Aversions, Thorns, and Prophetic Words

I didn’t take to St. Catherine of Siena for years after I became Catholic. She frustrated the image I wanted Catholicism to convey.

I felt bad for Catherine. She was always talking about drowning in Christ’s blood. This seemed more like a depiction of horror than of saintliness or sanity, reminding me of Carrie by Stephen King which I had read when I was 15 or 16. Her early death at age 33, following years of self-starvation, confirmed all my thoughts about the patriarchy of the Church encouraging women to keep themselves in positions of subordination. How could I possibly convince my secular friends that Catholicism cared about women if this was the woman Catholicism venerated? The unspoken question: how could I convince myself?

Out of all the saints that I knew of, Catherine was my least favorite. So, I ignored her.

But she just wouldn’t stay ignored. She kept popping up in homilies at Mass. People admired her in books I read. We moved to a new town and a saying attributed to her was painted on the side of the Eucharistic chapel.

Then, in the middle of my master’s degree, a professor suggested we write our term paper on the spirituality of the saint we found most disagreeable. Ugh. I knew instantly that I had to write about Catherine. At least after I finish, I thought, I’ll be able to dislike her honestly.

This ended up being one of the most important papers that I wrote during my degree program. It was not my most well-written paper or my best researched theological work, but in the midst of it I learned some valuable information about myself.

Catherine did write often about drowning in Christ’s blood. She wrote things like, “I long to see you engulfed and drowned in the sweet blood of God’s Son, which is permeated with the fire of his blazing charity.” This was the opening of a letter Catherine wrote to a fellow Catholic, a very typical opening line from her actually. She frequently encouraged disciples of Christ to drown in His blood.

And Catherine did die young after years of consuming the Eucharist as her main source of material nourishment. However, she described her inability to eat as a physical ailment. At one time, in prayer, Jesus encouraged her to go eat with her family and she found that she physically struggled to eat food. She felt great disappointment in herself that she couldn’t obey the Lord’s instruction. She took this physical suffering and the self-betrayal she felt along with it and transformed them into service.¹

The Church did not suppress Catherine. The Church, then and now, continues to help Catherine in her mission of service to Christians, encouraging them to see Jesus as He is and to experience our great need for His love, especially His blood which I once found so uncomfortable to discuss. I could say so much more. Catherine did some truly incredible things in her life and also loved Jesus in a way that does not conform to post-modern aesthetics at all.

Catherine is weird. And she is amazing.

Prophetic speaking, telling people the knowledge of God, is probably the most despised gift in the Church. During her lifetime Catherine dealt with many people, like her first confessors, who did not want to understand her and denied that her words and actions carried spiritual significance. And then, even after her death, she has to deal with people like me who want to tuck her neatly away and find another saint who is easier to handle.

Exploring my discomfort about Catherine was the best thing I could have done to welcome her prophetic word into my life. But it was also something I was really averse to doing. Catherine did not suit my Catholic ideal.

We see prophets in the Bible, like Ezekiel in today’s first reading, experiencing this push/pull of the demand of God to share His word. Ezekiel makes it clear that he didn’t want to go; the Spirit set him on his feet and took him. And Catherine could definitely write the words of Paul’s address to us today about wanting to do God’s work and finding that revelation comes with thorns. Many prophets have just as strong of an aversion to sharing God’s word as those who receive it have to hearing it. Service is never without suffering.

After we’ve experienced initial conversion to faith, we often dismiss passages like today’s Gospel reading from St. Mark as not applicable to us. “I have not rejected God,” we might say. “I love Jesus, so I’m not like these people in His hometown.” Passages like this often get used to justify our own feeling of persecution. And while that’s definitely one interpretation and true for many, many people around the world today who will be threatened, kidnapped, abused, or murdered for profession of the Christian Faith, it’s not one that is often true in my own life. If I feel persecuted in America in 2024, I’m probably inflating my importance and not looking honestly at my own failings.

We dismiss the most obvious and awkward interpretation, like I hid from Catherine. We are still in need of conversion. We still need to welcome Jesus home to our hearts more fully. That aversion to prophetic nudging is essentially the push/pull of not wanting to have Jesus convert us out of our comfort zone.

I didn’t want to like Catherine because that would mean I would need to love the Eucharist more devoutly. I wanted (and still feel that want) for my faith to conform more easily with the world. Most fundamentally that’s about my rejection of Christ (the true issue) rather than my fear that other people will reject me (the issue I pretend I’m dealing with).

But for me, right now, I remember Catherine every time I want to tug away when God nudges. When I get that sense that God continues to present me with the thing that I would rather not do, that’s when I think about Catherine. I ask her to guide me in the push/pull to hear what I need to hear and say what I need to say, to love with an uncomfortable love.

Sometimes I will learn the most about myself by doing the thing I want to do the least. Catherine has become, for me, the patron saint of taking a second look at what is hard to understand about God. She’s the friend I turn to when I think maybe I’ve judged a situation or a person because I’m seeking a painless life for myself. Catherine understands thorns, especially ones like me.

Readings for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) on the USCCB Website

1. This comes from the research of historian Caroline Walker Bynum, who discusses Catherine specifically in pages 165-180 of Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women.