“What We Were Obliged to Do” by Melanie Rigney (@melanierigney)
For the grace of God has appeared, saving all and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to deliver us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people as his own, eager to do what is good. (Titus 2:11-14)
The salvation of the just comes from the Lord. (Psalm 37:39a)
“When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’" (Luke 17:10)
Piety
I travel, work, suffer my weak health, meet with a thousand difficulties, but all these are nothing, for this world is so small. To me, space is an imperceptible object, as I am accustomed to dwell in eternity. —Frances Xavier Cabrini
Study
They say that when Frances Cabrini died on December 22, 1917, she had been making Christmas candy for at-risk children in Chicago. It wasn’t a big, showy thing; but then, Frances probably wouldn’t have considered much of what she did to be big and showy. She just did what she felt the Lord obliged her to do.
It was a life in some way similar to many of the time… with some similarities to our lives today. No one thought she’d amount to much; a frail and sickly child who was nearly felled by smallpox and a near-drowning that may have been the reason behind her lifelong fear of the water. For health reasons, several communities of women religious refused to accept her. She failed at one of her first endeavors, turning around a troubled orphanage.
Frances had always felt called to be a missionary, and she knew it would be to China. She made little paper boats and put flowers in them, calling them missionaries. She and friends from the failed orphanage endeavor formed the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and made plans to go to China. The pope, however, saw a greater need among Italians who had recently emigrated to the United States, and famously told her, “Not to the East, but to the West.” Frances didn’t argue; she did what she felt the Lord obliged her to do.
The women received less than a warm reception from Church authorities in New York, who advised them to go back home until funding and a place to live were set up. Frances didn’t argue… or return to Italy. She and the others asked another community of women religious and immigrants for help in doing what they felt the Lord obliged them to do. She spent the next twenty-eight years establishing schools, orphanages, hospitals, and more on three continents, crossing the Atlantic more than two dozen times—and making Christmas candy and performing other small, mundane tasks she felt the Lord obliged her to do.
We can learn much from the United States’ first (naturalized) citizen to be canonized. But perhaps the greatest lesson the frail woman with the big eyes and bigger heart offers us is not to look for accolades and atta-girls and atta-boys for what we do in His name. We do it because it is what we are obliged to do, knowing our ledger with God can never be balanced.
Action
Listen to that small voice calling you to do something you don’t think you have time or skill to do. Then do it.
Image: Public domain https://commons.wikimedia.
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