What To Make of Her?

Saturday of the 2^nd Week of Advent

Psalm 80

Lord, make us turn to you;

Let us see your face

and we shall be saved.

Although the 284 martyrs of the English Reformation are commemorated on the 4^th of May, today we remember specifically five (see below).  Today is also Thomas Merton’s Feast Day. 

Merton reflected often and deeply on martyrdom and sainthood…a particularly poignant gem:

One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him.  In fact, they are not sure whether he is crazy or only proud; but it must at least be pride to be haunted by some individual ideal which nobody but God really comprehends.  And he has inescapable difficulties in applying all the abstract norms of ‘perfection’ to his own life.  He cannot seem to make his life fit in with the books.  Sometimes his case is so bad that no monastery will keep him.  He has to be dismissed, sent back to the world like Benedict Joseph Labre, who wanted to be a Trappist and a Carthusian and succeeded in neither.  He finally ended up as a tramp.  He died in the street in Rome.  And yet the only canonized saint, venerated by the whole church, which has lived either as a Cistercian or a Carthusian since the Middle Ages is St. Benedict Joseph Labre.  

-From: The Pocket Thomas Merton, Edited with an introduction by Robert Inchausti, New Seeds, Boston & London, 2005, 196.

Today, then…

I will pray that someone, sometime, somewhere will say of me:

I just don’t know what to make of her;)

FYI from this “hanged, drawn and quartered” kind of Saturday:

St. John Roberts (1575-1610)

St. Edmund Gennings (1567-1591)

St. Eustace White (1559-1591) hanged only

St. Polydore Plasden (153-1591)

St. Swithin Wells (1536-1591)  (wife 10 years later)

for more about this crowd click here