Advent Day 25: Catherine of Siena
The people's mystic
The more I know, the more I love. The more I love, the more I know.
Advent Day 25: Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)
Christians are sometimes accused of being so focused on their personal perfection plans in order to get into some far-off Heaven that they miss Jesus’s essential teaching—and the responsibility that goes with it—that the kingdom of Heaven is already right here among us (Luke 17:21). One person against whom this charge could never be leveled is Catherine of Siena, a woman whose awakening led her to live each day serving justice and mercy in the Now.
Catherine was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children born to upper-class wool merchants in the hilltop town of Siena, Italy. Like Hildegard of Bingen, she experienced her first vision as a young girl, as she was walking near her home one day and Christ suddenly appeared in the sky. From there on she devoted her life to God.
Her passion turned her into somewhat of a problem child as she developed a habit of giving away her family’s clothing and food to the poor. Familial relations worsened when Catherine was a teenager and her parents tried to marry her off to her older sister’s widower. Catherine refused, then cut her beautiful hair down to the scalp. To punish her disobedience, her parents made her sleep in the cellar and pretend she was a servant. Catherine endured this humiliation through meditation, entering a deep, interior place she called her secret cell.
My cell will not be one of stone or wood, but of self- knowledge.
When her father realized that her will could not be broken—and after spotting a dove hovering over her during prayer which he took as a sign of her holiness—he relented and readmitted her to family life.
Catherine’s time in the cellar had focused her ambitions. Now she announced she would never be some merchant’s wife. Instead, she wanted to live like one of the desert anchorites from the early years of Christianity. She then climbed the stairs, entered her room and closed the door. She wouldn’t emerge for three years.
Catherine passed her days in fasting, prayer and meditation. In her secret cell, she often felt tortured by demons, temptations and voices. She doubted her path and her sanity. Maybe, she thought, she should just get married to a merchant and have a bunch of kids. The voices in her head got so loud and taunting they almost broke her. Then, one day, she came to the Dorothy-in-Oz epiphany that, all along, she’d had a power inside her that had gone unused. The next time her demons appeared, she simply laughed and waved them off. Almost immediately, Christ appeared to her in a vision. “And where were you all this time?” the precocious Catherine demanded to know. “I was in your heart,” Jesus answered.
From that time forward, Catherine felt herself bonded to Christ in the same mystical union that Jesus, Paul and so many others spoke of. For Catherine, there was no other reality but a Christ-soaked world. This allowed her to say with confidence:
The soul is in God and God in the soul, just as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.
Catherine emerged from her room after three years. Since opportunities for fourteenth century women were limited, her logical next move would have been to enter a convent as a cloistered nun. Instead, the ever-mercurial Catherine—with the memory of a vision in which Jesus told her to do for others what she could not do for Him—she opted to remain with her family and serve the poor.
This was during one of the most chaotic moments in human history. The Black Death had swept across Europe, killing a third of the population. Italian papal states were at constant war. Out of fear for his life, the pope had fled to France, leaving Rome and the administration of the church to corrupt and ambitious priests.
In those desperate times, Catherine felt called to the lowest places. She visited prisoners. She gave alms to the poor. She counseled people cast off as sinners. Like Francis of Assisi, Dorothy Day and Jesus—all who inhabited the outer edges of their faith tradition—she came under attack from the religious powers-that-be. There was even an attempt made on her life. When she was criticized for her immersive, inclusive spirituality in which all was from God and belonged to God, she used insects to describe her theology.
These tiny ants have proceeded from His thought just as much as me. It caused Him just as much trouble to create the angels as these animals and the flowers on the trees.
Most significantly, Catherine nursed plague victims no one else would get near. That she did this without regard to her own health—and miraculously lived—gained her a large number of followers in Siena and beyond. The most ardent among them even formed something of a fan club, calling themselves Caterinata. She counseled these disciples to meditate, to enter into the depths of their heart and learn who God was and who they were and what was theirs in the world to do. Be who God meant you to be, she said, and you will set the world on fire. Whatever they did, she advised them to do it boldly.
Proclaim the truth and don’t be silent through fear…the world is rotten because of silence.
Catherine lived this maxim with vigor. She entered the politics of church and state. She mediated between warring factions. She regularly wrote to the self-exiled Pope Gregory, urging him to return to Rome. When letters didn’t work, she traveled to France herself. Won over by her passionate arguments, Gregory soon returned to Rome. (Unfortunately, he died not long after, ushering in a new era of instability.)
Catherine performed her work out of love. For her, love was the foundation and font of all creation, all that ever was and ever would be. This love cast out her fear and led her to knowledge which led to even deeper love. This love, she taught, was available to anyone willing to enter into oneself in search of a Christ who, in a vision where God spoke to her, she came to know as the Bridge.
I have made a Bridge of my Word. I have given you my Son in order that, passing across the tempestuous sea of life, you may not be drowned. For those who cross by the Bridge, being still in the darkness of the body, find light, and being mortal, find immortal life, tasting, through love, the light of the eternal truth which promises refreshment.
Catherine’s jam-packed life spanned a mere thirty-three years. It came to an end on April 29, 1380 after she suffered a stroke. Her last words were, “Father, into your hands I commend my soul and spirit.”
Practice
One of Catherine’s best-known maxims was:
Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.
Catherine believed that who God meant her to be was love—that she was made to embody loving-kindness by performing acts for others which she could not do for Jesus. Spend a period of time reflecting or writing on who you think God means you to be. You don’t have to have one answer, or any answer at all. This is about opening up the question and allowing possibility. Follow up your reflection with a period of silent sitting.
Upcoming Holiday Happenings at Life In The City
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Jan 1, 11:15 am: A quiet, contemplative service to welcome 2023.
Feedback
This is a first draft of a book that will go to publishers in 2023. If you spot typos or have suggestions, leave them in the comments below or email Greg Durham at greg@lifeinthecityaustin.org.
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