A River of Companions

     When I was growing up, one of my favorite books was Heroines of Christ, a collection of pious essays about saintly women given to me by one of the authors, a Jesuit uncle of mine. It was full of tales of women engaged in heroic endeavors: Joan of Arc rescuing France from the English; Catherine of Siena dragging the Popes back to Rome from Avignon; Kateri Tekakwitha withstanding the ravages of smallpox and the persecution she suffered from her own people as a result of her vow of virginity.

     These were thrilling stories to a girl, each one an introduction to a vivid and courageous woman. Fortunately for me, the flowery prose, the remote settings, and the serene perseverance of these women in dreadful circumstances (along with their regular, easy communications with the divine) kept me from feeling that I actually had to be like them. They were saints, after all, not normal people!

     Funny, then, that so many years later I feel drawn to the saints, not so much as paragons of virtue, but rather as companions. Decades of living in the messy world, and a growing sense that the Vatican II promise of church renewal may be fading, have left me with a yearning to find out how men and women we remember and celebrate as saints (official or unofficial) kept the faith in difficult times. Perhaps because I have come to know some genuinely holy people who are also flawed and complicated like the rest of us, saints no longer seem so remote. In fact they seem ready at hand, beckoning almost.

     The Book of Wisdom says that in every generation Sophia –Wisdom --passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets. Hebrews says that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. We profess in the Creed our belief in the communion of saints: our Catholic cosmos is crowded not only by those present but by those who have gone before. Theologian Elizabeth Johnson writes that we contemporary Catholics can be in communion with all those whose adventure of faith opens a way for us.  Indeed, together we form “an ongoing river of companions seeking God.”

     How is it that we can learn from our saintly companions? The late theologian William Spohn wrote in his book Go and Do Likewise about the way Jesus taught us. In response to a lawyer’s question about who a good neighbor might be, Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the lawyer acknowledged the Samaritan, the one who had mercy, as the model neighbor. Jesus then said simply, “Go and do likewise.” He didn’t say: “Go and do exactly the same.” He didn’t give a set of rules for being neighborly. What Jesus taught us is that we are to “spot the rhyme” between His words and deeds and our own present experience. We do this through discerning the authentic reflection of Jesus’s example in our own lives, and, through the grace of God, living it.

     And so it is with the saints. Few of them lived in Jesus’ time, either. They were people just as we are, in equally chaotic and confusing times. But in following Jesus as disciples, in living in prayerful communion with Him, in seeking always to act as He would have, they made of their lives magnificent rhymes of His. Sophia entered into them, and they became friends of God and prophets to us.

     Not all the saints we read about will move us; in fact some of their lives may seem incomprehensible. As a contented wife and mother and grandmother-to-be, the struggles of so many saints to remain virgins can be difficult to understand. But as a fellow vegetarian, I am touched by the tenderness of Nicholas of Tolentino, who when presented with a nice roasted fowl, blessed the bird, who thereupon flew out the window! Whether it is Francis taming the wolf that was terrorizing Gubbio, or the wounded Ignatius pondering his calling at Manresa, or Mary MacKillop bearing up under her excommunication, these are our family stories.

     And sometimes we find a woman or a man whose life becomes a brilliant torch along our way. For me it is Oscar Romero, an aristocratic, shy, bookish man whose heart was broken by the murder of his Jesuit friend Rutilio Grande by government forces. It was then he began his own way of the cross: “It is my lot to gather up the trampled, the dead, and all that the persecution of the Church leaves behind.” His lot, until he himself, bearing the suffering of his people, was martyred, at the altar.

     Twenty years later, March 24, 2000, I marched through the streets of San Salvador to commemorate his death, with what seemed like the entire population of El Salvador. The crowd was at once reverent and joyful; people wept and danced and prayed their rosaries. From blocks away we heard Mass celebrated outside the cathedral where Romero is entombed, echoing through streets filled with a million people at prayer. They spoke of Romero as though he were with us. And one could feel him there, great friend to the poor, great companion to his people that he was, great companion to us that he is.

Catherine Wolff is the former director of the Arrupe Center for Community-Based Learning at Santa Clara University, and a long time CC@S member