men die and are not happy.” And we are not happy – at east relatively happy – because perhaps we look for happiness where it is not found, in utopian places. Maybe, many of us place our eyes on objects, things, persons that do not – cannot – make us fully happy, although they may contribute to our happiness. What are the usual objects upon which humans place their search for happiness? Money, power, pleasure, honors, fame, science, etc.

SEARCHING FOR TRUE HAPPINESS

The great philosophers and religious leaders show to us with their lives and their teachings the road of and to happiness: They are, generally, the happiest persons on earth. For Socrates, for instance, knowing what is right necessarily implies doing right: “He who knows what is right, will do right, because why would anybody choose to be unhappy?” Certainly, we all want to be truly happy: “living well and doing good is similar to being happy” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics). Following Aristotle, Tomas de Aquino tells us that “every agent acts for an end,” and consequently the end – the ultimate end really – is what we need to know to be able to walk on the right direction.

I remember the expression of philosopher Seneca: “There is no favorable wind for one who does not know where he is going.” In his passionate search for full happiness, Saint Thomas approaches money, power, pleasure, honors, science… to conclude that the possession of these objects can and should contribute to our happiness, but by themselves are neither sufficient nor the main ones to provide true happiness.. 

The happiness that Jesus preaches and lives, on the other hand, is very different from the one preached by our individualistic, secular and consumeristic world. Jesus speaks to us of the Beatitudes (cf. Matthew chap. 5) as the way of happiness and to full happiness. How to be blessed, happy?  By straggling to be poor in spirit, merciful, peacemakers, meek, sufferers for the sake of justice and nonviolence, and persons who forgive all, including their enemies. For St. Augustine, the Beatitudes – the core of the Sermon of the Mount– are the answer of Jesus to the universal longing for happiness. As it has been said correctly, the Beatitudes are eight forms of happiness.

VIRTUE, LOVE, GOD

The road to happiness cannot be evil, hatred, violence, selfishness, mere success. “The (ethical) evil is always a degradation, sinking” (Jose Maria Marina). Authoritative words: “Calmness and a modest life bring more happiness than the chase of success combined with constant agitation” (Albert Einstein).

Aquinas opens his moral theology with the treatise of beatitude – or happiness - as the end of the journey that we walk by the path of virtues. For the Angelic Doctor, the ultimate end is beatitude, full happiness, or the supreme good.  Aristotle tells us that happiness is the reward of virtue. Happiness, Aquinas adds, “Consists in the practice of virtue.” The practice of virtues improves the moral vision of life – and happiness.

A good life is an ethical life: “It is criminal that the teaching of ethics be eliminated from schools”  (Jose Antonio Marina, Ética para náufragos). An ethical life is a virtuous life, that is, a life that respects the moral values.

Hence, the good life of a pilgrim –we are all pilgrims – is an ethical life, that is, a life which from virtue issues corresponding good deeds (compassion trough repeated acts of compassion). In Christian perspective, the theological virtues are infused by God while the moral virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance…) may be acquired and also infused by God with the virtues of faith, hope and love and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Virtues are connected. One virtue, however, stands out over all the others that are vivified and given extra value by it: the virtue of love. In ethical perspective, without love, everything values little. Thus, the search for happiness is a continuing search for love. Love is the greatest and most perfect human and Christian value and virtue, and it radically means to get out of ourselves, of our fat ego.

For all humans, selfishness is an obstacle on our journey of happiness to full happiness. For the believer, the center of his or her life is not he himself or she herself but God, and in God all the others. Knowingly or unknowingly, the natural longing towards total happiness, towards infinite love is God: our quest for happiness is a mysterious search for God, who placed in our hearts that natural longing for happiness. For the Bishop of Hippo, morality is a search for happiness, that is, for God, who wants us to be happy. Not only that, God wants us to share in his divine happiness: man, creature of God is called by God “as a son to intimacy with God and to share in his happiness” (Vatican II, GS 21). Hence, “There is only one happiness: to please Him [God]. Only one sorrow, to be displeasing to Him, to refuse Him something, to turn away from Him” (Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain). Indeed, "Solo Dios basta” (Saint Teresa of Ávila).

Are you happy? Am I happy? The journey of life goes forward only with steps of love: love of all neighbours, especially the poor and marginalized neighbours, love of creation, and radically and ultimately love of God - with the very love of God in our hearts: “Thou have made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee” (St. Augustine, Confessions).