You are called to be a saint!
You’ve heard that before, right? It’s an astounding call, yet perhaps it can seem out of reach, like an ideal only meant for some. Or, maybe the call to be a saint is too abrupt, impossible to answer in my current life situation, so I answer à la St. Augustine, “Not just yet, Lord.”
What if instead we said, “You’re called to become a saint?” Maybe that’s easier to swallow—“You know, maybe I could take a step right now.” There’s a becoming involved in sanctity, and that’s an important reality check.
Dawn Eden has a powerful insight in one of her books:
Here is where the saints have something to show us. We tend to think of the saints in heaven as being perfect, which they are, but it would be more descriptive to say they have been perfected. Likewise, we think of the saints as being pure, which they also are, but it would be truer to say they have been purified. (Introduction, xxix)
Saints have a past. Maybe that’s our present.
Now, I know fall has officially begun, but the hot DC weather is still telling me it’s summer, so a Throwback Thursday to add to our summer readings suggestions can’t be too out of line to illustrate the above point in a powerful way. Rumer Godden’s Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is a gem: soul-wrenching for the evil that characters suffer, yet awesome (literally) for its depiction of God’s grace.
We follow the not-entirely fictitious Soeur (French for “Sister”) Lise, a Dominican Sister of Bethany, as she moves through formation. Catching glimpses of her past through her memories, we quickly realize that she is not the stereotyped pious girl who inevitably ends up as a religious sister. Far from it.
Soeur Lise received her call in prison. There, she encountered the Sisters of Bethany, a congregation inspired by the life of St. Mary Magdalene and established in 1867 by the French Dominican Jean-Joseph Lataste to minister to abused and imprisoned women. This congregation not only accepts women from “the outside” but also, after a careful and lengthy scrutiny, those from “the inside”—from prison. Yet, once together under the same roof of the convent, no one can ask who was who.
Before becoming a sister, Lise was in a dark situation. She had been manipulated to think she was in love with a brothel owner, who then trained her to help him run his seedy business. Mired in sins of the flesh for years, she ended up in prison for a different crime (that I don’t want to spoil) while trying to protect one of the girls. It was there that she encountered God’s grace in a startling new and re-creative way.
We see her becoming as a graced handing-over of her past wounds to Christ’s healing mercy, which is captured for us in her recounting of past memories, now as a Sister of Bethany. All had not been lost in her darkness: God still wanted her to become a saint.
Godden, much like Dawn Eden, leaves us with a profound realization from someone so scarred in body and soul. It was the day of Soeur Lise’s final profession of vows:
Lise was blessed; then came the blessings of her veil “in the hope,” Soeur Marie Emmanuel had explained, “that when you wear it you may be pure in soul and body.”
“I!” thought Lise, and then, “Why, perhaps I am now—not pure but purified…” (187)
Becoming is truly in us, yet it is primarily God’s merciful work accomplished through time by grace. Let us become saints, then—by his hands.
✠
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