Your body is magnificently yours alone, but it is also true that the people you love receive from your body in important ways. Your flesh and blood actually make life more comforting and less lonely for others. The wonder of being human is the endless domino effect of how our presence touches the hearts of others—often in ways we will never know. When you hug a friend, make eye contact with a stranger, put a child on your lap, or caress a lover, you are opening yourself to allow God to communicate to another person through your body. We don’t usually think of it that way, but if God is love, then that’s exactly what is taking place. When your body communicates love to the world, it is acting as a vessel of God’s Spirit.
Your body is not an end in itself; rather, it offers the gift of tangible connection to the spiritual world. As a human, you experience God in and through your physical body. Perhaps this looks like kneeling and standing through your worship service. Perhaps it looks like singing or dancing. Perhaps for you it is hiking through the woods or meditating in the grass. The way you reach out for God might differ from the way of the next person, but you can be sure that if your heart desires divine encounters, then your body will put itself to good use to make them happen. Have you ever thanked your body for this gift?
For the fact that your limbs and senses help you organize your spiritual experience in a way that you can understand and recognize? When you consistently honor your body for this holy gift, it becomes harder to criticize and despise it. When you can feel the very life of God flowing in and through your body, connecting you to transcendence itself, it becomes easier to accept whatever shape it happens to take.
Our world is one that is breaking from pain and sin in every direction we look, it seems. But we do not have to give up hope, because we are women who see. If we will set our hearts on the discipline of prayer and give up the things that keep us from living wholly dependent on him, we will see God in action, recognize him at work, and have the courage to go out and proclaim his presence with great rejoicing. Our homes, our towns, and our world need us to be women of vision. They need us to know when God is stirring and to show up to witness his coming. They need us to run out rejoicing because we have hoped in him and seen our hopes confirmed.
“Why are you weeping?” the angels ask her as she leans into the tomb. Mary Magdalene is not ashamed of her emotion; she is not hesitant in her answer. She is missing her Lord. No, she does not fully grasp the great theological mysteries of the passion and the resurrection that she is about to encounter. She cannot explain that she leans in to look because everything about Jesus indicated there was something greater coming on the other side of his hideous death. All she knows is that she is there because she is looking for her Lord. And that is enough to lead her straight to the Resurrected One. Whatever has brought you to the tomb weeping, know that you are made for resurrection joy. Stay, lean in, and look for the Lord.
Before you know it, he will be there beside you in all his glory. And he will fill you with a joy that bubbles over and overflows and sends you out as an apostle of the Good News. And when you see him? Oh, when he calls your name and you recognize his voice? You will be transformed! You, friend, will become a new creation, one who has drawn near to Christ in sickness and in suffering, in sin and shame, and been made new. You will become one who now knows that the end of the story is that he defeats it all and comes back to offer us a life of hope. And then he sends us to offer that hope to a world so desperately in need of it. He is calling your name. Do you recognize his voice? Turn, friend, and in his face, be reminded of who it is he says that you are.
They say that Mary Magdalene becomes the apostle to the apostles after she encounters Jesus risen. I wonder now if what she might have to teach them is this: the message of a heart that is rejoicing with resurrection joy. Though she is unable to explain what happened or how Christ is here, she explodes with the impetuous and overwhelming joy that it is to recognize the resurrected Christ when he calls your name. I wonder if she was sent out as the apostle of the heart, the one who hurries to where the others, who try to figure it all out with their heads, have gone so she can awaken their hearts.
Mary runs out to the apostles to tell them the good news so that they can stop trying to figure out the tomb and simply rejoice. When she reaches out for Jesus in the garden, he tells her that she cannot hold on to him. As much as I am sure her heart would have liked to stay there in that moment forever, in that cocoon where it was just her and her Lord, her heart awakening to the “alleluia” life of the resurrection, she has a job to do. This joy is not meant only for her. It belongs to all his followers, to the whole world. She is sent to the apostles, who are then sent to the ends of the earth. Mary Magdalene bears the Good News to the Good News bearers. She is the first to know resurrection joy and the first to share it.
“Thanks be to God” was the prayer most often on his lips, coming directly from his heart. Always filled with a true sense of gratitude himself, first to God and then to the benefactors, he tried to lead others to this attitude. In 1937 he was invited to deliver a little “radio address” at the time of a benefit party arranged for the soup kitchen. This is an excerpt from that talk.
“From all parts of the city men and women came to us asking how they might help. We Capuchins are told that the city of Detroit wishes to show itself grateful for the help we have given during the days of the Depression. We admit that we have tried to be of service to the poorest of the poor, but must add that it was a simple duty. St. Francis, our holy founder, impressed it upon his brethren that they must labor for their daily bread. And he added, “Should the wages of our work be not given us, then shall we have recourse to the table of the Lord asking alms from door to door.” Our lot has been cast among the simple lives of the poor, and our object is to give them spiritual aid and, if possible, material help as well. When speaking of those days of the Depression, we cannot forget that our work in relieving the misery of poverty was made possible only by the willing cooperation of such people as bakers who supplied bread, the farmers who gave us vegetables, and our numerous friends who made donations from their fairly empty purses. It is to these generous souls that we want to pay tribute today. May the all-bountiful God, who leaves no glass of water offered in His name to pass unrewarded, recompense the generosity of our friends with true happiness—the peace of the soul.”
There is such a thing as getting “a taste of heaven” in this world, as we see in the lives of the saints. But it is up to each of us to strive for—inasmuch as our virtue of hope is inspired by faith in God and strengthened—sweetened—in confidence of His great merciful goodness.
Jesus never meant us to live in a world where we have to make a choice to be either a Martha or a Mary—where in order to seek holiness, we would have to change the temperament God gave us. Jesus was offering Martha, who was stuck in her either/or mindset, another option, the “both-and” option. He was extending to her an invitation to the one necessary thing, the one thing we need to live in intimacy with him, no matter how we are wired. He was extending to her in that moment, just as he extends to us now, an invitation to contentment, to live unhurried and unafraid, knowing that he is present, right here in the chaos of our everyday lives. And we can embrace that contentment whether we are natural sitters or natural servers.
He is an equal-access Savior. The truth is that any one of us could choose to sit at Jesus’s feet and still be anxious and worried, distracted, missing out on the grace of the Savior’s presence—just as we could also be in the kitchen contentedly laying supper out on a platter, while we tuned into Jesus’s presence right there in our midst and drank of all that he had to offer. What Jesus wants for you and me has very little to do with whether we sit or stand, serve the supper or contemplate at his feet. What he wants for us is to be so keenly aware of his divine presence with us that whatever we do takes on the nature of the extraordinary, and we live in a sense of wild gratitude. We can live knowing that we are completely surrounded by God, knowing that we are not working for his approval but for his pleasure. We can know that we are able to be utterly and completely confident and content in who we are and how we are wired because he is here, visiting us with his love and grace.
In many of his letters Solanus speaks of the beauty of death and how we should look forward to it. For example: “Many are the rainbows, the sunbursts, the gentle breezes—and the hailstorms we are liable to meet before, by the grace of God, we shall be able to tumble into our graves with the confidence of tired children into their places of peaceful slumber.” Another letter has this: “Let us prepare for our final moment on earth by patient suffering, prayer, and the sacraments, then we will receive with joyful countenance the final call of the Divine Lover—the Bridegroom of our souls—and gently pass into eternity.” Throughout his life he had fostered a healthy, hope-filled view of death. As a young priest in Yonkers he once declared to his friend Willie Spring, “Death can be beautiful—like a wedding—if we make it so.”
A letter written in 1946 to his niece Helena Wilhite reveals his confidence in God’s loving providence: “Let us thank God ahead of time for whatever He foresees is pleasing to Him,… leaving everything at His divine disposal, including—with all its circumstances, when, where, and how—God may be pleased to dispose the events of our death.” In his last days his prayers were, as usual, for the needs of the sick and troubled but not for the relief of his own sufferings. Now he longed only for a happy death.
It was at the Porziuncola, St. Mary of the Angels, that the Franciscan story unfolded. Together with San Damiano there are no more important places in the original Franciscan story than these two. That is why it is so important to visit and return to these sanctuaries again and again. This is Francis’ heart; this is Francis’ center and the center of the entire Franciscan story. Why? Here Francis began his religious life, understanding his vocation and life direction through the hearing of the Gospel. Here his life and vocation developed. Here it ended when he died on October 3, 1226. Here Francis received the promise of the pardon (Il Perdono) from Jesus Christ through Mary. We know this as the Porziuncola Indulgence. When asked why he wanted this, he answered, “I want to send everyone to Paradise.” For these reasons the Porziuncola is the heart and center of Francis, the core of the Franciscan movement; it is the womb from which it grew. This is truly holy ground.
