Five years ago, just as you were preparing for your freshman year, Pope Benedict XVI recalled that God requires only one thing of us: “that we become a sign of his action in the world,” in other words, that we discover what he wants us to do and that we do it.
That is the whole purpose of our lives, just as it was with the Apostle Paul, in whose Cathedral Church we gather today. Saint Paul’s struggle to find out who God made him to be is depicted in the great transcept window to my left, depicting the Conversion of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus.
What Saint Paul learned on the road to Damascus was that true happiness, true purpose in life is not so much a matter of getting our way and plotting our course, as, again in the words of Pope Benedict, “letting go, surrendering to the ocean of God's goodness.”
Just like Saint Stephen…Let’s go back to him…There he is, fearlessly preaching Christ Jesus before the Jewish elders, before he was falsely accused of blasphemy and condemned to death.
And there he is, dragged outside the city and being hit in the face with rocks, stoned until he died. Imagine what that would be like, to be unjustly accused of heresy, dragged outside the house and killed as great big stones cracked your bones. And the last thing you hear is your friends damning you to hell.
Yet we are told he died smiling. Because he had found out why God had made him in the first place. And he was the first of the martyrs and first among the early saints.
Just like Saint Vincent de Paul. Vincent was born by the River Paul, which is perhaps where his family name came from. At the age of fifteen his father sent him to seminary and he was ordained four years later. He expected an uneventful life of scholarship and pastoral ministry as a respected member of seventeenth century French society. He had no idea that God had something else in mind.
On his fifth anniversary of ordination, returning from inspecting an estate he had inherited from a rich relative,
he was captured by pirates and sold as a slave. Over the next two years he was sold to a fisherman (which didn’t work out so well because he got sea-sick), a physician (who died) and an ex-priest with three wives who had converted to Islam. Vincent re-converted him (they were in Istanbul at this point) and returned with him to France, where he was freed and found that he had been entirely changed by his enslavement. He now heard God calling him to a radically mission to the poor…the ones every else would forget.
His enslavement had taught him what was truly important he wrote:
“It is not enough to give soup and bread to the poor. This the rich can do. You are the servant of the poor, always smiling and good-humored. They are your masters, terribly sensitive and exacting master you will see. And the uglier and the dirtier they will be, the more unjust and insulting, the more love you must give them. It is only for your love alone that the poor will forgive you the bread you give to them.”
And this: “Humility is nothing but truth, and pride is nothing but lying.”
It’s still a long story from there, but let it suffice to say that if God had not led him into slavery half-way across the world, he would have probably ended up as just one more aristocratic French clergyman of the seventeenth century whom no one would ever hear about again.
But God had something else in mind. He needed to make Vincent little so that he could do great things through him, so he could love the ones whom everyone else had forgotten and teach the Church to do the same.
God wrote straight with this crooked-line named Vincent, just as he does with us.
And then to the time of the French Revolution and Jeanne Jugan, whose father died when she was four. Her mother struggled to feed the six children and to secretly provide them with a Catholic formation. So little Jeanne learned from a young age to herd sheep, sew and spin wool. She could barely read and write.
Jeanne eventually went to work as a kitchen maid and a nurse, until she met the elderly Françoise Aubert and the teenage orphan Virginie Tredaniel and the three of them rented a house and formed a Catholic household of prayer, teaching and care for the poor.
Then she met Anne Chauvin, a blind woman with no on to care for her. She brought her home, put her in her own bed, and went to sleep in the attic. That was only the beginning. Within two years she had packed the house with a dozen elderly people for whom she and her companions would care, day and night. Next they rented a nearby cottage and before you knew it there were forty. Then, thanks to Jeanne’s begging in the streets, the Little Sister of the Poor opened three more houses, and more than one hundred women joined her new order.
But then things changed. The Bishop appointed Father Auguste Le Pailleur to supervise the work of this new order. Father Pailleur, a man of some ambition, removed Jeanne from authority and ordered her to do nothing but beg for money on the street. Twenty-seven years later few acknowledged the old blind lady who lived in a room on the third floor as the foundress, as Pailleur concocted a story about how the whole enterprise was his idea in the first place.
Jeanne was honest with the ambitious priest who had been chosen as her superior "You have stolen my work from me,” she wrote to him early on, “but I willingly relinquish it to you.” When novices would ask her if she was really the founder, she would reply, “They will teach you all about our Congregation in your classes, Dear.” And in her diary she wrote: ”In our joys, in our troubles, in the contempt that others show us, we must always say, ‘Thank you, my God,' or ‘Glory to God' "?
Jeanne died at the age of 86, not as an adored and glorious founder, but as the sweet old nun who seemed happy with whatever God would choose for her fate.
Now imagine Jeanne when she first left home to work as a Kitchen maid. Imagine her when she took in Madame Chauvin. Imagine her when the Congregation thrived and imagine her at 86. God chose the road. She just agreed to walk it, willingly and with joy.
Conclusion
And you, like the young Stephan, Vincent and Jeanne have a road to travel. God has a plan for you. And where it leads you is the great adventure which you and God will work out together.
And our prayer for you is that you live as happy a life as Stephen and Vincent and Jeanne…knowing that you have simply done what God has asked of you: picked up the crosses he will send you and got on with it. Giving all to God in an act of love, in imitation of the perfect sacrifice of him who did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at, but who took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of a little child, and who offered the perfect kenotic sacrifice upon the altar of the cross.
And what does this God have in store for each of you? Fame or ignominy? Admiration or infamy? Success or abject failure? In the end, it really doesn’t matter, does it?
All that matters is that we obediently follow the way he has set out for us, expecting only that his love and his grace will get us through. For we are not made for ourselves, but for him who first breathed life into these bodies and who teaches us how to live and to love in his name. We know not where the road leads. All we have to do is follow it.
Lord Jesus, gentle Shepherd,
you are the way, the truth and the life.
Lead me, guide me
and give me the grace
to follow the path you have chosen for me.
Help me to trust
in your presence and your strength,
my Lord and my God,
for ever and ever. Amen.
