Fashioning Faith’s Forest

I remember my primary school teacher Miss Luke making the verses of Henry Longfellow’s Hiawatha dance in my mind. Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to visit the national shrine of Saint Kateri Tekawitha, the first Native American to be canonized by Pope Benedict XVI. Her story was connected by his predecessor,John Paul II, with the famous Indian Chief. It is directly linked to the celebration of Christ’s resurrection and our own mission to be people of peace.

Kateri’s mother was of the Algonquin tribe and a convert to Christianity. Her father was a pagan Mowhawk Leader himself. Jesus‘ own suffering gave Kateri great strength. She had to come to terms with the loss of her parents, and younger brother, to smallpox. Coupled with her facial scars, near blindness and depression which resulted from the same illness.

Kateri became an orphan at 4 and was  brought up by an Aunt and Uncle. They, along her tribe, could not accept her teenage longing to be a Christian.

Baptised at the age of 20 on Easter Sunday, she took the name Catherine after Catherine of Siena. Tekakwitha means “to cut a path” and she cleared the way for others to follow.

Mary O’Driscoll notes that the central theme in Catherine’s writing was God’s love for humanity through the crucified Christ. Even before Kateri knew the meaning of the cross she felt moved to carve it on a tree in the forest and created her own mini shrine. As her faith grew, she would often make crosses out of twigs and scatter them in the woods.

After her conversion, still resisting all attempts to marry her off, Kateri left her village and moved 100 miles away. She was comforted by the great joy of making her first Holy Communion on Christmas Day, 1677. God, was to be her only spouse and she took a vow of perpetual virginity.

Like Catherine of Siena, Kateri was known for her care of the sick. This special union was displayed in the circumstances surrounding theit saintly deaths. Catherine, while caring for young man with leprosy, contracted it in her hand. At the moment of her call to heaven, the signs of the disease completely disappeared. Kateri, who lived most of her life with significant injuries to her face was said, by eye witnesses, to be healed of these imperfections as she entered into eternal life.

St John Paul II spoke of Kateri as an inspiration for everyone to become instruments of Christ’s healing power. R S Thomas‘s reflection called The Kingdom captures this vision completely.

It’s a long way off but inside it

There are quite different things going on:

Festivals at which the poor man is King and the consumptive is Healed; mirrors in which the blind look at themselves and love looks at them back; and the industry is for mending the bent bones and the minds fractured by life. It’s a long way off, but to get there takes no time and admission is free, if you purge yourself of desire and present yourself with your need only and the simple offering of your faith green as a leaf.

Fr Peter Conley