Today, I was one among many at St. Basil Church as the local convent of the Sister Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick (of whom you know I am fond from earlier entries) celebrating this last stage prior to sainthood.
One of the nuns had written that martyrdom by literally dying is not what is generally required of the average disciple, people like me. In every day, we experience small martyrdoms. I suppose this is a corrollary of what Terese of Lisieux called the Little Way. We take the moments of our lives, good, and bad, and we who believe in our Catholicity, offer those things in union with the sacrifice on the Cross, the condition precedent to the Resurrection that restored the relationship of man and God.
It was cold in Los Angeles today. Don't laugh oh rest of the country. We are having a rare snap, which means that it gets into the forties, sometimes the thirties at night. The church that hosted the celebration is made mostly of stone, a big cavernous place on Wilshire Boulevard. Drafty on a warm day, the cool seeped into your bones through your clothes--not unlike a New York winter's day. It wasn't just me. People were shivering and wrapping their coats around themselves and not finding relief. It was hard to pay attention. Then in the back the sounds of loud voices as the Archbishop was speaking his homily. I went back there when it became intolerable. I wasn't the first. As I opened the inner doors to see the outer doors were wide open, encouraging the cold air to swoop in, I wasn't sure I wouldn't be sharp with those on the other side.
Apparently there was to be a wedding after the celebration of the Beatas, and the bride was having pictures taken. There she was, stock still at the open door in her sleeveless wedding dress, with a photographer, whose voice was likely what had been heard, instructing her.
How could I be sharp with this group. And yet, how thoughtless it seemed they were, disregarding the occasion of another and the reverence due to the Mass. So, I put my hand on the photographer's shoulder and said, "I know that this is a wedding, but there is a Mass inside, if you could lower your voices," or something like that.
I hadn't been the only one to come out.
I realized as I returned to my pew that not only was I distracted, but I was feeling nothing about being there. I wasn't just cold bodily but I was cold as ice emotionally, and if any emotion were to break through it would be irritation and anger. "I feel inconsolable," I thought. Mother Theresa was inconsolable for fifty years. Media pundits concluded that this meant she did not believe in the faith she claimed to have. Those of us practicing our faith, and I emphasize the word "practice", which includes lots of falling and failing, knew that faith is an act of will not a matter of the vagaries of feeling.
I experienced it today, more than intellectually. I had to force myself to pray. And I realized that my absence of feeling was not an absence of belief, although there was a tendency to merge the two.
This was a small martyrdom. Tiny, indeed, but still something to bear with a recognition that I was not abandoned, even when it felt to be so. I have never been hugely attracted to those saints who seek martyrdom. But I think that I ought to be attracted to those who have it thrust upon them, and accept it with equanimity. May I never face that, but then it seems it should be a piece of cake to accept a little cold, a little noise, and a lack of feeling consoled.
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