Br. Jack Crowley

Marie de l’Incarnation

John 15:14-17

Whenever I pray with the life of a saint, I look at two things. The first is what the saint thought God was calling them to do. The second is what actually happened in their life. These two things don’t always overlap smoothly, yet somehow, saints always find a way to serve God.

Today we celebrate and pray with the life of Saint Marie of the Incarnation. When Saint Marie was fourteen years old, she told her parents that she wanted to join a Benedictine abbey. This was in France in the early 1600s, and her parents responded to her request by saying no and arranging her marriage to a silk worker. Saint Marie married and had a son. Tragically, six months later, her husband died. So in a short amount of time, Saint Marie had gone from a young woman looking to join the religious life to a teenage widow with a baby and her husband’s business to run. Certainly this was a wide gulf between what she thought God had been calling her to do and what actually happened.

We don’t have time to go into the seventy years of her saintly life and all that she did to become a saint, but the point I’m trying to make is even saints have to deal with the curveballs of life. They become saints not by quitting or resenting, but by persevering. They keep finding a way to serve God even if it’s not in the way they originally thought they would.

I think we all have our own version of this. Times when we say to God if only this or that happened, then I could really start serving you. We may even feel forsaken by God, wondering why God called us to do something and for that thing to suddenly change. It’s important to remember that even Jesus himself felt this inner turmoil.

Although it is beautiful to put our saints in stained glass windows, we must remember their inner lives were just as human as our own. They too had to deal with the same doubts, pet peeves, and anxieties we deal with. Yet somehow they transformed these into something greater, something that could serve God and others.

We don’t always have a full idea of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Yet, as Christians, we are called to do our best. No matter what form that might take, we are called to do our best, and let God handle the rest.