Saints and the Scribbler

In cased you didn’t know, last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday and Ash Wednesday marks the start of Lent.  For the record, I got lucky on the ashes this year.  Instead of the usual “you’ve got dirt on your forehead,” a man actually asked me where I got my ashes because they actually looked like a cross.  A compliment.  Ha!

That’s never happened before.  Back when I worked at Borders I had a customer (whom I had never met before in my life) try to wipe them off my forehead like they were doing me a favor.  Awkward?  I thought so.

The inevitable question every year(the one that tags along with the ashes) is: What are you giving up?

Sometimes I don’t give up anything, and when I do “give up” something, I try to make it something that’s actually for God instead of for myself (ex: giving up deserts because you want to lose a pant size=for you).  No, it doesn’t always work that way, and yes, like everyone else in the world I’ve given up food items.  Perfect I am not.  Last time it was pop(yes, southerners, I said POP!), and by the time Easter rolled around I was seriously craving some Coca Cola. (Sidenote: When I finally got to order that Coke, the restaurant we were at gave me diet instead…sheer disappointment)

This year, I decided I would do something instead of giving something up.  I decided to give up some of my day to read something religious whether its fiction or non.  As a reader, I tend to stay away from the religious reading.  A single book a customer made me read several years ago(that I felt I had to slog through to be nice) kind of killed a genre for me.  It was awful.

But that was one book out of many, and there are so many more out there.  So, for the sake of not forming an opinion based on one bad experience, I’m trying again.

I started my Lenten reading with a book by James Martin called My Life with the Saints, and I am so glad I did.  The book is essentially about Martin’s life and experiences as he first encounters the saints that have made an impression on him throughout his religious journey.  He started out a business man and eventually ended up becoming an Jesuit priest.  Martin tells the stories of how he encountered the saint and also walks his readers through the saints journeys.  We learn how they eventually arrived at sainthood and what brought them into the religious life.  What I like most about Martin’s book is that it’s brief but enlightening.  You learn just enough to want to look into the saint yourself, but not so much that you feel bogged down by info and want to stop reading.  I’d highly recommend it (and it’s one of those kindle $3.99 titles till the end of February here).

Martin actually inspired me to go back and look into a saint that I haven’t learned about since high school: Saint Angela Merici.  She was actually the saint I chose for confirmation–which I Googled because I couldn’t remember why exactly we did this other than to inspire/motivate us(and write a paper…we definitely had to write a bio on them).  It turns out some churches have you chose a saint and a name some don’t.  Clearly, my church is of the variety that does–and I didn’t actually pick her because she inspired me at the time.  I chose her because our names were the same and I’m slightly particular about people calling me names other than my own (Don’t call me Angie.  Just don’t.).

I’m actually surprisingly glad that I took the time to look her up again.

She was born in 1474 in a small town called Desenzano del Garda which is somewhere South of Lombardy.  Her parents died when she was 10 years old, and she and her sister moved to live with her uncle in the town of Salo.  She was deeply distressed by the sudden death of her sister, who never received the last sacraments.  She prayed fervently for her sister and (according to wikipedia…) was only at peace after having a dream of her sister in Heaven with the saints.

When she was 20 years old her uncle passed away and she moved back to Desenzano.  There she dedicated herself to teaching girls from her home.  St. Angela’s belief that everyone deserves an education inspires the rest of her life, and is why I personally find her to be such a wonderful lady.  A vision tells her that she’s destined to found a group of virgins (they weren’t a religious order in her lifetime–the Ursalines/Company of St. Ursula) who would devote their life to the education and religious training of young girls.  These women didn’t have much money, they didn’t have proper schools and classrooms so they taught out of their own homes.

Eventually their work spread to other cities.

These women were the first teaching order of women.  They were doing work that nuns at the time couldn’t do as they couldn’t leave the cloister.  St. Angela actually declined Pope Clement VII’s request that she stay and live in Rome(which, in my own opinion, would have been a great honor, but she disliked the notoriety that came with his invitation).  On a trip to the holy land in 1524 she became blind while traveling through Crete.  She, despite her blindness, continued on with her journey, and legend has it that her blindness was cured a few weeks later as she prayed before a crucifix in the same spot where she had lost her sight in the first place.  She officially started her Company of St Ursula in 1535, was elected Mother and Mistress in 1537, and passed away in 1540.

She was finally beatified in 1768 by Pope Clement XIII and canonized by Pope Pius VII in 1807.

Since then her feast day has jumped around the calendar several times.  As of 1969, her feast day is officially the day of her death (as it probably should have been to begin with) January 27.

The Company of St Ursula, the Ursulines, still exists today across the globe.  Their website says that the U.S. company was founded in 2000.

St. Angela Merici was truly dedicated to education, especially women’s education.  She believed that all people should have that opportunity, even if they were the poorest of the poor.  For her to decide this was important and succeed at it in her own time amazes me–she must have struggled, because society wouldn’t have believed her goals were all that important. If you think about it, even the pope didn’t really see her work coming to fruition.  He wanted her to grace Rome with her presence and live there, I assume indefinitely.  If she had done that the company never would have been formed.  She believed in her goals so much that she said no to the pope.  That’s dedication.

As I’m reading My Life with the Saints, the saints seem to stick with Martin because they were so determined to accomplish their goals and to achieve what God told them they needed to.  I think that’s why they’re sticking with me.  Sometimes it’s so hard to act, even when you know it’s the right thing.  These people are just…wonderful…inspirational…you know?

Well, happy Lent guys!

 

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