October is a month of many saints who have especially touched my spiritual journey and put me into contact, in a more profound way, with the Person of Jesus Christ. Perhaps one of the deepest feelings I associate with the presence of Christ is that of depth, a fathomless falling deeper into the mystery of Him – like some singing voices that we cannot stop listening to, for each note opens up something new about them. And these notes of Christ’s song have echoes in those who have taken up their crosses and followed after Him, like the echo of the Sacred Heart. What I would give to simply know that people might hear that heartbeat in my own!
St. Francis of Assisi puts me in touch with Christ through stripping himself so utterly of himself that he became one with that redemptive suffering of the Divine Incarnation. By sinking into this stark “lovescape” of interior crucifixion, he came to bear the wounds of Christ upon his own body. This was the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of expiation, of pouring out himself in the service of his Lord, of making all creatures his brothers and sisters – to bring hope to the despairing and joy to the saddened, to tame the ravaging wolf, kiss the outcast leper and befriend the enemy sultan. To be betrayed and abandoned, to walk in darkness when his eyesight failed him, and still to sing the Canticle of Creation. He found that in dying to himself, he was born anew into eternal life.
St. Teresa of Avila puts me in touch with Christ through her ecstatic longing for union with a lover, a piercing dart in the hand of an angel, puncturing her heart and leaving her in rapture. She mapped our interior castle, the many rooms of a mansion which we must move inside in order to find the Child who calls us by name. She said, “I am Teresa of Jesus,” and the Child answered her “I am Jesus of Teresa.” She knew the primacy of things, the summit, and the pinnacle. The source of her calling was to be found in her Lord, and she knew that God alone suffices. Like Francis, she found her own way of expressing this physical reality of union with the Beloved, writing that Christ had no body now but ours, and that it was through our eyes, our hands, our feet, that He may yet look with compassion, walk to do good, and bless all the world.
St. Therese of Lisieux puts me in touch with Christ through her childlike heart, a heart of one who had inherited the Kingdom of Heaven. Yes, a little girl’s heart who loved her family, adventure stories, jam sandwiches, and the way the sunset painted the sky. She was so common, and yet so uncommon – a little flower believing with all her heart that she need not remain simply at the feet of Our Lord, but instead reach out and fling herself into His embrace, for she could not fear a God who had made Himself small for her in the manger of Bethlehem. She bore the weight of depression and the dark night of the soul, of fear that her longing for paradise was merely an illusion. She offered love in the smallest sacrifices, and in the greatest – that of her young life through cruel illness. In the end, she promised to spend her heaven doing good upon earth.
St. Faustina Kowalska puts me in touch with Christ through her emphasis upon Divine Mercy, deeper than any ocean, yes, this stream of blood and water from His side – pierced through by a Roman lance which all of us have held in our sinfulness – and sliced by the jagged edges of the human condition. It is this offering of highest worth, of body and blood, soul and divinity, that makes souls as red as scarlet turn as white as snow, and causes the avenging angel to set aside his sword. It makes every stitch of a sewing needle salvific, every heavy pot full of roses, and the bride without a dowry – as Faustina was – be wed to the King of the Universe. “Lord and Master of this house, do you accept me?” she asked in the chapel. “I do accept you,” His voice replied. “You are in My Heart.”
Pope St. John XXIII puts me in touch with Christ through his simplicity of heart and spice of his wit. He was, in many ways, an “accidental saint” who always lamented not being as holy as he himself wished to be, but who sought, from childhood, to “love God at all costs” and serve “simple souls.” An amiable and humble man who liked to crack jokes and who had a hard time keeping down his weight. He believed that a true saint is one who is nearer to our next-door neighbor than a superhero, nearer to the common man who sweats and suffers, plays and prays, lives a fully human life “with great tenderness” and has a willingness to die to self through love. He kept his arms open to everyone with love, just as Christ’s were open on the cross, and sought to bring unity to Christians and non-Christians alike, whom he embraced as his brothers.
Pope St. John Paul II puts me in touch with Christ through the poetry of his words and his life that traversed the threshold of a new millennium. He became an icon of love in an age of cynicism and violence – a voice crying out for human dignity in an era when dehumanization spread like a cancer, and a sign of hope that reminded us we are an “Easter people, and Hallelujah is our song.” He survived oppression and the explosion of rage that he turned to forgiveness, even for his oppressors and would-be murderers. He offered his life for his bride, the Church, which he described as “born in me, not dying with me, nor do I die with it, which always grows beyond me.” He found his strength in the sign of the cross which he would imitate, spread out cruciform on the cold floor before the Blessed Sacrament, with the humility of the Blessed Mother whose heart he held encased within his own.
All of these figures have pulled me a little more into the “lovescape” of the redemptive love and transfigured suffering of the Crucified One. None of them were perfect, none of them were free from sins, nor indeed from the perspectives of their own times and cultures. Yet, in many ways, they had no single time, no single culture but, instead, transcended them all to beat, as one, with that Heart that was pierced through from the foundation of the world. And so, we continue to sing the song carried by a thousand tongues in the choir of saints, and each chord pulls us deeper into the mystery of the Christ and into our union in His Mystical Body.