Wednesday of the Thirty-Third Week in Ordinary Time
St. Rose Philippine Duchesne
Given to Religious Sisters at the Domus Guadalupe in Rome
Something that we all quickly discover about living a life in the wake of Jesus and the saints is that we will at times face overwhelming situations, situations where what is being asked of us seems too demanding. Our readings show us two examples of people faced with overwhelming situations. First we have a mother and her youngest son enduring persecution and in the Gospel some servants are given a task from a ‘demanding’ king.
What will we do with the difficulties we face daily? How can we respond in that overwhelming situation?
In the words of Meister Eckhart, “Do the next thing you have to do with your whole heart and find delight in doing it.” Or in other words, know that God will give you the grace to do the next thing you have to do and do it with joy. His grace is sufficient for us and so with great joy we ought to do what lay’s immediately before us. St. Rose Philippine Duchesne’s life was full of overwhelming situations, but she faced them with trust and joy. When she was 19 she entered the convent and only 4 years later, because of the French Revolution, her convent was closed down; her dreams of being a religious sister and eventually a missionary crushed, what could she do? If she thought too much about her main goal, which was to be a missionary in the Americas, she would have been overwhelmed and deemed the task, like the third servant in the Gospel, to be ‘too demanding’. So instead she did ‘the next thing’, she opened up a school for poor children, she provided for the sick around her, and she hid priests from Revolutionaries. Then, when the ban was lifted, she reclaimed her convent and later was able to start a mission in the state of Missouri. When faced with overwhelming situations we should not stress ourselves out, but simply do the next thing, do it with our whole heart, and with great joy.
The many tasks that you face will be overwhelming at times from your study, to your work, to your prayer, to spreading the Gospel to others, to the struggles of answering the call to live out to perfection the evangelical counsels, all of these are rather ‘demanding’ tasks. But we must do all these tasks with joy and then our lives will become, in the words of Blessed Mother Teresa, ‘a net of love by which you can catch many souls’. Joy was the strength of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne and all the saints. This morning the first thing we are asked to do is to receive our Lord in the Eucharist, something that we know we can do with joy, and then to allow the joy from this moment, to spill over into all the tasks that lay ahead of this day.
