Saturday, November 4, 2017

“Relics and Roadmaps” - November 5, 2017




Revelation 7:9-17


I finished cleaning my desk recently.  It was a job that took a couple of weeks, with a few minutes here and there every day.  In the course of it, I found a card with a picture of a nun and a small piece of cloth attached to it, noting that it was a “second degree relic” of the Blessed (now officially Saint) Katharine Drexel.  I told Father Newns about it, and he got all excited – his father had been a student, long ago, at the trade school she had founded in Bensalem.  I figured that a relic attached to a Roman Catholic saint probably belongs more down the street at St. Ann’s than it does on my desk underneath a pile of charge conference reports and a bottle of Elmer’s glue, so that’s where it is now.

Let me share the letter that I sent with it.

“Dear Father Newns,
            Enclosed is a relic of one of our local saints, Mother Katharine Drexel.  I want to get it to you as a gift for St. Ann’s Church before All Saints’ Day brings the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.  It has taken us five centuries to stop shouting at one another so loudly that we cannot hear ourselves saying many of the same things, but I am glad that in many ways, despite our unresolved differences we can at least recognize the shared commitment to the life of faith and the work of grace in the lives of people like Katharine Drexel and find encouragement in that “cloud of witnesses”.
            As far as the provenance of this small piece of cloth:  It is attached to a card with the May 20, 1992 Nihil Obstat of Msgr. Thomas Herron and Imprimatur of Cardinal Bevilaqua.  That should cover its source.  More particularly, it came to me sometime between 1994 and 1998 when I served Holmesburg United Methodist Church and had a parishioner who worked at the convent of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Bensalem.  She offered to arrange a visit, and I was shown around by a sister who had been a novice when Mother Katharine was elderly.  One story she shared has stuck with me because there’s something in it that speaks to Katharine Drexel’s personality.  My guide had been assigned to be her night-time attendant, and told me that she would be awakened regularly by the call, “Spectacles!  Spectacles!”  Going into her room, she would help her put her glasses on, then Katharine Drexel would lift a watch that hung on a chain around her neck, glance at the time, grunt and nod, remove the glasses (with help), and fall back to sleep immediately.  She remained decisive to the end.
            As I read about people like Katharine Drexel or Teresa of Avila or Francis of Assisi I ponder the thin line between stubbornness and perseverance, single-mindedness and short-sightedness, and how one of the great gifts we have in these saints is the lesson to be patient with the hardheaded people who can become either the reformers that any organization needs from time to time or who act as the brakes on those who go too far.  Of course, in the particular case of Katharine Drexel, I also find myself grateful for the good work that her forceful personality brought about, work that you and many others in this area are able to attest to personally.  That is yet another reason I am glad to be able to place this item, along with the leaflets I was given in Bensalem at that time, into your hands.
Grace and Peace,                                                                                        R. Mark Young”
            The part of history that doesn’t go into this letter, but is well known around Philadelphia, is that Katharine Drexel was often difficult to work with.  One of the things that the nuns saved were her pencils.  She was big on not wasting anything, and she used her pencils down to the very stub, smaller than the kind you see at Putt-Putt or a bowling alley.  The odd thing, though, is that every one of those pencils had a complete eraser.  As one of my friends remarked, “That was a woman who never had a second thought.”

            We put people who have been close to Christ on a pedestal sometimes, but in our heart of hearts we remember them not as statues but as human beings, with faults and flaws – and that is exactly what makes them important to remember.  (Here I speak of all of God’s saints, not just the people who are given that title, but everyone whom we know whose lives have been touched by God’s grace and who, in turn, have blessed our lives in some way, in any way that reveals Jesus’ universal love.)  Saints are not angels.  They are human beings, no different from you and me.  And you and I are, by God’s grace, no different from them.  In fact, it might be our worst attributes that God uses to his glory.

            Not long after I moved to a new church, I got a phone call from my successor, who had a problem.  Someone had died, and the funeral was looming, and she had met with the family and nobody wanted to say much about the man who had died.  Did I know anything?  I gulped, and then told her about the visits where the deceased went into great detail about his fights with his neighbors.  I told her about how we took the youth group Christmas caroling to his house each year and how he closed the door in their face with comments that would have made Ebenezer Scrooge blush.  How did he get to be that way?  I had no idea.  His family said that he had been disagreeable from childhood on.  What would she say?

            A week later we spoke again.  She told me she saw no reason to beat around the bush.  She had said that the gospel is not about people being likeable.  It’s about God loving us as we are, even if we are so miserable that nobody wants to be around us, and that it doesn’t matter what we think of somebody, they are still and forever beloved by God.  God’s love is not like ours, conditional and limited.

            John’s vision of the saints gathered around the throne in heaven isn’t about them.  It’s about Jesus’ willingness to give his life for them – and for us. 

“After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,
‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’
And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, singing,
‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honor
and power and might
be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.’”
[Revelation 7:9-12]

In that, we have a vision, not of the relics of our present lives, but a roadmap for what God has in store.  There is so very much that we leave behind, but so very much more that is given to us when the Holy Spirit puts all of our humanness to work, warts and all.

            Be yourself.  You are the person that God has in mind, and who knows where that may lead?



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