As the biblical wisdom writers say ‘there is a time for everything’, and now seems to be my time for returning to Catherine McAuley. Busy with teaching responsibilities, and in an eager desire to be modern, I was loathe to immerse myself in nineteenth century theology-spirituality, wondering what I would learn? But now that I have more time, reading Mary C. Sullivan’s The Path of Mercy: The Life of Catherine McAuley (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012) helped me to realise that the core of Christian faith transcends the passages of time and classifications. In the lives of great servants of God, such as Catherine, we touch once again aspects of that core, and that is why the Church considers people like her venerable and even saints, and recommends them to us as exemplars of what it means to be Christian.
Sullivan points out that it is in her letters and prayers that we find Catherine at her most original where she hints at her spiritual life and who God is for her. She came to God from below. As she admits herself, she had no doctrinal formation, and though she moved easily through scripture and used it with authority, she also interpreted it in terms of her own experience of self-bestowal in service of the most deprived and thereby shaped her own language of relationship to God. Frequently in her writings, she evokes the divine Providence, God as Provider, an image that recalls the shekinah, the sheltering divine presence that accompanied the Israelites on their journey through the desert to their promised home.
Catherine too was on a journey, and travelling metaphors such as ‘trips’, ‘dances’ are frequent in her writings. She was seeking a ‘home’ and variously she found it with the O’Callaghans in Coolock, in the House of Mercy in Baggot Street, and finally through her greatest spiritual journey – the founding of the Mercy Congregation. She was very much a here-and-now person. If God is real, he must also be God-with-us in the maelstrom of life. Hers was the living God of the Bible, who makes his presence felt now. Having coined the axiom that has inspired so many Mercy Sisters – ‘the poor need help now’ – indeed she could not have known any other God.
Mary C. Sullivan rsm
Her accompanying and self-bestowing God, Catherine found enfleshed and modelled in the person of Jesus. Jesus is the embodiment of God’s self-bestowal. He is divine love made manifest, but as divine love he is also mercy in the face of human misery. Catherine saw mercy as inseparable from love and yet distinct, in that mercy was the ‘assistance’, the ‘practical rendering of God’s charity.’ She saw mercy as love characterised by ‘tenderness’. Sullivan tells us that ‘tenderness’ was a favourite word of hers. She had a particular partiality for the gospel story: ‘the Washing of the Feet’ (Jn 13:2-11), and she advocated that the Sisters, in imitation of Christ, must be ‘bent toward’ those they serve, bestowing on them not just gifts but their very selves. Echoing the Pauline text of divine self-emptying (Phil 2:5-9), the humble Jesus of the gospels who died on the Cross was her model of divine self-bestowal. Sullivan tells us that the mystery of the Cross pervades Catherine’s references to Jesus, and she counselled Sisters to imitate him with the words: ‘Be alert to each day’s Cross of Christ, the carrying of one’s cross being the greatest way of imitation.’
And yet this self-bestowing providence that upheld her deep immersion in human deprivation, her tiresome journeys for foundations, her shaping of the history of her times, was also the Providence who called her apart. She wrote: “We have one solid comfort amid this little ‘tripping about’: our hearts can always be in the same place, centred on God.” To this still centre she frequently called the Sisters. And here we find her using words such as ‘Peace’ and ‘Eternity’. When she says: ‘Each day is a step we take towards eternity; and we shall continue thus to step from day to day until we take the last step which will bring us into the presence of God.’ she is not denying the reality of life now and focusing on the after-life as if it were more real. She is speaking rather of a perspective or a consciousness within with which we can truly serve God. She seems to intuit through all her immersion in the human that God also is the Holy Mystery who draws her apart. Thus we find in her a certain joyous detachment from all her endeavours and from what she calls ‘this poor miserable world.’ We know from her life that she liked to dance; she liked to write verse, some of it witty pieces of wise advice or nonsense verse to entertain. While undoubtedly she was blessed with natural talents enabling her to do this, it is possible that this ‘time out for nonsense’ was also an expression of the inner freedom and joy nourished in her by the divine Peace she also experienced.
Jo O’Donovan rsm
South Central Province
