Between the years 1373 and 1380 the post office in Sienna must have been exceptionally busy. We know that because 382 letters have survived from the pen of St Catherine of Sienna whose feast day it was yesterday. Catherine was a woman who spoke her mind, whether it was to the Pope, to royalty, to the local nobility, to merchants or to lawyers, all of whom did not perhaps entirely welcome the delivery of her letters. Wherever she saw sin, negligence, social injustice or division in the church she would fire off a letter. So to one great prelate she wrote Cry out as if you had a million voices; it is silence that kills the world; proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.’ And she certainly took her own advice.
From a modern point of view Catherine is an awkward saint. She had her first vision when she was six, she decided at the age of seven that she would never marry which wasn’t that precocious since her parents would have started to plan her marriage as soon as she reached twelve. From eighteen to twenty one she lived the life of a recluse. Christ then told her in another vision to become a nurse. She taught herself to read, visited notorious sinners to persuade them to repent, and became a successful negotiator between feuding families both locally and soon between the feuding Italian states. This was the period when the Papacy was in the pocket of the French crown in Avignon. Catherine persuaded the pope to return to Rome. Gregory XI then died and the cardinals proceeded to elect two different popes because the Italians and the French could not agree on a candidate. Catherine fired off a volley of letters and went to Rome to try to end the Great Schism as it was known. But no-one would listen to her. She had a heart attack which may have prevented her from eating or possibly she went on a hunger strike and died offering up her pain for the sake of the church whose divisions caused her immense emotional suffering. Not an easy saint but an extraordinary woman in an age when female spirituality was very suspect. Albertus Magnus had said a hundred years before that women shouldn’t receive communion too often as it might encourage disrespect – for women were naturally given to levity.
Levity is the last thing one would associate with Catherine though her taste for rather extreme verbal imagery sometimes give rise to unintended amusement. There are, however, at least two sayings by Catherine worth treasuring. As the soul comes to know herself, she also knows God better, for she sees how God has been to her. In the gentle mirror of God she sees her own dignity.’ Catherine does not understand knowing herself to mean a modern kind of psychological introspection. She means knowing her self to be created by God and dependent on God, In this she is working from a rather different perspective to the one we are familiar with. We tend to work from ourselves and our world about which we think we know a lot, up to God whom we find rather more difficult to talk about. Catherine assumes that we know very little about ourselves. Nothing about us makes sense, nothing is reliable or certain. The only thing we can be certain of us that our life is dependent on the one who creates and sustains us and does not let us go. So Catherine hears God say to her, You are the one who is not, I am the one who is.’ That is not a belittling statement. Catherine takes it to mean simply that without God she is nothing. So she sees herself as existing in the sea of God’s being, where God is in the soul and the soul is in God, as the fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish.’
It is this vision and understanding of herself which gives Catherine the strength to be the remarkably independent kind of woman she became. This and the fact that she saw Christ as the divine bridge builder between God and man and between human beings themselves. All of you,’ Christ says to her, have to come along this bridge by seeking the praise and glory of my name.’ Bridge building was what Catherine dedicated her life to and it also is one of the principal themes of this morning’s readings. The risen Christ builds a bridge between past and present. He opens the minds of the disciples to understand the way in which the Jewish past recorded in Scripture is fulfilled in his life, death and resurrection. He builds a bridge between suffering and glory. Peter by his preaching seeks to build a bridge between those who rejected Christ and the fledgling Church. And in that difficult passage from the first letter of John we have to build a bridge between the real present and the ideal future. No-one who abides in Christ sins; no-one who sins has either seen him or known him.’ And yet in the first chapter of that letter John says, If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and there is no truth in us. If we confess our sins, Christ is faithful and righteous and will forgive our sins.’ Reading John we have to build bridges between attainment and aspiration, between the sinful realities of the present and the confidence of knowing that we shall one day be like Christ.
And then finally the most difficult bridge of all; the risen Christ tells the disciples that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations starting from Jerusalem.’ As John Pridmore graphically expresses it in this weeks Church Times, we are all spiritually commuters from Jerusalem. Everything begins from Jerusalem. Our salvation and the salvation of Jerusalem are in some deep way connected. Praying for the peace of Jerusalem is more than just a phrase from the psalms it is a political and moral and spiritual necessity the one place on earth where bridge building is a necessity for the sake of the world. May Catherine and Mary and John and all the saints and all of us pray for the bridge builders of Jerusalem. Amen
Stephen Tucker