| Lessons from the Saints: Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510) |
| Often in life, we are presented with concepts we are not ready for, concepts we understand but cannot comprehend. And then one day, without any warning, they make sense; we “get” them. This often happens to me with Bible passages, but most recently it happened with one of the great teachers of the church, St. Catherine of Genoa. I first encountered Catherine through Richard Foster’s anthology, Devotional Classics, and her intimacy with God immediately attracted me: “…every day I feel myself more occupied with him, and I feel a greater fire within. It is as if I have given the keys of my house to Love with permission to do all that is necessary.” I wanted that same intimacy in my own faith, but Catherine’s approach, an odd mixture of fervor and passivity, taught me that perhaps I was trying too hard. Consider this statement: “When God finds a soul that rests in him and is not easily moved, he operates within it in his own manner. That soul allows God to do great things within it. He gives to such a soul…the joy of his presence which entirely absorbs [it].” Catherine’s concept, “rest in God and be not easily moved,” echoes the psalmist’s “be still and know that I am God.” Both authors rebuke our spiritual busyness to remind us that divine intimacy is not something we have to strive for, but is rather already given to us. The same holds true for our sin. To her friends who struggled with persistent sins, Catherine advised: “You cannot defend yourself and I cannot defend myself. The thing we must do is renounce the care of ourselves unto God who can defend our true self. Only then can God do for us what we cannot do ourselves.” This concept, so different from what most of us have been taught, makes surprising sense – if Christ had to die for our sins, how can we possibly fight them without God’s help? And who could be more eager to help us than God? Catherine’s approach to intimacy with God might best be summed up by this image: “We simply wait like a stone, with no capacity until he brings us life.” We need to hold ourselves still, to stop striving and to wait for God to move in our lives. Her call for a more restful faith appealed to me and re-ignited my desire for a deeper, more trusting relationship with God. And so I searched out her biography, the Life and Teachings. But the Catherine I found there was more problematic than I had realized from the selections presented in Foster’s anthology. Her life is definitely inspiring, such as her miraculous work with the poor and sick in Genoa. But it also reveals a very un-modern view of the relationship between faith and the world. For instance, Catherine’s experience of Love manifested itself as a radical opposition between what she calls “the spirit” and “humanity,” an opposition so intense that she spent a great deal of her life in intense pain. Spiritually she was always at peace. But physically she was in horrible torment, as if seized by flames. As her biography describes it, her spirit, “if it had not been restrained by a divine power…would have reduced that body to dust, to obtain the liberty to be entirely occupied with itself; and the body, on its side, would rather have endured a thousand deaths than suffer so much from the oppression of the spirit….” Catherine’s experience marks her as particularly medieval; she is much less charitable towards human nature than we moderns are. We tend to emphasize the restorative aspects of God’s love, remembering Jesus’ miracles of healing and the Hebrews’ rejection of any dichotomy between earthly and spiritual life, a rejection founded in the notion that God created humanity and earth and called them both good. For Catherine, the spirit is kept in bondage by the body, which is unable to withstand God’s love. This aspect of Catherine’s life troubled me for a long time. I could not accept it as according with the biblical revelation of the relation of humanity to spirit. But neither could I reject it straight out, given the marvelous quality of her life. Catherine’s suffering simply made no sense to me. And then it happened: a brief period of crisis and intense anguish in which my material and spiritual lives seemed in full conflict. My suffering was nowhere as intense as Catherine’s, but in the days that followed, I realized I had tasted something of what she had undergone. I understand now that there are times in our lives when our material circumstances constrict us, choking our communion with God. And in response our souls cry out in agony, wishing to be released from the cares of the world to be with God. Whatever the circumstances, we find ourselves caught in the conflict between a world that rejects God’s ways and a God who rejects the world’s. We ourselves become, for a short while, the site of conflict between God and the world. It is a painful reminder of the gap that still exists between rebellious humanity and the God who is Love. Catherine’s life, like those of the Hebrew prophets, was a heightened illustration of this conflict: she experienced the fire of God’s love so strongly that it physically pained her even as it drew people back to God, who comes to redeem the world. That redemption, however, involves conflict, and if we who are being redeemed are also to “stand in the gap” for others, we must be prepared to suffer that conflict in our own lives. Like Catherine, we too will undergo periods in which our longing for God, and God’s longing for us put us in direct conflict with the world. And like her, may we always give God “permission to do all that is necessary.” --January 2003 |