A Homily for the Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Who can say how many saints there are? Even canonized saints, those officially recognized by the church, are innumerable. But there are only 37 doctors of the church. These are saints whose writings on faith have been pronounced by the church as being of perennial value for our own lives of faith.

Only four women have been named doctors of the church: Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, Thérèse of Lisieux and Hildegard of Bingen. If you find the gender balance disturbing, consider this: The male saints on the list generally received the best education that their times could offer. The women were left to fend for themselves, receiving only the most rudimentary forms of schooling.

Ironically, this often makes the women doctors more accessible to ordinary readers. Contrast for example the 16th-century Carmelite contemporaries St. John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila. Their teachings on how to gain union with God in this life are strangely congruent, but John, a product of Jesuit education, is much more difficult to read. You must first become a bit familiar with philosophical terms that are no longer used. But reading Teresa is like having coffee with your grandmother. She is direct and unadorned.

Hence the power of a passage like this, describing her first 20 years in religious life:

I should say that it is one of the most painful lives, I think, that one can imagine; for neither did I enjoy God nor did I find happiness in the world. When I was experiencing the enjoyments of the world, I felt sorrow when I recalled what I owed to God. When I was with God, my attachments to the world disturbed me. This is a war so troublesome that I don’t know how I was able to suffer it even a month, much less for so many years (Life, 8.2).

Teresa deemed a lukewarm faith, even that of a religious sister, to be the most painful life she could imagine—and remember that she spoke from experience!

Sadly, the same is true for many of us, at least if we have real compunction to live the faith. We can be a mite miserable, trying to live in two worlds. In contrast, Christians in name only do not feel the division. Why would they, giving so little of themselves to the faith? No, the one who is truly wretched is the one who strives greatly to live the faith but as no more than an ideal.

Ideals are wonderful. They can be great motivators. Lots of great things have been accomplished by those with high ideals. But faith cannot survive as only an ideal. It must be a relationship.

If you understand Jesus to be an idea, a project, an agenda, you may accomplish a lot, do a lot of good, but you will never find the joy and the contentment the Gospel promises because you have never fallen in love with Jesus. The Gospel widow is not giving her mites to a project. She is pouring out her love.

We set limits to ideals, but love cannot be limited. We pursue projects within the confines of reason, but love must be irrational. Ideals demand much from us, but they are essentially worldly visions: how we see the world, how we think the world should be. But love swallows up the world we know and puts another in its place, a world that is the beloved, no more, no less.

Nothing is more miserable than an earnest Christian who pursues an ideal, miserable to self and to others. You have got to be in love. If there is a common focus for the female doctors of the church, it is intense love for the person of Jesus.

A pattern in my life began when I was in seminary, and it is one that persists. I would grow weary and afraid, tired of work and strain, afraid that this was all there was and all that there would ever be. I would wonder if it was time to say, “Enough, I’m out of here!” But then I would spend about an hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament. And in the silence, the one whom I had first loved would emerge. I could live pursuing ideals that neither I nor anyone else would ever fully meet because I loved him.

I have accused poor St. John of the Cross of being hard to read. So I will give him the last word. His “Dark Night of the Soul” is one of the greatest love poems ever composed, and it is written to Jesus. The metaphorical dark night of the poem is his life in the world. He has set aside that life, allowed it to rest, as he looks for the one whom he loves.

In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed,
O, happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest.

In darkness and in safety,
By the secret ladder, disguised,
O, happy lot!
In darkness and concealment,
My house being now at rest.

In that happy night,
In secret, seen of none,
Seeing nought myself,
Without other light or guide
Save that which in my heart was burning.

That light guided me
More surely than the noonday sun
To the place where
He was waiting for me,
Whom I knew well,
And where none appeared.

O, guiding night;
O, night more lovely than the dawn;
O, night that hast united
The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into her love.

On my flowery bosom,
Kept whole for Him alone,
There He reposed and slept;
And I cherished Him, and the waving
Of the cedars fanned Him.

As His hair floated in the breeze
That from the turret blew,
He struck me on the neck
With His gentle hand,
And all sensation left me.

I continued in oblivion lost,
My head was resting on my love;
Lost to all things and myself,
And, amid the lilies forgotten,
Threw all my cares away.