The Lily and the Lotus: Saint Catherine vs. the Self-Help Aisle

Saint Catherine of Siena by Arthur Hughes

"Bless me, Father, for I have kept two of our parish library books out far beyond what I imagine the due dates must have been.  It's been a month since my last confession.  If I squint with my brain I'm pretty sure that's 1/8th of the time I've had these books out."  Maybe that's how I should start my next confession?  It's not as if I can claim ignorance about the way libraries work, having managed the circulation department of an academic library for years, sending out overdue notices and/or the mob when students did not return materials on time.  Like the doctor who is a terrible patient, I'm a former library employee who is a lousy book-borrower.  Breaking the habit might require absolution.


The books in question are a biography of my parish's patroness, Saint Catherine of Siena, and also her own Dialogue with God.  I have stubbornly hung onto these volumes, telling myself all through Advent and Lent that I would make time to read them.  But, then I would find a toddler without his pants in the next room, or it would take an hour and 15 minutes at the town hall to register a car, or I would nod off because I'd had such a busy day of chasing a pantsless toddler, maybe even while trying to register my car.  Finally, this Easter season, 10 days before the feast of St. Catherine, I decided I was going to binge-read both books.  Even if it took staying up past midnight for a week, I would read every last page and get to know more about our patron saint and strike up a friendship with her.  Then, on her feast day, I would participate in the timeless ritual of dressing in black and clinging to the shadows while making my way to the after-hours parish book drop, after which I would pretend I had not just senselessly kept these titles from other parishioners for more than half a year.

The feast of St. Catherine was on April 29th, and I still have the books, but not only because of the typical excuses.  I have actually started to read the Dialogue, which led me to the discovery that I cannot "binge-read" St. Catherine.  I'm still on page 11 of her conversation with God.  All of her writing invites or even demands due reflection.  On a good day, I can "binge" on a few pages; on another day, just a fragment of a sentence.  In the first half of a statement, the woman mystically wedded to Christ will start off saying something a pop psychologist would laud, but then she'll conclude the thought with nothing I have ever heard issuing from the mouths of Oprah or Dr. Phil.  For example:

"[I remain] in the cell of self-knowledge, in order to know better the goodness of God toward [me]."

What?  But, this article from Chopra.com lists a bunch of things meditation --also called "me time" by the author-- will teach me about myself, and none of it leads to knowing God is good to me, or even that God exists and I am a created being.  "The more consistent you are in your meditation practice, the more you come to understand about yourself, which is the source of freedom and fulfillment in life.  . . . By taking the time to sit and be with yourself in silence, you practice kindness, compassion, love, patience, flexibility, and acceptance," says the blog.  But, in the pages following her above quote, Saint Catherine demonstrates that pride masquerading as self- "compassion" or "acceptance" is not the end result of true self-knowledge.  Honest self-knowledge leads to pride's opposite:  humility.  And, since humility is the first movement of self-sacrificing love, entering into the "cell of self-knowledge" to attain it is critical:  ". . . humble and continuous prayer founded on knowledge of [self] and of God . . . unites with God the soul that follows the footprints of Christ crucified, and thus, by desire and affection, and union of love, makes her another Himself."  Knowing ourselves with all of our flaws and limitations coupled with the knowledge of the multitude of blessings we have all been given, the greatest of all being God's Only Begotten Son, leads to a keen awareness of the "goodness of God" to us, and in turn leads to loving God "who first loved us" (1 John 4: 19).  This responding love is a fire in the Spirit, an all-consuming offering of ourselves to God and to others as we, in St. Catherine's words, "become another Himself," another Christ.

This idea flies in the face of another hallowed slogan of our post-Christian cultural gurus, namely that we must love ourselves before we can love anyone else.  Even the Bible's "love your neighbor as yourself" would seem to agree with our modern mantra.  The popularly peddled prescription is that we need to "give ourselves permission to pamper ourselves," repeat daily affirmations about our own greatness, or simply get in a quiet place and envision ourselves on a peaceful beach for 15 minutes a day, and then, as long as it doesn't hurt too much (because suffering has no value), maybe we will be ready to "love someone else" --but, only if we truly feel cherishing and compassionate towards ourselves.  If you're not quite there yet, you need more "you time" and will understandably have to hold off on loving others, perhaps indefinitely, except the type of good-deed-doing that makes you feel good.  By and large, that's our society's position.  However, lest the inventors of Comfortably Airbrushed Jesus forget, that was not His position.  He gave us a "new commandment":  to love one another as HE has loved us (John 13:34).  We must first humble ourselves, which will lead to contemplation and realization of the unfathomable depth of God's love for us; in this knowledge we will respond and love as He does.  The closer we are to loving as He loves, the closer we are to truly loving our neighbor.  And, how much does He love us?  He gave everything for us, as unworthy as we are, willingly going to his death so we might live.  St. Catherine tells us we must know ourselves honestly to begin to understand this love God has for us, which will lead us to returning His love, and so transform us into "another Himself" for the world.  Self-knowledge, according to St. Catherine, leads not to self-worship or self-cuddling or complacency but to humility, which God tells the saint is the "foster-mother and nurse of charity."  This is not the sterile, feel-good "charity" of mindlessly tossing some coins in a jar in the checkout line.  It is caritas, a word full of life and blood and passion and danger, a word that consumes as it multiplies.  It is agape love.  Humility is the "foster-mother and nurse" of this Love that is Christ.  God continues to St. Catherine:

"In self-knowledge, then, thou wilt humble thyself, seeing that, in thyself, thou dost not even exist; for thy very being, as thou wilt learn, is derived from Me, since I have loved both thee and others before you were in existence; and that, through the ineffable love which I had for you, wishing to re-create you to Grace, I have washed you, and re-created you in the Blood of My only-begotten Son, spilt with so great a fire of love.  This Blood teaches the truth to him, who, by self-knowledge, dissipates the cloud of self-love, and in no other way can he learn."

We do well to truly know ourselves as St. Catherine knew herself, so that we might be humble enough to "know better the goodness of God" to us and in that knowledge sprint into that Love and Truth with all of our strength.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.  I have been lazy in spiritual reading and inconsiderate of the parish library and anyone who may have wanted to borrow these books while they lay on my nightstand untouched for months.  But, that is an easy, superficial thing to admit, however slightly embarrassing.  It's the Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card of confessions.  Compared with the behemoth of my pride, it is the absolute least of my flaws.  May God help me to truly grasp this, so I may be led to know Him, the joy that loved me into existence, and I may become that Love in the world.  Amen.