The Apparitions at Vicksburg

I asked Jessica Rabbit at . . . the hell with it to draw a saint for me for 2013. She assigned me not a saint per se, but rather the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which struck me as both excellent and fitting. I will strive to focus my devotion on the Sacred Heart, and feel therefore as if I'm somewhat freed up to address some special prayers this year to an unofficial patron saint -- in this case, a man I've only recently learned about, whose cause has not yet been opened, but one day may be, which is one of my prayers. Read the remarkable story of Claude Jude Newman here.

Saint Henry's Funeral Mass

I have no words.

My Patron Saint for 2011

The Patron Saint Drawing for 2011, hosted by Angela at Where Angels Blog, closed this year before I could put my family's names in the hat.  Last year, Angela drew Blessed Zélie Martin for me, who proved to be a most apt and helpful influence in my life in 2010, to the extent that I allowed her to be.  Nonetheless, I believe I have found a patron saint for next year:  Blessed Pope John XXIII.  The reason I'm electing him is that I had an elaborate dream about him last night, in which we had a conversation, and in which, most importantly, his presence emanated love.

I've had one or two dreams that I believe have contained important information for my real life and have changed its course significantly, but in general I don't believe in the prophetic or eternal nature of dreams (in my dream last night, incidentally, Bl. John was a thin young man!).  Nonetheless, if a saint or near-saint has a chat with you in a dream, as long as they're not spouting heresy, it can hardly be a bad thing, I suppose.  I suppose it stands to reason, too, that my saint would be a fairly controversial figure.   Unfortunately, some heretical Catholics have used his name to give their efforts legitimacy, as others from the opposite side of the same heresy have used the name of Pope Saint Pius X to advance theirs.

May Blessed John XXIII, the Good Pope, pray for us all in 2011.

"A Saint for Those Who Are Prisoners of Their Past"

A re-post from February 8, 2009.

Today is the feast day of recently canonized Saint Josephine Bakhita. Read her amazing story here. As Father Mark notes:

Looking to the future does not mean forgetting the past; it means transfiguring it. It means re-reading it with eyes of mercy in the light of faith. We need not remain slaves of our own histories, chained to the evil things, the hurtful things, the unjust things that happened ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or seventy-five years ago. There is another way: the way of those set free by love.

May Saint Josephine Bakhita, la madre moretta, pray for us.

Hat tip: Elena Maria Vidal at Tea at Trianon.

Mother Cabrini, Pray for Us

Today is the feast day of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, affectionately called "Mother Cabrini" by her devotees, patroness of immigrants and traditionally revered by Italian-Americans.  Her shrine in New York City (in a neighborhood jokingly referred to as "Upstate Manhattan") was my long-time parish (the beautiful stained-glass window at the back of the church, which has a view that overlooks the Hudson River and the Palisades of New Jersey, is pictured above).  I spent many hours praying there both before and after my conversion, once hopping a gypsy cab on an impulse to take me there in a snowstorm even after having moved some distance away to the Bronx.

The corridor that connects Cabrini High School for girls to the shrine is lined with glass cases filled with gifts left in honor of the saint, in thanks for her miraculous cures.  Her popularity has been effortlessly transferred to the neighborhood's large Latino population as its Italian population has dwindled to virtually nothing, and most, if not all, of these ex-votos, which include china plates and ceramic statuary, are inscribed in Spanish with the names and dates of the cured.  Just a few weeks before my conversion, I struck up a conversation with a professional, highly-educated woman at the local Korean fruit-and-vegetable stand, who told me that her daughter had been healed of life-threatening illnesses through the prayers of the local faithful and the intercession of the saint.  "This," she said, gesturing to include the whole neighborhood, "is holy ground."

One day several years before that encounter, I went on a Saturday to pray at the shrine.  Mother Cabrini's body is interred in a glass coffin, over which the altar is built.  As I knelt in a pew, the Latina charwoman, who spoke no English, put down her mop, came over to me, took my hand, and led me up to the altar, normally roped off from the public.  She had me kneel down before it and placed my hand on the glass; it was vibrating.

Next door to the church and high school is the former Saint Elizabeth's Hospital, where Maria Callas, who grew up in the neighborhood, recovered from a badly broken leg after being hit by a car (it's now co-ops).

This is also the sixth anniversary of my first date with my husband, which took place at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Terminal.

Musical Saints of Helfta

November is a month that commemorates many musical saints, both celebrated and unknown. This is a repost from a couple of years ago about the musical aesthetic of the Benedictine Abby at Helfta.
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November 22, aside from being a singularly tragic day in American history, is the feast day of the Roman martyr Saint Cecilia, patroness of musicians, whose name I took at my confirmation. I love that her feast falls at the denouement of autumn, when the beauty of the season is mostly past and everything is gray and barren; it cheers the heart. But November also marks the feasts of some other remarkable “musical” saints, a trio of women from the thirteenth-century Saxon monastery of Helfta, a Benedictine abbey that was a sort of hothouse of visionary nuns: Mechthild of Hackeborn (November 16), Gertrude the Great (who shares her feast day), and Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose feast day is November 19.

All of these nuns were party to visions of Christ in which musical sounds and imagery played an important role. Gertrude the Great, for instance, wrote of a visitation by the Lord in which he told her: “Listen to me, beloved, and I will sing you a song of love that is quite different from those sung by profane courtiers,” and then proceeded, in a voice that Gertrude calls indescribably sweet, to sing the following words to the hymn tune Rex Christe factor:

Amore meus continuus,
Tibi languor assiduous,
Amor tuus suavissimus,
Mihi sapor gratissimus.

(My continuous love,
Your persistent languor;
Your very sweet love,
a most pleasing savor to me.)

Mechthild of Hackeborn, the abbey’s choirmistress, was renowned for her own beautiful voice; her sisters in religion referred to her as “God’s nightingale.” She received a revelation in which Christ extended a harp from his sacred heart, explaining that the harp was himself, and the strings were “all chosen souls which are all one in God through love”; then Christ, the “high chanter of all chanters,” struck the harp and led “all the angels with delectable sound” as they sang the hymn Regem regum Dominum.

Mechthild of Magdeburg’s mystical writings are well known, and have been studied and appropriated by both feminist and Jungian scholars. The record of her revelations, the book The Flowing Light of the Godhead, is also filled with remarkable musical imagery, including a vision in which Christ tells her: “Oh, dear dove,/Your voice is string music to my ears./ Your words are spices for my mouth./ Your longings are the lavishness of my gift.”

I find the musical mysticism of Gertrude and the two Mechthilds of Helfta quite thrilling and encouraging. Their aesthetic – a sort of ecstatic rigor that, like all mystical writing, from Rumi to St. John of the Cross to William Blake, uses the language of poetry and eros – is so very far removed from our present understanding of holiness that it strikes me that many present-day orthodox Catholics would find it dubious and unsettling at best. But it seems to me an antidote to the both the meandering confusion of liberal Catholicism and the joyless legalism of modern-day traditionalism, and I'm happy that the Church in her wisdom has seen fit to honor these three nuns.