On Our Knees

This was followed by a brief Litany to St. Joseph and a concluding prayer. At Madonna House, we decided to pray this prayer on our knees after Mass each day, as we truly are begging God to change the hearts of our government leaders before they commit the tragic error of changing the definition of marriage in this country to include same-sex couples.

During my 30 some years of living in Canada, over half of those as a citizen, I couldn’t remember our bishops ever making such an appeal for united and public prayer on the part of all Catholics that God’s mercy be shown to us in a vital matter affecting all of society.

So, have the Canadian faithful been brought to their knees at last? Are we truly a Church which recognizes its depth of poverty and need for grace to such a degree that coming before the Lord on bended knee has become a way of life for us?

Probably not quite yet! But we have an indication at least that something is changing.

Our Country

Are we beginning to acknowledge at last that without humbling ourselves before the Lord, our country will likely go further in a direction contrary to the law of God?

This bended-knee business always reminds me of my first visit to Combermere in 1972. I had come seeking a deepening of my faith in the Person of Christ, and was in a great deal of distress at my inability to decide one way or the other concerning Jesus.

All the while I had kept practicing my faith, and had ended up hundreds of kilometers from home in a Catholic community.

One evening when Catherine Doherty was making the rounds of the MH dining room during tea time, she came by a table where a few of us guests were clustered together. With heart pounding, I thought: this is my chance to ask a holy person, maybe even a saint, my burning question.

But before I could open my mouth, the B (our nickname for her) spoke to me and handed me a little poem she had written about poverty: “This is what Madonna House believes about poverty,” she said.

But I was not to be put off. I countered immediately and fervently with my question: “B, in John’s Gospel Jesus says, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ I want to believe this, but I can’t. What should I do?”

“Oh,” she responded casually, “you’re not ready for this yet!” With that she snatched the poem on poverty out of my hands and put it back in her basket!

“What you are asking about is faith. How does one get faith? That’s very simple. I will show you.”

Flat on the Floor

And with that, Catherine made a Sign of the Cross and then bowed profoundly before the icon of the Lord Jesus on the wall nearby. Then, to my (and our table’s) utter astonishment, she placed her cane aside and lay flat on the wooden dining room floor, face down, in silence before that icon.

She remained there, perfectly still. None of us at the table dared move. It seemed to me that the whole dining room had become silent as well, and I began to worry about what I had provoked this 70-something old lady to do!

Would she ever get up? Would she even be able to get up? And worse still, was everybody looking at me?!

But after a couple of moments, she started to move again. With the help of her cane, she stood back up. Then with a backward glance in my direction and a wink, she concluded her teaching: “A couple of nights of that, and leave the rest to God!”

As you might gather, it was an unforgettable lesson in prayer, faith, and calling on the Lord for help.

I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but I was having the good fortune, the blessing really, of meeting someone for whom this bowing before the Lord to seek his counsel was a way of life.

Every decision of any seriousness was wrought in the crucible of this silent struggle with God, where the wrenching experience of human poverty alone finds the blessedness of the kingdom of God on earth.

In this New Millennium, in this rather desolate world, spiritually speaking, we may be looking for signs and wonders of the Lord’s presence. Who can blame us for doing so?
But the “sign” and the “wonder” to be most rejoiced in might be simply a person, a community, or a nation that has had burned into their very soul the conviction that apart from Me you can do nothing (Jn 15:5).

That kind of humility is indeed a sign of God’s mighty grace at work, and a wonder in an age when self-direction is the expected means of transport!

Catherine put all of this so succinctly and so poignantly in the great chapter found in her book Poustinia, the chapter entitled “Confrontation with Evil and Martyrdom.”

She writes: “In the poustinia, this struggle between yes and no, this struggle with God, is intensified a hundredfold. At some point, your yes to God will make you nonexistent. For only a second.

Something will happen in your purified soul through these tears and struggles. You will seem to be like one dead. But it won’t last long. You will return, and on that day you will know a miracle. You made your choice for God. The true liberation that God reserves for those who love him will be yours” (3rd Edition, p. 97).

This new-found freedom becomes visible in us, she continues, like a bonfire on a mountaintop. It is, presumably, the bonfire of the truth who is God and the love he bears for each human being.

In Catherine’s words: “You are a bonfire through which they can pass. On the other side, the heart of Christ is waiting for them. Having been yourselves scooped up by the hand of God, and having agreed to it by your yes, you have now become a transparent bon
fire that leads other men to Christ” (p. 97).

In other words, engagement in the challenges of our day requires a profound “meeting in faith” with the God who purifies us, saves us and alone can guide our steps.

In future columns I want to write about the ways we have discovered in MH to assist in that Meeting, which Catherine demonstrated to me so unforgettably that long-ago evening, and which she herself lived from so indefatigably, day after day.