Of Paths, Passions… and Crosses

The women who inspire a good friend and me aren’t much farther apart in age than we are. I’m six years older than my friend, and the holy woman she admires most was only twelve years older than mine.

Yet their journeys to holiness began and ended more than 8,500 miles apart, and were even further apart in terms of calling.

At a recent dinner party, I told the story of Blessed Agnes of Phila, a Thai nun with courage and passion almost beyond understanding. She was thirty-one in 1940 when she and six other Catholics were martyred in northern Thailand, suspected of spying for the French and ordered to stop teaching about Jesus. Agnes mouthed off in a series of exchanges with the authorities, including sending a vial of oil to make sure their gun barrels were well lubricated. It’s said she and the others sang hymns as they were shot.

I ended by saying I admired Agnes’s fearlessness and spiritual indifference. Whether she lived on this world didn’t matter much to her. A lifelong Catholic, Agnes knew where her real life was.

My friend and I contrasted that attitude to the one evidenced by the woman she admires, Dorothy Day, who died in New York in 1980 at the ripe old age of eighty-three. Efforts to canonize the cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement and Catholic servant of God are under way, efforts Day herself might oppose. “Don’t call me a saint,” she said. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Day converted to Catholicism when she was thirty, after an abortion and becoming a single mother; later, she would become a Benedictine oblate. Day was arrested repeatedly for civil disobedience in her tireless, pacific efforts for social justice.

My friend and I talked about which path takes more courage and more faith–to lay down one’s life for Christ or to live to a ripe old age, battling injustice every day one takes breath.  I don’t think there’s probably one right answer. I do know, however, that those my Church holds in high regard–servants of God, venerables, blesseds, and saints alike–all have unique stories of struggle, and that learning from those struggles makes our own crosses easier to carry.