Mary-Cabrini Durkin-Angela Merici Wise Guide to Life

Mary-Cabrini Durkin-Angela Merici wise guide to life:

Introduction

Much of what I will say is not new to you. You are already on this path. I simply hope to encourage your continued faithful service. I shared your ministry for many years, so please let me say “We” as a fellow Ursuline educator.

The fine speakers addressing you in these days together are helping you focus on various aspects of Ursuline education, including educational leadership. You have inherited the mission of Ursuline education. Naturally you look to Angela Merici and to others who share this mission for guidance.Your educational mission flows from St. Angela’s spiritual wellspring. Naturally you come here to drink from that spring.

My topic today is Angela Merici as a wise guide on the path of life. Angela is a wisdom-figure. Her wisdom guides us as human beings, as followers of Christ, and as Ursuline educators. She calls us to integrate spirituality and action. What is sown in our hearts flowers in our profession. Angela calls leadership and teaching “this task – there cannot be another more worthy” (Prologue to the Counsels, 7-8). Why are these roles so “worthy”? Because of the worthiness, the intrinsic value of the students whom you teachers teach. Because of the worthiness, the intrinsic value of the entire school community whom you administrators lead: St. Angela calls them “so noble a family, [entrusted] to your hands” (Prologue to the Testament, 11-12).

My focus will be primarily on Angela’s spiritual wisdom. We will also recognize some educational implications of her wisdom. My underlying assumption is that authentic Ursuline educational leadership is rooted in authentic Ursuline spirituality. As living water, Ursuline education wells up from deep inside educators who drink from Angela’s spring. None of us is called to replicate Angela Merici. After all, God didn’t make us 15th-century Italians.

But we are called to imbibe and integrate Angela’s guidance, her spirit. This is the only way to be authentic Ursuline educators. Authenticity as an Ursuline educator involves a personal spiritual journey that integrates awe, Scripture, and a relationship with Christ. Think of the four centuries of Ursuline schools that have flowed into the institution in which you now serve. Think of the rich, deep, and global reality of Ursuline education represented in this room today.Ask yourself, what made all this work?Think of the Ursuline sisters on whose shoulders you stand. Ursuline education, now handed on to you, did not emerge from a checklist labeled “Ursuline values.” It flowed out of these women’s lives, out of the regular prayer and contemplation that both opened them ever more to God and deepened their own spirits.

This morning, we will break apart this title - Wise guide on the path of life – into three parts: Angela’s wisdom, Walking a path, and Life: Earth and heaven.

I. Angela’s wisdom

First of all, there is so much to be said about Angela’s wisdom! Books have been written, seminars conducted, articles read…. I can focus on only a few aspects.

Secondly, wisdom is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Angela’s wisdom cannot be understood or emulated unless we see its full perspective – God’s perspective. Angela’s wisdom, the fruit of her authentic human maturity, is rooted in her relationship with God. “Rooted”: God is the Source that nourishes this human growth. It would never occur to Angela to separate humanity from its divine Source, its roots.

Why did Angela “invent” a form of life for women in the world – the Company of St. Ursula? Not because of a sociological program. She inaugurated this way because her own heart and spirit yearned to belong to God alone. God had called her in a visionary experience in her teens that continued to energize her life until it took shape as the Company of St. Ursula. Angela recognized a similar call from God in other Brescian women.

The spiritual family that grew from this call is our ancestral origin. She is our Madre. Our authenticity as her spiritual family today – Company, Order, schools – depends on our fidelity to what we sometimes call her charism: her particular spiritual gift. We inherit this legacy from our Madre. At its core is this central truth: God loves you. God invites you into a loving, committed relationship and into a spiritual family where the members love one another and nourish and foster a new generation.

Angela’s wisdom is the fruit of a life lived deeply, intentionally, and in prayerful discernment. Her writings manifest the fruit of her experience. Let us observe the significance of these ways of living as Angela’s life reveals them: deeply, intentionally, and in prayerful discernment.

Deeply – Angela lived deeply, with depth of feeling and depth of experience.

First, Angela felt deeply. She felt suffering. She did not protect herself from the anguish that is a natural part of human experience. We know how deeply the loss of her parents and her sister affected her. Her suffering bore fruit in compassion. When CaterinaPatengola lost her husband and children, the Franciscan friars thought of Angela as the person who could accompany Caterina. Why? Because Angela was equipped with authentic compassion; she had entered the depth of suffering.

Secondly, she related to others with genuine warmth, which was reciprocated. After Angela had spent several months with the Gallo family in Cremona, Agostino Gallo said he and his wife and family “could not live without her” and invited her to reside with them in their home in Brescia. Her affection shines through the Rule, the Counsels, and the Testament in language such as “most beloved daughters and sisters…” (Rule, Prologue, 4). She encouraged the leaders to share her warm affection for their daughters – we would say for our students: “Therefore, my most loving mothers, if you love these dear daughters of ours with a burning and passionate charity,it will be impossible for you not to have them all depicted individually in your memory and in your heart” (2nd Legacy, 10-11).

She was passionate in her relationship with Jesus Christ. She called him “my Lover, or rather, the Lover of us all” (5th Counsel, 38). Her prayer, recorded in the Rule, reveals her intensity: “Lord, on behalf of those miserable wretches who do not know you…my heart is wrenched” (Ch. 5, 31-33).

In another aspect of living deeply, Angela related to others at a deep level, not superficially.She saw people’s inner reality, not their social standing or their accomplishments. Angela gave her deep attention to people as varied as SimonaBorni, a serving girl and Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan. When our students absorb society’s categories of value based on income or athletic stardom or academic success, what a treasure we give them by relating to them deeply, on the basis of their intrinsic human value. Angela’s example challenges us to foster a school culture based on this deep truth. Counselors have a particular role in cultivating this deep truth.

She called the members of her Company to be “queens in heaven” (Rule, Prologue, 17). These were simple women, some of them servants, all of them single and thus on the bottom rung of their family’s social position. Angela saw their dignity.

She instructed her successors in leadership to have the Company’s members “carved” or “engraved” on their minds and hearts. For us, the parallel is to have our students engraved on our hearts. What a powerful metaphor! “Have engraved on your mind and heart all your dear daughters, one by one” (2nd Legacy, 1).

Living deeply, Angela plunged into new, risky experiences. She was not satisfied with the safe territory of the familiar. In midlife, she left the rural landscape of the family farm at Le Grezze and the familiar streets of nearby Desenzano and moved to Brescia. Not only was Brescia the big city. A military invasion coupled with civil war had devastated its social fabric and its families even more than its buildings and institutions. At fifty – old age! – she went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There were no Delta Airlines or Marriott Inns. This was a long, arduous and dangerous journey. The sea was vast. Pirates were threatening. Language and customs and food were strange. Yes, Angela took risks and lived deeply.

A second aspect of Angela’s wisdom was what we might call intentionality – Angela lived intentionally. She did not drift through life. Or at least she learned this intentionality as she grew from a rather impetuous young woman into the wise Madre whose guidance we treasure.

Angela lived intentionally by being purposeful and by being authentic in matching words with deeds. To achieve a purpose, one must take specific steps. Angela was very realistic about what she called “means and ways.” “Seek out, and desire all those means and ways that are necessary to persevere and prosper till the end. Because merely beginning is not enough if not carried through” (Rule, Prologue, 10-11).Pious words mean little unless they are put into concrete actions.And actions, including spiritual practices, must have a purpose. They are not to be empty or automatic. For example, in her Rule’s chapter on fasting, Angela makes it clear that this practice is not for its own sake, but has value only as a tool for the purpose of spiritual fruitfulness.

Having said that Angela lived intentionally, I’m not sure that she always lived this way. In fact, her youthful vision of a company of women did not become a reality until she founded the Company at the age of sixty. It seems that her illness in Cremona, almost unto death, catalyzed her action. Perhaps it scared her. Perhaps she realized that she had almost died with the mission of her life incomplete. In the prayer recorded in her Rule, she says “…nor have I ever been obedient to your divine precepts” (Rule, Ch. 5, 29). An exaggeration, surely, but reflecting how she must have felt.

We tend to look back at Angela through the lens of what she eventually accomplished. We honor the holiness and wisdom that marked her final years. But she had to grow into that ripeness. Forty years intervened between her early vision and the foundation of the Company. She would later say that, after her illness catalyzed her into taking action, an angel scourged her for her tardiness. I take this as figurative way of expressing her anguish over her delay. Like us, she too journeyed and searched, sometimes literally journeyed – on her pilgrimages. Some biographers think that her search for guidance and clarity was at least one motive for her several pilgrimages. What actions was she called to take?

It would not be realistic to see her as a model if we could not recognize ourselves in her struggles and uncertainties. So Angela can be our guide not only in the final outcome of her journey, but also on the uncertain path of search and discovery. Perhaps you come to conferences like these and groan inwardly at the distance between yourself and the saint who is held up as our model. Take heart! Let Angela be your guide precisely as a sincere and earnest seeker.

In a third aspect of her wisdom, Angela lived discerningly, and I cannot separate this discernment from the way she arrived at it: She lived prayerfully. To discern is to see clearly, to distinguish between the false and the real, between the superficial and the deep. Discernment includes the capacity to see reality not only from the narrow perspective of one’s individual experience. Instead, Angela could see a broader, fuller reality. Perhaps today we would call that quality a capacity for the larger view, or for the common good.

Like Mary of Nazareth, Angela pondered over her experiences. (Luke 2:19, 51) Pondering, she learned from experience. Pondering, she discovered deeper truth and wisdom. Angela spent long hours of the night in prayerful reflection, her friends tell us. She found guidance in the Bible and other spiritual reading. We cannot turn a page of her writings without encountering quotations or references to Scripture.Jesus was her model. She regularly cited his example for her daughters to follow.

Angela’s prayerful pondering led her to discover more than met the eye.In the Prologue to the Rule we find these poetic lines, which I will return to throughout the morning: “We will cross through this momentary life with consolation, and our every pain and sadness will turn into joy and gladness, and thorny and rocky roads we will find flower-strewn for us, paved with finest gold” (Rule, Prologue, 27).Honestly, she acknowledges pain: thorns, rocks. Like us, she has felt the prick of thorns, the hardness of life’s often stony path. Only the combination of time and of looking deeply into her experience allowed her – and allows us – to see the flowers and the gold.

A second example of this deeper seeing – or we might say deeper hearing – comes in the Rule’s chapter on obedience, where she says, “And above all, to obey the counsels and inspirations which the Holy Spirit continually sends into the heart, whose voice we will hear all the more clearly the more purified and clean our conscience” (Rule, Ch. 8, 14-15).Hearing the Holy Spirit clearly is not automatic. It depends on what she calls purifying our conscience, what we might call both our continuing conversion and our inner work.

She calls for discernment about difficult situations and individual students. In her 2nd Counsel, she says to the teachers, “You will achieve more with kindness and gentleness than with harshness and sharp rebukes, which should be reserved only for cases of necessity, and even then, at the right place and time, and according to the persons. But charity...teaches such discretion, and moves the heart to be, according to place and time, now gentle and now severe, and little or much as there is need” (2nd Counsel, 3-7). Rigid discipline is far indeed from Angela’s way. Reflection – loving reflection – will discover the most effective approach.

As I said before, Angela could stretch herself to understand from a point of view different from her own. What does this stretching call for, from Angela and from us?It means thinking through a situation from more than one point of view, that is, not just automatically from my own point of view. By the way, both fiction and non-fiction narrative and the study of history can be tools for developing this capacity.

Angela gave very practical advice in her third Counsel. She is speaking here to the colonelle, the teachers, about possible disagreements with the matrons, that is, the administrators. The principles can apply in any disagreement. Perhaps her words will be useful to you.

6: Now, if it should happen that you have some just reason to contradict or reproach them, do it with discretionand respect. This advice applies to disagreements that Angela identifies with a “just reason.” She calls first for thinking this through, not just sounding off, not just voicing my opinion merely because it is my opinion. Is this a matter of simple disagreement, or does it involve a matter of justice? She also calls for respect, which includes the willingness to recognize the other person’s intrinsic worth, not to look at her primarily through the filter of the disagreement.

7: And if they do not want to pay you heed, have patience.Sometimes we just have to put up with the situation or decision. Patience means accepting without complaint, without, as Angela says elsewhere, grumbling. Grumbling means that I’m still stuck within the narrow confines of myself, unwilling to let go of my opinion or my way.

8: And know that it is right to love the mothers if they are good, and bear with them if they are eccentric. Angela calls us to love, to bear with the other. Unlike the polarized and vitriolic atmosphere so poisonous to a sense of community, we are not to see the person we disagree with as an opponent, much less an enemy. The person I disagree with is also someone I continue to love.

9: And be very careful never to complain, or grumble, or speak ill of them, whether with others or with your daughters. A reminder: here Angela is speaking to the Company’s teachers, responsible for modeling behavior to their daughters, that is, in our school context, to their students. She describes behaviors that none of us want our students to learn, least of all from us: complaining, grumbling, and speaking ill. Even worse would be driving a wedge between students and the administration. This would damage the relationships that are the fabric of the educational community. The next line makes this clear.