Memorial of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, priest
“Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!” begins today’s first reading from the book of Ecclesiastes (Eccl. 1:2). This beautiful passage goes on to explain poetically the sort of pointlessness of human life as it is experienced. Qoheleth, who speaks, seems to say, life goes on and on, the same things happen over and over again, people forget those who came before, the sun rises and sets, but what is the point, what is the purpose? This first passage, then, seems to pose a question based on human experience. How can this life as experienced by us and millions of others have any meaning at all? Is not all life temporal and ephemeral?
If the first reading poses a question, we can say that today’s responsorial psalm provides us with an answer: “In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge” (Ps. 90:1). This is what provides meaning to life; this is why life ultimately makes sense. It is because our God is our refuge, the one who defines all things that we experience. Through God we gain wisdom, we understand our lives, and hence today’s psalm ends with the plea, “Prosper the work of our hands! Prosper the work of our hands!” (Ps. 90:17bc). This is what makes the endless toil of work and daily life possible, namely, that we direct it toward God, that we seek his assistance, and that he blesses us by his involvement with us and these little daily concerns of everyday life. How does God bless us with his involvement in our everyday life? The biggest blessing comes to us in the form of Jesus’ incarnation. Our God involves himself in this daily toil of everyday life by entering this ephemeral, temporal realm by becoming human like us. Our Lord becomes our refuge in a very concrete way, taking on human form and immersing himself in the burdens and seeming pointlessness of life.
In today’s gospel from Luke, we get a sense of what this means. God’s becoming man and walking among human beings is something that even a ruler such as Herod noticed and worried about. Luke gives us a sense of Herod’s concern. Who could this person be? And how will it affect and challenge his world as he has constructed it? For Herod, as for us, the knowledge of God among us challenges our experience of life. Jesus, who is God Incarnate, forces us to realize that actually, we cannot simply construct our own meaning out of life. We cannot respond to Qoheleth’s description by deciding for ourselves what life is all about. Rather, Jesus provides us with an answer about what life is about. He is our refuge in a concrete way, a way that draws us out of ourselves and our personal preferences to face an objective truth: God’s love for us. We have all likely experienced life as humdrum, pointless, senseless before. We may still have these moments today. How can we learn to see in Jesus our refuge, our salvation, and the point and meaning of our existence?
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, known more commonly as Padre Pio. St. Padre Pio stands for us as a model of someone in recent times (he died in 1968) who truly saw Jesus as refuge, salvation – the Christ who gave meaning to the daily toil of life. Padre Pio, from an early age dedicated his life to doing God’s work, becoming a Capuchin priest and spending every day in God’s service. He was a gifted confessor – sometimes spending 10-12 hours a day in the confessional – and is famously known for bearing the marks of Christ’s wounds on his hands (the stigmata). St. Padre Pio embodied Christ, physically with these wounds, but also spiritually in the way he lived his life.
The witness of such a committed saint may intimidate us. How can we ever be as holy as Padre Pio? But this is the wrong question. Instead, we need to ask ourselves what small steps we should take to move closer to a life that is transformed by God’s love manifest in Jesus. How can we reevaluate some of our own daily toil, whether with children, work, or school? If, like Padre Pio, we let each day move us closer to God and farther in our pilgrimage, then, like him, we can also be saints when we die. Let our plea be, today as always, that God will “Prosper the work of our hands! Prosper the work of our hands!” St. Padre Pio, pray for us! Maria Morrow