Novena to St Catherine of Siena - Day 4

Reflection on Charity – from the Dialogue of St Catherine of Siena, Chap. 148

 

Enlarge your heart, daughter, and open your mind’s eye to the light of faith. See with what great love and providence I have created and ordained humankind to rejoice in my supreme eternal reward. I have provided everything in soul and body, for the imperfect and the perfect, for the good and the bad, spiritually and temporally, in heaven and on earth, in this mortal life and in the immortal.

In this mortal life, so long as you are pilgrims, I have bound you with the chain of charity. Whether you want it or not, you are so bound. If you should break loose by not wanting to live in charity for your neighbors, you will still be bound by it by force. Thus, that you may practice charity in action and in will, I in my providence did not give to any one person or to each individually the knowledge for doing everything necessary for human life. No, I gave something to one, something else to another, so that each one’s need would be a reason to have recourse to the other. So though you may lose your will for charity because of your wickedness, you will at least be forced by your own need to practice it in action. Thus you see the artisan turn to the worker and the worker to the artisan: Each has need of the other because neither knows how to do what the other does. So also the cleric and religious have need of the layperson, and the layperson of the religious; neither can get along without the other. And so with everything else.

Could I not have given everyone everything? Of course. But in my providence I wanted to make each of you dependent on the others, so that you would be forced to exercise charity in action and will at once. …

Look up into me, everlasting Life; look up to the angels and the citizens of this everlasting life who have won eternal life by the power of the Lamb’s blood. I have so ordered their charity that no one simply enjoys his or her own reward in this blessed life that is my gift without its being shared by others. This is not how I have willed it to be. Rather, their charity is so well ordered and perfect that the great find joy in the reward of the small, and the small find joy in the reward of the great. I mean small in the sense of capacity, not that the small are any less full than the great. As I have told you elsewhere, each has his or her own measure.

Oh, how intimate is this charity! How united they are with me and with each other! For I am the source of what they have and they acknowledge this with holy fear and due reverence. When they see this they immerse themselves in me, and in me they see and know the dignity that I have given them. The angelic communicates with the human, that is, with the souls of the blessed, and the blessed with the angels. Thus all of them in this joyous charity rejoice in each others’ reward and exult in me in jubilation and mirth without any sadness, sweet without any bitterness, because while they lived and died they enjoyed me in loving charity through charity for their neighbors.