The
Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)
Sacred
Heart Convent
Springfield,
Illinois
Dear Sisters,
A few moments ago, we asked
almighty God to give us, in his mercy, “what prayer does not dare to ask.”[1] We
know that God “wishes to give us more than forgiveness, more than our desires,
more even than what we know to ask, or dare
to ask.”[2] But what does this mean?
What is it that prayer does not dare to ask?
The answer to this question is, I think,
hidden within the text from the Letter to the Hebrews: “For it was fitting that
he, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to
glory, should make the leader of their salvation perfect through suffering”
(Hebrews 2:10). The Greek word translated for us as “leader” can also be
translated as “pioneer” or “author.” This is why Mary Healy rightly says that
“Jesus is not only the cause of our salvation but also the pioneer, the one who
blazed before us the difficult trail from human fallenness to divine glory. We
experience nothing on the path to salvation that he did not endure before us.”[3] If
Jesus is our pioneer along the via
dolorosa, does it not follow that we who are called to follow him must also
make our way along the way of the Cross if we hope to be perfected in him? How
often do we dare to ask for this perfect unity with Christ Jesus?
Two days ago, Mother Church
celebrated the great witness of her sons who was brought to glory through
perfection in suffering: Saint Francis of Assisi. (You will forgive me, I hope,
for speaking of a Franciscan in a Dominican convent with so many Dominica
Saints before us; having studied with Franciscans, I know more about Saint
Francis than I do about Saint Dominic.) It was he, of course, who received the
sacred stigmata – the five holy wounds of the Savior – upon his body just two
years before he entered into the joy of his Master (cf. Matthew 25:23). What is
perhaps less well known about Saint Francis is that his reception of the
stigmata followed two requests he asked of God.
Because “Jesus Christ crucified
always rested like a bundle of myrrh in the bosom of Francis’ soul, and he
longed to be totally transformed into him by the fire of ecstatic love,” he
ascended Mount La Verna for a period of prayer (cf. Song of Songs 1:13).[4] He
was on Mount La Verna on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross when he
said to God what few of us would ever dream of saying:
My Lord Jesus
Christ, I pray you to grant me two graces before I die: the first is that
during my life I may feel in my soul and in my body, as much as possible, that
pain which You, dear Jesus, sustained in the hour of Your most bitter
passion. The second is that I may feel in my heart, as much as possible,
that excessive love with which You, O Son of God, were inflamed in willingly
enduring such suffering for us sinners.[5]
With these two requests, the
Seraphic Father asked to share completely in the Cross of Christ. Is this not
what, for most of us, prayer does not dare to ask?
It was after he made this prayer
that “he saw a man with six wings like a seraph whose hands were outstretched
and whose feet were joined together, and who was nailed to the cross.”[6] As
Saint Francis contemplated this vision, Thomas of Celano tells us
 |
| MS 18851 f. 469v |
…the
blessed servant of the Most High was filled with admiration, but he was unable
to understand the meaning of the vision. He was inflamed with joy by the loving
sweetness of the Seraph’s glance, which was immeasurably beautiful, yet he was
terrified by the consideration of the cross to which he was nailed and the
bitterness of his passion. He got up feeling sad yet happy at the same time, if
this is what we call it, and joy and sorrow were intermingled in him… He could
not understand anything specific and was engrossed with the uniqueness of the
vision, when the signs of the nails began to appear on his hands and feet, just
like the ones on the man he had seen crucified above him just a short time
before.
His
hands and feet were pierced right through the middle by nails and the heads of
these nails could be seen in the palms of his hands and on the upper part of
his feet, whereas the ends came out on the opposite side…. Moreover, his right
side looked as if it had been pierced by a lance and had a long scar that bled
frequently…[7]
If we happened to muster up the
courage to ask to feel in our bodies and in our souls all that Jesus
experienced on the Cross, would we welcome these signs of the Savior’s love?
The early followers of Saint Francis looked upon them “pearls, like most
precious gems” that made him “more wonderfully rich in honor and glory than any
other man…”[8] Even so, the Poverello
kept the stigmata as secret as he could.
Dear Sisters, to be so closely
conformed to Jesus Christ that we feel in both body and heart all that the Lord
endured for us because of his love, is this not what prayer does not dare to
ask? And yet, is this not precisely what you and I have been called to share?
Is this not what we have promised to seek? Let us, then, not shy away from the
Cross, but let us – with Saint Francis – seek to embrace it and so be perfected
through the fire of ecstatic love. May the Lord, in his mercy, perfect us and
bring us to glory. Amen.
[1] Collect of the Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Roman Missal.
[2] Anthony Esolen, The Beauty of the Word: A Running Commentary
on the Roman Missal (New York: Magnificat, 2012), 184.
[3] Mary Healy, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: Hebrews (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Baker Academic, 2016), 62.
[4] Saint Bonaventure, The Major Life of St. Francis, 9.2.
[5] The Little Flowers of St. Francis, 190-191.
[6] Thomas of Celano, The First Life, 2.94.
[7] Ibid, 2.94-95.
[8] Ibid, 95.
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