Memorial of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, Virgin
I grew up only a few miles away from the Mother Cabrini shrine in Denver. I didn't know, when I was growing up, that St. Frances Cabrini was born in Italy in 1850 and desperately wanted to be a member of a religious order, but none would have her because she was in poor health. Eventually, she felt God calling her to begin her own order - the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart - and her little group traveled to the United States to be missionaries to Italian immigrants here in the US. They provided health care and education and tried to help new immigrants in the sometimes appalling working conditions they faced. For example, one of the reasons she has a shrine in Colorado is because she worked with Italian miners who suffered from lung diseases, among other things, as they worked in the mines. Throughout her sixty-seven years of life, Mother Cabrini established sixty-seven hospitals, schools, orphanages and other institutions in Italy, the United States and in parts of Latin America. Despite being apparently weak, here was someone who was really "strong in Christ" as Paul says - someone who didn't let physical health stop her from doing what she believed God called her to do.
Now, I didn't know much about Mother Cabrini when I was growing up. But what I do remember is that a big news story broke out about a woman who said she was having visions of Mary at the shrine. The visions appeared on the horizon, by the sun and scores of people flocked to the shrine in the hopes of seeing Mary as well. I wasn't Catholic then, and neither were many of my friends - but that story impressed us kids to the point that many of us walked around at school recess trying to peer at the horizon by the sun to see if Mary might visit us, as well.I remember that many church officials came to verify the visions, and to be honest I have no idea what they concluded.
In a way, none of those visions - nor their proof - matter and I think today's scriptures remind us of that. The first reading from Wisdom (13:1-9) says "For from the greatness and beauty of created things, their original author, by analogy, is seen." The ones who focus on the world, and only focus on the world without seeing the reality toward which this world points us, are not wise, suggests the book of Wisdom. In our culture, wisdom is often measured by the stuff we concretely know, the things that we can prove. The author of the book of Wisdom suggests differently, however: such knowledge takes you far, but not far enough.
Analogy - the poetic device that enables us to compare things to other things, - also enables us to think more deeply, more broadly, and, Wisdom suggests, even begin to see an inkling of God. One of my poet friends has a poem about God being like a dog, exuberant, friendly, excited. The Psalms are full of poetry too, suggesting God is like an earthquake, a chick, a mother - each of which suggests something different about God's nature. But if we focus too much on the dog, the earthquake, and the chick, without "wisdom" the scripture suggests we're missing a great deal - we're missing who God is. None of these things can tell us much about God in entirety, yet the little bit we can begin to see of God is important.
Jesus admonishes us even further about our ability to be wise, in Luke 17:26-37. He suggests that the clueless people back in Noah's day who criticized Noah for building an ark but drowned in the flood, were clueless precisely because they spent too much time looking at the mundane without attempting to think about broader patterns and deeper meanings. They ate and drank and built and bought things, but didn't take stock of the bigger meanings of their lives and the ways in which God was trying to speak to them.
Poets and artists help us see analogies and metaphors - they help us look at the mundane in different ways. I think poems and other things that promote poetical thought help us not be the clueless people Jesus criticizes, if we are willing to reflect and wonder and ask for God's wisdom. And so it is with the woman who had the visions of Mary at the Mother Cabrini shrine.
Whether or not the visions were validated, the idea of the visions helped me and my friends begin to think about the world differently and wonder if God might, in fact, be speaking to us in any given moment. And it was that ability to recognize God's movement in the world that Mother Cabrini was able to leave behind Italy and move to a foreign land where she did not know the language or people, and set about pursuing God's vision for her: sixty-seven schools, hospitals, orphanages and other institutions all meant to help God's people. Noah's ark might have looked crazy; Mother Cabrini's trip might have seemed a bit far-fetched to some, but we can only begin to see these possibilities as real if we begin to look at God's world in ways that seem impossible, crazy, poetical.
- Jana M. Bennett