Reflections

Finding Fire, Casting Fire (to Catherine McAuley – a personal reflection)

For too many years I’ve been thinking of you too much and relating to you too little.
Lately, I’ve been brooding about you, searching for what it was that opened your eyes to the world and compelled you to cast your fire upon it.

You neither loved wealth, nor feared it.
Rather, you used it with confidence, trusting your own perception of how it should be given and enjoyed.
No false poverty for you, no scrimping and saving for the sake of it, no bowing and scraping to authority.
You knew your own authority and acted on it, being personally intimate with the God whose source it was.
You wanted your women to do the same.
This is poverty.

Neither did you seriously doubt your vision, however hard others tried to make you do so.
Though it was previously unheard of – what you wanted women to do and be – and though ecclesial princes would have you believe it impossible, scandalous – you listened to your inner voices and trusted them.
You felt the fire of God bringing about a new thing and that fire walked you through all the false claims of small minds and even smaller hearts, your first allegiance to inner, not outer authority.
This is obedience.

And oh how you weren’t afraid to love!
Love pours through your words, which we still read, streams through all the ways you found to brighten the lives of women with confidence in themselves.
Love shines through your steady respect for the women who joined you in the work, for their health, for their enthusiasms.
You weren’t afraid to love Frances best of all and let it be known You were a lover. From it came your strength.
Not for you the fearful frozen distance that passes for celibacy, hiding in tradition, rules and overwork.
This is chastity.

After all the years, I see that your fire was a mirror for my own and that’s how you would have wanted it.
Not for you the hero worship with the worshipper placing you on a pedestal and avoiding herself, shirking her own power.
Not for you the hiding behind imposed authority already dead from killing other spirits.
Not for you the life of comfort you might have had and couldn’t while you saw anyone in distress.
Your security disappeared when you used your whole fortune for one house against all advice and still you chose that inner fire, telling you otherwise.

I see a line of fire reaching back from me to you.
Since I was a child, I knew you were my ancestor, a true grandmother, a wise elder.
Now that I am older than you were when you died, I finally grasp what legacy you give me over decades and lost time.
It’s the legacy of fire, my own fire, inspired by you but not yours.
You ask me what my fire is telling me, what in my world needs to be challenged so that the poor, the wounded and the lost can find a bit of light. Your fire is not your works, but yourself.
This is charism.

I think you’re proud of us all, all the thousands who have lived your vision, covering the world with lived Mercy.
I think you’re surprised by what faithfulness to your own vision brought about. I think you’d want the same faithfulness for each of us, joining our singular visions into your large one.
You don’t want us stuck in the very structures you rejected.
You don’t want us held back by long range plans that unsuccessfully try to contain the freedom of Spirit.
You never wanted us hierarched, divided, mistrustful and afraid to offend.
You want us fired up, free, focused on the broken world and loving intensely in all ways, letting any structures we need grow around that and not the other way around...

“How? I ask you? How can we? The world is big and we are so set in our ways.”

You laugh. “So was my world,” you say, “and everyone around me.
Look within, each one of you alone for awhile.
When you find your fire, get together.
Throw off the blinders of should and must and can’t and especially the blinders of this-is-how-it’s-always-been-done.
You cannot get to a new place going the old way.
Trust the fire of God that is beyond human structures and remember that Church is also a human structure that needs waking up from time to time.
We don’t set out to do that but being who we really are seems to have that effect.

That’s how it’s done.
You are not my daughters, but my sisters. We are equals.”

And as often happened, I have read about you, there is a twinkle in your eye and a dance to your step as you tell me this.

Brenda Peddigrew, RSM
25 July 2006