A woman to be reckoned with
As a Sufi story teaches, "There are those in winter who, calling themselves religious, say, 'I shall not wear warm clothes. I shall trust in God's kindness to protect me from the cold.' But these people," the Sufi teach, "do not realize that the God who created cold has also given human beings the means to protect themselves from it."
The point, of course, is that we must not expect God to do for us what God means us to do for ourselves. If there is any figure in history who is a sign of that truth and who calls the entire Christian tradition over and over to learn the same lesson now, it is surely Catherine of Siena. Mystic, theologian, religious recluse, she was also one of the most publicly influential, and most theologically piercing women in the history of the church.
Catherine gave her entire life for truth and peace; she persisted for the long haul. She stood immovable in the midst of mayhem, and she never blinked. And, God knows, she met opposition everywhere: some people criticized her public ecstasies as religious ostentation, and others criticized her involvement in public affairs as unreligious. Some people called her travels worldly, and others called her steady, reckless, untiring commitment to the local poor extravagant. Some people criticized her virginity, and some people criticized her friendships with men. They criticized her commitment to the church, and they criticized her criticism of it. But they never, ever broke her spirit or deterred her work or confused her vision or diverted her path. None of them, not the family, not the city, not the rulers, not churchmen, not even the women of her own community whose silent, secret jealousies grew in proportion to her obvious greatness.
She prodded popes to cure the church of its corruption, provoked rulers to cure the city-states of their vulturous greed, protested in behalf of the people who were crucified by it all, and persisted and persisted and persisted. She never stopped, she never backed down, and she never left.
She was a woman to be reckoned with. As long as any woman anywhere is demeaned or diminished or dismissed out of hand as foolish or incompetent or lesser in the sight of God and little in the church, as long as anyone anywhere says a hostile and unholy no to women, then Catherine of Sienta is a woman to be reckoned with again.
Catherine of Siena was a woman whose life God flung across our sky to out-meteor, out-comet, out-star, and out-brighten every sick and squalid age to come, to touch and sear even yet, even now, even us, even here. We too must learn to derail the war mentality that makes the world poor. We too must learn to trust the insights in the Gospel when education fails to persuade the rich to care for the poor and calls that obscene insensitivity, "the business cycle." We too must learn to claim Christian feminism when the designs of God for women are obstructed by the name of the will of God. We, too, must learn to be patient when the walls of poverty do not fall, when the wars do not end, and the women of the world are wanted more for domestic services than for spiritual powers. Why? Because it is the measure of the things to which we give our allegiance that is the measure of ourselves.
Personal sacrifices, Gospel insight, Christian feminism, and patient prophetism is the legacy of Catherine of Siena to the twenty-first century.
––from A Passion for Life: Fragments of the Face of God, by Joan Chittister
