A Reflection for the Memorial of Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin and Doctor of the Church
Some years ago, I was invited to a writing experiment with a group of scholars, scientists and artists. Our charge was simple: “If you could share a meal with anyone in history, who might that be, and what might that conversation be like?” We were imagining a dinner party without boundaries and full of revelatory possibility. It was an invigorating Ignatian exercise asking us to become active participants in history and to learn from those encounters. Through it, we “met” new friends and stretched our horizons. I invite you to ask yourself this same question.
Given the abundance of over two millennia of our community’s history, who might you choose as your dinner companion, and if we were listening in, what might we hear?
Our sacred Scriptures are full of great candidates to join us at this table. From multiple time periods, in different parts of the ancient world, representing a variety of communities, languages, customs and social circles, they nevertheless shared something intrinsic with us, they all sought to hear “words of eternal life” (Jn 6:68).
Who will your dinner companions be, and how will they awaken you to a renewed life?
Our imagination might fly to Peter, who the Scriptures tell us was simply a neighborhood friend, a family man and good at fishing. It seems that it is his very ordinariness that Jesus most values. Peter’s journey from making the horrifying mistake of pretending not to know Jesus to save his own skin, to leading the efforts of building up the newly birthed Church, gives us hope through our flaws. We might ask him, “Peter, how did you not sink into despair and self-hatred? How did you get up and begin again?”
Another dinner companion might be Aeneas, whose fragile body had kept him bedridden, but who was introduced to the words of abundant life of Jesus by Peter’s renewed faith. “Tell us your story Aeneas,” we might ask, “what was it like to get up, walk out your door and begin a full life again?”
And of course, there’s Tabitha who seems to be an essential part of this nascent community of disciples of Jesus. She is remembered as an active minister, dedicated to serving the poor and vulnerable. Her story reminds us that this new community functioned as Paul describes in his letter to the Galatians, erasing all boundaries in truly radical equality and unity in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28). What would you ask her? “Tabitha, were you moved that your friends and the widows you helped were surrounding your bed as Peter’s prayer was answered? And when you opened your eyes, how did the love of this community sustain you in a ministry that was undoubtedly hard and required much of you?”
Still, our imagination may turn in a different direction and we might want to devote not one dinner but many to conversing with Catherine of Siena. There’s just so much to ask her! Where to begin? I would be excited to bring her up to date. I would want to tell her that thanks to Pope Paul VI, in 1970 within one week of each other, two women were proclaimed “doctors of the Church,” the first women ever, after 31 men. The first was Teresa de Jesús from the cold hills of Avila in Spain and the second was Catherine. It took the official Church almost 600 years to declare what the people of Catherine’s time had witnessed, that she was a passionate lover and advocate for the abundance of God’s mercy for all and in all. How did a young woman of the 14th century, who taught herself to write, and who lived in a world where in almost everything she did she was “the first” or the “only,” grab on to life in God as revealed in Christ with such extraordinary vision and vigor? “What can you teach us, Catherine, about perseverance and fearlessness for and with others?”
Who will your dinner companions be, and how will they awaken you to a renewed life? Peter, Aeneas, Tabitha and Catherine, what a great gift it is to call you friends.
